time is perfectly and imaginatively expressed.

The Hill of Vision is a very unequal book. There are many verses full
of power, which move with the free easy motion of the literary athlete.
Others betray awkwardness, and stumble as if the writer had stepped too
suddenly into the sunlight of his power, and was dazed and bewildered.
There is some diffusion of his faculties in what I feel are byways of
his mind, but the main current of his energies will, I am convinced,
urge him on to his inevitable portrayal of humanity. With writers like
Synge and Stephens the Celtic imagination is leaving its Timanoges, its
Ildathachs, its Many Colored Lands and impersonal moods, and is coming
down to earth intent on vigorous life and individual humanity. I can see
that there are great tales to be told and great songs to be sung, and I
watch the doings of the new-comers with sympathy, all the while feeling
I am somewhat remote from their world, for I belong to an earlier day,
and listen to these robust songs somewhat as a ghost who hears the cock
crow, and knows his hours are over, and he and his tribe must disappear
into tradition.

1912

A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN

As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably from
the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without jealousy and
even with delight to those who still make music in the enchanted land. I
often searched in the "Poet's Corner" of the country papers with a
wild surmise that there, amid reports of Boards of Guardians and Rural
Councils, some poetic young kinsman may be taking council with the
stars, watching more closely the Plough in the furrows of the heavens
than the county instructor at his task of making farmers drive the
plough straight in the fields. I found many years ago in a country paper
a local poet making genuine music. I remember a line:

And hidden rivers were murmuring in the dark.

I went on in the strength of this poem through the desert
of country journalism for many years, hoping to find more hidden rivers
of song murmuring in the darkness. It was a patient life of unrequited
toil, and I have returned to civilization to search publishers' lists
for more easily procurable pleasure. A few years ago I mined out of the
still darker region of manuscripts some poetic crystals which I thought
were valuable, and edited New Songs. Nearly all my young singers have
since then taken flight on their own account. Some