sentation of the drama of a woman that sells her
soul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. It
is curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it should
be Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adapts
to his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb." The background of "The
Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially
Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the
country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck
refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian
legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and
perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere,
the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel
Israfel"

"Whose heart-strings are a lute";

or about

"magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn";

or about

"old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago";

or about hearing

"the far-off curfew sound
Over some wide-watered shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar,"

were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of
Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:--

"You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang
Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God";

and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:--

"Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel:
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
He wander the loud waters";

and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are
great,--

"The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet."

It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of
all his lines,--

"And God stands winding his lonely horn",

and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had
to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his
first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in
the Valley" of Meredith.

There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats
than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose
constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is
playing o