niverse should glow again for
us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral
Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple"
under "the diamond night"

"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"

"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he
celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death
means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or
sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some
moods sees

"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.
Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"

or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees
individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,--

"Absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres,
Beckon the wounded spirit in."

So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so
preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must
feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien
to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning
for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in
"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when
that failure makes him acknowledge--

"Fade the heaven-assailing moods:
Slave to petty tasks I pine
For the quiet of the woods,
And the sunlight seems divine.

"And I yearn to lay my head
Where the grass is green and sweet;
Mother, all the dreams are fled
From the tired child at thy feet."

It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that
he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's
Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may
misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not
a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poems
out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other
than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his
verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been
given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have
the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he
writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a
description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must
be threshold to