minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived,
to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the
following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of
Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a
mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles
after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his
impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to
have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the
two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an
admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his
laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his
purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take
him, had not dulled his sense of humor.

Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine
suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that
sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his
embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of
them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures
are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of
Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls
that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise
above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them
to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of
liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born
again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he
records in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and looked
down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the
mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he
talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose
shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.

To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of
many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so
gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would
hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the
same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits
with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere