an empty heart. We may know the
fugitives from others poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis
Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the
expression of something which they have not themselves created, some
historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think
Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a
Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to
moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that
have no relation to experience.

I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he,
instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective
romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all
that romanticism admires and praises, indeed, all images of desire; for
such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of
his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong
intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the
man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him,
it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a
vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost
easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not
impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns
in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in
rounding the delicate spiral of a shell?

XV

I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man
who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly
man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such
poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a
dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write.

...Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain,
very full of his conversation with an old religious beggar, who kept
repeating, "God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth--He covets
the earth."

* * * * *

I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some
debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art
from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a
friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but