stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In
his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he
found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in
its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual
perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of
intellectual natures."

How important the symbol is to "A.E."--as important as it is to
Emerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of
what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.

"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings
From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods.
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.

Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires
Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light
To the field laborer whose heart desires
The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright
From the housewife long parted from at dawn--
So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the
sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose,
except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful
material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his
aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--as
of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves
in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space
and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration
that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink
away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds
that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the
Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is
only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and
lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns
that "the old forgotten splendors of the U