old
passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_,
with its refrain:--

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
And with O'Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:--

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned
now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The
late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will
long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightly
what they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope of
success.

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world--a hater of the
burgess and of the till. He boasts in _Responsibilities_ of ancestors
who left him

blood
That has not passed through any huckster's loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but
it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot have
the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the
gestures in good part.

2. HIS POETRY

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and
Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not
ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's
genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid
discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is
certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his
work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may
partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of
poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call
for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or
two of his early poems, like _Down by the Sally Garden_, that might
conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr.
Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the
magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his
robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for
worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize
that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without
convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to
understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the
century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explan