ain that my friend's noble art, so full of passion
and heroic beauty, is the victory of a man who in poverty and sickness
created from the delight of expression, and in the contemplation that
is born of the minute and delicate arrangement of images, happiness, and
health of mind. Some early poems have a morbid melancholy, and he
himself spoke of early work he had destroyed as morbid, for as yet the
craftsmanship was not fine enough to bring the artist's joy which is of
one substance with that of sanctity. In one poem he waits at some street
corner for a friend, a woman perhaps, and while he waits and gradually
understands that nobody is coming, sees two funerals and shivers at the
future; and in another written on his twenty-fifth birthday, he wonders
if the twenty-five years to come shall be as evil as those gone by.
Later on, he can see himself as but a part of the spectacle of the world
and mix into all he sees that flavour of extravagance, or of humour, or
of philosophy, that makes one understand that he contemplates even his
own death as if it were another's and finds in his own destiny but as it
were a projection through a burning glass of that general to men. There
is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we
have understood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for
what it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy
perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we
laugh aloud and mock, in the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation,
at death and oblivion.

In no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it
may be Miss Edgeworth in _Castle Rackrent_, was there anything to change
a man's thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but
play with pictures, persons and events, that whether well or ill
observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from
meditation, a child's show that makes the fables of his art as
significant by contrast as some procession painted on an Egyptian wall;
for in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world
had been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her
sleepy drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its
wisdom. All minds that have a wisdom come of tragic reality seem morbid
to those that are accustomed to writers who have not faced reality at
all; just as the saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fe