finite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman
and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking
of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,--

We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission
and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of
that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race
went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and
then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied;
that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen,
the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible
beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the
Isle of Destiny.

Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that
Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.

I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and
indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I
believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the
way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts
common to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of the
younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is
not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has
flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that
strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up
into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England,
so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as
Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but
it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his
ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm
ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More,
Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It
may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and
into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality
these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it
is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the
making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and
Americans.

How different are the types of