k roots of trees instinct with life, and the
royal liquor rising to its foam of leaves, we have something very like
Fiona's mystic sense of nature. Any extreme moment of human experience
will give an interpretation of such symbolism--love or death or the mere
springtide of the year.

It is not without significance that Sharp and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Symons
all dreamed on the same night the curious dream of a beautiful woman
shooting arrows among the stars. All the three had indeed the beautiful
woman in the heart of them, and in far-darting thoughts and imaginations
she was ever sending arrows among the stars. But Mr. Yeats is calmer and
less passionate than Fiona, as though he were crooning a low song all
the time, while the silent arrows flash from his bow. Sometimes, indeed,
he will blaze forth flaming with passion in showers of light of the
green fire. Yet from first to last, there is less of the green fire and
more of the poppies in Mr. Yeats and it is Fiona who shoots most
constantly and farthest among the stars.

_Haunted_, that is the word for this world into which we have entered.
The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as
these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where
strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro--phantoms of spectral lives
which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon
the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to
some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind
us, and often they are changing the course of our visible adventures by
the power of sins and follies that were committed in the dim and
remotest past. Certainly the author is, as he says, "Aware of things and
living presences hidden from the rest." "The shadows are here." The
spirits of the dead and the never born are out and at large. These or
others like them were the folk that Abt Vogler encountered as he played
upon his instrument--"presences plain in the place."

One of the most striking chapters in that very remarkable book of Mr.
Fielding Hall's, _The Soul of a People_, is that in which he describes
the nats, the little dainty spirits that haunt the trees of Burmah. But
it is not only the Eastern trees that are haunted, and Sharp is always
seeing tree-spirits, and nature-spirits of every kind, and talking with
them. Now and again he will give you a natural explanation of them, but
that always jars and sounds pros