poetic crystals which I thought were valuable, and edited New Songs.
Nearly all my young singers have since then taken flight on their
own account. Some have volumes in the booksellers and some in the
hands of the printers. But there is one shy singer of the group
of writers in New Songs who might easily get overlooked because
his verse takes little or no thought of the past or present or
future of his country: yet the slim book in which is collected
Seumas O'Sullivan's verses reveals a true poet, and if he is too
shy to claim his country in his verses there is no reason why his
country should not claim him, for he is in his way as Irish as any
of our singers. He is, as Mr. W. B. Yeats was in his earlier days,
the literary successor of those old Gaelic poets who were fastidious
in their verse, who loved little in this world but some chance
light in it which reminded them of fairyland, or who, if they were
in love, loved their mistress less for her own sake than because
some turn of her head, or "a foam-pale breast," carried their
impetuous imaginations past her beauty into memories of Helen of
Troy, Deirdre, or some other symbol of that remote and perfect
beauty which, however man desires, he shall embrace only at the
end of time. I think the wives or mistresses of these old poets
must have been very unhappy, for women wish to be loved for what
they know about themselves, and for the tenderness which is in
their hearts, and not because some colored twilight invests them
with a shadowy beauty not their own, and which they know they can
never carry into the light of day. These poets of the transient
look and the evanescent light do not help us to live our daily life,
but they do something which is as necessary. They educate and
refine the spirit so that it shall not come altogether without any
understanding of delicate loveliness into the Kingdom of Heaven,
or gaze on Timanoge with the crude blank misunderstanding of Cockney