Beauty and peace I sing--
The fire on the open hearth,
The _cailleach_ spinning at her wheel,
The plough in the broken earth.

Travail and pain I sing--
The bride on the childing bed,
The dark man laboring at his rhymes,
The eye in the lambing shed.

Sorrow and death I sing--
The canker come on the corn,
The fisher lost in the mountain loch,
The cry at the mouth of morn.

No other life I sing,
For I am sprung of the stock
That broke the hilly land for bread,
And built the nest in the rock!

THE OLD WOMAN

As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.

As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is a woman
With her travail done,

Her brood gone from her,
And her thoughts as still
As the waters
Under a ruined mill.

_James Stephens_

This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 1882. Stephens
was discovered in an office and saved from clerical slavery by George
Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, Stephens's most poetic moments are
in his highly-colored prose. And yet, although the finest of his
novels, _The Crock of Gold_ (1912), contains more wild phantasy and
quaint imagery than all his volumes of verse, his _Insurrections_
(1909) and _The Hill of Vision_ (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that
is at once hotly ironic and coolly whimsical.

Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend of
incongruities--he combines in his verse the grotesque, the buoyant and
the profound. No fresher or more brightly vigorous imagination has
come out of Ireland since J. M. Synge.

THE SHELL

And then I pressed the shell
Close to my ear
And listened well,
And straightway like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas,
Whipped by an icy breeze
Upon a shore
Wind-swept and desolate.
It was a sunless strand that never bore
The footprint of a man,
Nor felt the weight
Since time began
Of any human quality or stir
Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.
And in the hush of waters was the sound
Of pebbles rolling round,
For ever rolling with a hollow sound.
And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go
Swish to and fro
Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.
There was no day,
Nor ever came a night
Setting the