tourists staring up at the stupendous dreams pictured on the roof
of the Sistine Chapel. These fastidious scorners of every day and
its interests are always looking through nature for "the herbs
before they were in the field and every flower before it grew,"
and through women for the Eve who was in the imagination of the
Lord before she was embodied, and we all need this refining vision
more than we know. It may be asked of us hereafter when we would
mount up into the towers of vision, "How can you desire the beauty
you have not seen, who have not sought or loved its shadow in the
world?" and the Gates of Ivory may not swing open at our knock.
This will never be said to Seumas O'Sullivan, who is always waiting
on the transient look and the evanescent light to build up out of
their remembered beauty the Kingdom of his Heaven:

Round you light tresses, delicate,
Wind blown, wander and climb
Immortal, transitory.

Earth has no steady beauty as the calm-eyed immortals have, but
their image glimmers on the waves of time, and out of what instantly
vanishes we can build up something within us which may yet grow
into a calm-eyed immortality of loveliness, we becoming gradually
what we dream of. I have heard people complain of the frailty of
these verses of Seumas O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs,
to nerve the soul to fight or the hand to do its work. I will never
make that complaint. I will only complain if the strife or the
work ever blunt my senses so that I will pass by with an impatient
disdain these delicate snatchings at a beauty which is ever fleeting.
But I would ask him to remember that life never allures us twice
with exactly the same enchantment. Never again will that tress