, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his
play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his
copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first
performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if
I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of
young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the
enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had
written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his
work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here
who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because
they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have
seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,'
'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my
own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write
verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the
verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell
collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for
them.

It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of
verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier
volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and
"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were
almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in
Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked
to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that
combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy,
and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago,
yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.

It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on
the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended
from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit
"The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I
was to spend with him there, in many roles. First was that of one of the
beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit
to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the
movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and h