in a crowd.

The little fox he murmured,
"O what of the world's bane?"
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
But the little red fox murmured,
"O, do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane."

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you
please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music,
is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr.
Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature
almost Wordsworthian. In _The Stolen Child_, which tells of a human
child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the
child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the
magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the
poem:--

Away with us he's going,
The solemn eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside;
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
_For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand._

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or
adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the
world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple
things. To read _The Stolen Child_ is to realize both that Mr. Yeats
brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had
its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his
early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care
of an artist, as when he notes how--

in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more
conclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poet
cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in
Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work.
One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in
the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people
to think of him as a minor poe