im dry,
Although he had a squirrel's eye."

Such perfect observation is possible only to the detached spirit, which
is indeed doing nothing to nature, but only letting nature do her work.
In the sharp outline of this imagery, and in the mind that saw and the
heart that felt it, there is something of the keenness of the squirrel's
eye for nature.

Fiona's favourite part of nature is the sea. That great and many-sided
wonder, whether with its glare of phosphorescence or the stillness of
its dead calm, fascinates the poems of Sharp and lends them its spell.
But of the prose of Fiona it may be truly said that everything

"... doth suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange."

These marvellous lines were never more perfectly illustrated than here.
As we read we behold the sea, now crouching like a gigantic tiger, now
moaning with some Celtic consciousness of the grim and loathsome
treasures in its depths, ever haunted and ever haunting. It is probable
that Sharp never wrote anything that had not for his ear an undertone of
the ocean. Sitting in London in his room, he heard, on one occasion, the
sound of waves so loud that he could not hear his wife knocking at the
door. Similarly in Fiona Macleod's writing seas are always rocking and
swinging. Gulfs are opening to disclose the green dim mysteries of the
deeper depths. The wind is running riot with the surface overhead, and
the sea is lord in all its mad glory and wonder and fear.

Mr. Yeats has the same characteristic, but again it is possible to draw
a fantastic distinction like that between the soprano and the alto. It
is lake water rather than the ocean that sounds the under-tone of Mr.
Yeats' poetry--

"I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core."

The oldest sounds in the world, Mr. Yeats tells us are wind and water
and the curlew: and of the curlew he says--

"O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind."

In all this you hear the crying of the wind and the swiftly borne scream
of the curlew on it, and you know that lake water will not be far away.