ll never be said to Seumas O'Sullivan, who is always waiting on
the transient look and the evanescent light to build up out of their
remembered beauty the Kingdom of his Heaven:

Round you light tresses, delicate,
Wind blown, wander and climb
Immortal, transitory.

Earth has no steady beauty as the calm-eyed immortals have, but their
image glimmers on the waves of time, and out of what instantly vanishes
we can build up something within us which may yet grow into a calm-eyed
immortality of loveliness, we becoming gradually what we dream of. I
have heard people complain of the frailty of these verses of Seumas
O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs, to nerve the soul to
fight or the hand to do its work. I will never make that complaint. I
will only complain if the strife or the work ever blunt my senses so
that I will pass by with an impatient disdain these delicate snatchings
at a beauty which is ever fleeting. But I would ask him to remember that
life never allures us twice with exactly the same enchantment. Never
again will that tress drift like a woven wind made visible out of
Paradise; never again will that lifted hand, foam-pale, seem like the
springing up of beauty in the world; never a second time will that white
brow remind him of the wonderful white towers of the city of the
gods. To seek a second inspiration is to receive only a second-rate
inspiration, and our poet is a little too fond of lingering in his verse
round a few things, a face, the swaying poplars, or sighing reeds which
had once piped an alluring music in his ears, and which he longs to hear
again. He lives not in too frail a world, but in too narrow a world, and
he should adventure out into new worlds in the old quest. He, has become
a master of delicate and musical rhythms. I remember reading Seumas
O'Sulivan's first manuscripts with mingled pleasure and horror, for his
lines often ran anyhow, and scansion seemed to him an unknown art, but I
feel humbly now that he can get a subtle quality into his music which I
could not hope to acquire. I would like him to catch some new and rare
birds with that subtle net of his, and to begin to invent more beauty
of his own and to seek for it less. I believe he has got it in him to
do well, to do better than he has done if he will now try to use his
invention more. The poems with a slight narrative in them, like "The
Portent" or the "Saint Anthony," seem to me the most perfect, and it