characteristic are,

"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"

"the great star swings
Along the sapphire zone,"

"The Angel childhood of the earth,"

"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"

"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."

There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry,
for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood
or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing.
The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first
glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor
when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack
association with known and loved things to bring them home to the
reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions
rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much
alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.

It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it
is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the
world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth
century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they
of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who
hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those
under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street
their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have
found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are
regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there
is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how
strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of
personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into
his writings chiefly his relation with God,--for all other relations are
as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from
himself and his fellows into oneness with God.

Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have,
but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his
verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony
about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is
inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one
theme is of de