“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
  There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
  And evening full of the linnet’s wings."[3]

Yeats’s verse has been called “dream-drenched poems.”  The term is admirably descriptive of his romantic, lyrical verse.

George W. Russell.—­Among the most prominent of these Celtic imaginative writers is George W. Russell (1867- ), “the Irish Emerson,” popularly known as “A.E.”  He is a poet, a painter, a mystic, and a dramatist.  With Lady Gregory and Yeats, he has been one of the most active workers for the Irish National Theater.  He is an efficient member of those cooeperative societies which are trying to improve Ireland’s industrial and agricultural conditions.

Russell’s poetry is highly spiritual.  Sometimes it is so mystical that like Prospero’s messenger, Ariel, it vanishes into thin air.  His shadowy pictures of nature and his lyrical beauty and tenderness are evident in two little volumes of his verse, Homeward Songs by the Way (1894) and The Divine Vision (1904).  This Stanza from Beauty, in The Divine Vision, shows his spiritual longing for quiet, peace, and beauty, in which to worship his Creator:—­

  “Oh, twilight, fill in pearl dew, each healing drop may bring
  Some image of the song the Quiet seems to sing.

  My spirit would have beauty to offer at the shrine,
  And turn dull earth to gold and water into wine,
  And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thence refined
  It may have power to mirror the mighty Master’s mind."[4]

Fiona Macleod.—­All the work of William Sharp that he published under the pseudonym of “Fiona Macleod” belongs to this Celtic Renaissance.  Born in 1856 at Paisley, Scotland, he settled in London in 1878, and became widely known as William Sharp, the critic.  When he turned to his boyhood’s home, the West Highlands of Scotland, for inspiration, he wrote, under the pen-name of Fiona Macleod, poetic prose stories and many poems about these Scotch Celts.  He kept the secret of his identity so well that not until his death in 1905 was it known that Fiona Macleod, the mystic, was William Sharp, the critic.

Mountain Lovers (1895), a romantic novel of primitive people who live with nature in her loneliness, mystery, and terror, and who possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels.  He excels in the short story.  Some of his finest work in this field is in The Sin Eater (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with their weird traditions.

From the Hills of Dream (1901) and The Hour of Beauty (1907) are two small volumes of short poems full of the witchery of dreams, of death, of youth, and of lonely scenes.  These poems come from a land far off from our common world.  Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any touch of impurity, a beauty as of “dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist,” are the qualities of Fiona Macleod’s best verse.