e a dear home place brought before him by such lines as

"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep
Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";

and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory;
Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave
More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve,
Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";

and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er
Hill and vale puts out the day--
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What's away in yonder grey?"

but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past
"the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."

A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit
cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of
Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt
into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the
earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life.
The fairies call to him and he would away--

"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now;
'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough.
Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew,
And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"

But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods.
Over against these lines you may put,

"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"

and

"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."

Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness
unalloyed of heaven.

When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him
anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form,
melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many
fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog
like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he
should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if
earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog,
and radiant with cold white light.

"Forest glooms
Rumorous of old romance"

and

"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"

the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more