aic. In fact, we do not want it; we
prefer the "delicate throbbing things" themselves, to any facts you can
give us instead of them, for to those who have heard and seen beyond the
veil, they are far more real than any of your mere facts. Here we think
of Mr. Yeats again with his cry, "Come into the world again wild bees,
wild bees." But he hardly needed to cry upon them, for the wild bees
were buzzing in every page he wrote.

A world haunted in this fashion has its sinister side, allied with the
decaying corpses deep in the earth. When passion has gone into the world
beyond that which eye hath seen and ear heard, it takes, in presence of
the thought of death, a double form. It is in love with death and yet it
hates death. So we come back to that singular sentence of Robert Louis
Stevenson's, "The beauty and the terror of the world," which so
adequately describes the double fascination of nature for man. Her spell
is both sweet and terrible, and we would not have it otherwise The
menace in summer's beauty, the frightful contrast between the laughing
earth and the waiting death, are all felt in the prolonged and deep
sense of gloom that broods over much of Fiona's work, and in the
second-sight which very weirdly breaks through from time to time,
forcing our entrance into the land from which we shrink.

Mr. Yeats is not without the same sinister and moving undergloom,
although, on the whole, he is aware of kindlier powers and of a timid
affection between men and spirits. He actually addresses a remonstrance
to Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and
fairies, and his reconstructions of the ancient fairyland are certainly
full of lightsome and pleasing passages. Along either lane you may
arrive at peace, which is the monopoly neither of the Eastern nor of the
Western Celt, but it is a peace never free from a great wistfulness.

"How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face."

That there is much paganism in all this must be obvious to any one who
has given any attention to the subject. The tale of _The Annir-Choille_
confesses it frankly enough, where the young Christian prince is brought
back by the forest maiden from his new faith to the ancient pagan world.
Old gods are strewn everywhere upon the waysides down which Fiona leads
us, and there