de perfect by tears. Thus
though there is truth in Sharp's complaint that Christianity has often
done sore injustice to beauty as such, yet it must be repeated that this
exponent of the Celtic heart somehow missed the element in Christianity
which was not only like, but actually identical with, his own deepest
truth.

Sharp often reminds one of Heine, with his intensely human love of life,
both in its brightness and in its darkness. Where that love is so
intense as it was in these hearts, it is almost inevitable that it
should sometimes eclipse the sense of the divine. Thus Sharp tells us
that "Celtic paganism lies profound still beneath the fugitive drift of
Christianity and civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the coming and
going of the tides." He was indeed so aware of this underlying paganism,
that we find it blending with Christian ideas in practically the whole
of his work. Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his
genius than that blend. It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories
as _The Last Supper_ and _The Fisher of Men_. In these tales of
unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic
Christ. The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in
Jerusalem, and His work the same. But he talks the sweet Celtic
language, and not only talks it but _thinks_ in it also. He walks among
the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames upon
the grass, and the fierce people that lurk in shadow have eyes for the
helplessness of the little lad who sees too far. Such tales are full of
a strange light that seems to be, at one and the same time, the Celtic
glamour and the Light of the World.

All the lovers of Mr. Yeats must have remembered many instances of the
same kind in his work. "And are there not moods which need heaven, hell,
purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this
dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no
expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory,
and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies
of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go
forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart longs
for, and have no fear."

Mr. Yeats is continually identifying these apparently unrelated things;
and youth and peace, faith and beauty, are ever meeting in converging
lines in his work. No song of his has a live