w" that the
"greatest of the earth" often owned but two aims, "two linked and
ardorous thoughts--fatherland and song." Twenty-six years have gone
since then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country,
for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is now
in his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin to
the ardor of patriotism; to him, as to Spenser, the master of his
youth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as did
and does his father, Mr. J.B. Yeats, he studied in Dublin Arts Schools,
but as Nature "wanted a few verses" from him, she sent him "into a
library to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into
Connaught to sit by turf fires." He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the
poet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote of
Irish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davis
chief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him the
doctrine embodied in the text--

"Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best."

Many influences thus conspired to make Mr. Yeats find his inspiration
in Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influences
that the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were the
national legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, but
the interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one of
the Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the high
priest, as early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated so
often in his later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderings
of Oisin" of 1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr.
Yeats found in the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's three
hundred years of "dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in three
wondrous lands, where were severally pleasure and fighting and
forgetfulness, and in each of which Oisin spent a century. It has a
half-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick,
who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and the
Christian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is a
story Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyrical
beauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most
typically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go with
more lilt, or fall oftener in