he
Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative,
said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English
literature." So the boy--he was not yet twenty-one--went out into the
night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen.

As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those
that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and
counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met
"A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities
that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal
following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by
every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men
and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the
pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more
often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and
strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius
and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness"
from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression
of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the
English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their
exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose
Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George
Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his
appearance and his power of seeing visions.

As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of
poems--that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"--and
read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation"
which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not
pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can
never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without
hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in
that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist
on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic
they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than
presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of
thought for their desired effect.

To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr.
Yeats he is at one with