the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he
finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at
Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of
prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be
symbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of
the First Fountain of mysticism."

He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:--

"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil:
Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies:
The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil
The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.

"The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires
Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim
Over the unregarding city's spires
The lonely beauty shines alone for him."

In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you
expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the
concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell
must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees
spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has
lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining
like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an
enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think
you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our
literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:--

"In the wet dusk silver sweet,
Down the violet-scented ways,
As I moved with quiet feet
I was met by mighty days.

"On the hedge the hanging dew
Glassed the eve and stars and skies;
While I gazed a madness grew
Into thundered battle-cries.

"Where the hawthorn glimmered white,
Flashed the spear and fell the stroke--
Ah, what faces pale and bright
Where the dazzling battle broke!

"There a hero-hearted queen
With young beauty lit the van.
Gone! the darkness flowed between
All the ancient wars of man.

"While I paced the valley's gloom
Where the rabbits pattered near,
Shone a temple and a tomb
With the legend carven clear.

"Time put by a myriad fates
That her day might dawn in glory;
Death made wide a million gates
So to close her tragic story."

And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by
Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but
will hav