at made him delight in setting the hard virtues by the soft, the
bitter by the sweet, salt by mercury, the stone by the elixir, gave him
a hunger for harsh facts, for ugly surprising things, for all that
defies our hope. In _The Passing of the Shee_ he is repelled by the
contemplation of a beauty too far from life to appease his mood; and in
his own work, benign images ever present to his soul must have beside
them malignant reality, and the greater the brightness, the greater must
the darkness be. Though like 'Usheen after the Fenians' he remembers his
master and his friends, he cannot put from his mind coughing and old age
and the sound of the bells. The old woman in _The Riders to the Sea_, in
mourning for her six fine sons, mourns for the passing of all beauty and
strength, while the drunken woman of _The Tinker's Wedding_ is but the
more drunken and the more thieving because she can remember great
queens. And what is it but desire of ardent life, like that of Usheen
for his 'golden salmon of the sea, cleen hawk of the air,' that makes
the young girls of _The Playboy of the Western World_ prefer to any
peaceful man their eyes have looked upon, a seeming murderer? Person
after person in these laughing, sorrowful, heroic plays is, 'the like of
the little children do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and
do be dreaming after in the dark night it's in grand houses of gold they
are, with speckled horses to ride, and do be waking again in a short
while and they destroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe,
and the starved ass braying in the yard.'

IV

It was only at the last in his unfinished _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ that
his mood changed. He knew some twelve months ago that he was dying,
though he told no one about it but his betrothed, and he gave all his
thought to this play, that he might finish it. Sometimes he would
despond and say that he could not; and then his betrothed would act it
for him in his sick room, and give him heart to write again. And now by
a strange chance, for he began the play before the last failing of his
health, his persons awake to no disillusionment but to death only, and
as if his soul already thirsted for the fiery fountains there is nothing
grotesque, but beauty only.

V

He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor
complaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book's momentary cries:
all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of n