SOURCE: Colum, Padraic. Review of Etched in Moonlight, by James Stephens. The Dial 85 (June 1920): 69–71.

In the essay below, Colum praises the philosophical nature and complexity of the stories in Etched in Moonlight.

In Etched in Moonlight James Stephens has accomplished the feat, always hazardous for a writer, of passing from one idiom into another. His new book is in a new manner and deals with a new material, and yet it is as vital and personal as any of the books we think of as being distinctively Stephens'. There is nothing of the exuberance of A Crock of Gold, or Deirdre, or Irish Fairy Tales, in the latest volume; it has fantasy, but its fantasy is not now of happening or of character, but of idea. Even the distinctiveness of background has been suppressed in the tales that make Etched in Moonlight: the story that gives title to...