ng and of her study of local ways about
Coole and on the Connemara coast and in the Aran Isles. One of the most
interesting of her chapters is that on the poet Raftery, whose poems Dr.
Hyde has published. Blind and bitter, Raftery wandered about Connacht
until about 1840, when death took him, an old man, but still vigorous in
mind and spirit. Another chapter of "Poets and Dreamers" is "On the Edge
of the World." Each reading of this is to me like a return to West
Ireland, the very quality of whose life it gives. It should be the first
chapter of the book turned to by the reader, for it gives one the note
on which to read all. As Lady Gregory drives by the sea, people about
her on the roadside and in the cabins are singing in Irish. The little
experiences of the day are, for them, experiences to brood over; and for
her, too. And this thought is the last of her brooding: "The rising
again of Ireland, of her old speech, of her last leader [Parnell],
dreams all, as we are told. But here on the edge of the world, dreams
are real things, and every heart is watching for the opening of one or
another grave."

There is creative writing in these essays of Lady Gregory's, for all
that she is playing middleman between her people and the reading public
of the English-speaking world in many of them; and, as I would emphasize
again, in her three books of translations. But, after all translation
will not content, and the essay that is not self-revelation will not
content, the writer who would have his writing a "reading of life." So
it is not surprising that Lady Gregory turned toward drama. And yet I do
not ever feel, after many readings of her plays, that Lady Gregory took
to drama because of any overmastering impulse toward this most difficult
of all literary forms. She has learned to handle some orders of drama
pleasantly, the farce more than pleasantly, and, very recently, the
folk-tragedy nobly; but had it not been that plays of other than
romantic tone were needed for the Abbey Theatre as a foil to those of
Mr. Yeats and of Synge, I doubt whether it is drama that Lady Gregory
would have chosen as the medium through which to express her reading of
life. I can just as well imagine her shrewd kindliness of judgment upon
the foibles and virtues of her countrymen in stories whose form is very
like that employed by Miss Barlow in her "Irish Idylls" (1892) as in
these so original little plays that she has wrought out without
precedent,