is Contemporaries"
of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due
much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a
boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he
thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic
Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with
the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English
literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the
Bhagavad-Gita and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young
men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at
whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor
was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at
last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories
of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would
have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said,
they were only being so shaped.

His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them
much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them,
designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent
about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said,
"I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its
dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very
much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it
but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give
but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played
in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic
situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a
dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But
you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that
something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of
you.

As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon
landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr.
Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and
Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with
mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which
we were considering in a few