[Footnote 1:  “Your health.”]

Or was the homing instinct, the homesick longing for the old sod, ever more truly rendered than in Moira O’Neill’s song of the Irish laborer in England?

Over here in England I’m helpin’ wi’ the hay,
An’ I wish I was in Ireland the livelong day;
Weary on the English, an’ sorra take the wheat! 
Och!  Corrymeela an’ the blue sky over it.

      D’ye mind me now, the song at night is mortial hard to raise,
      The girls are heavy-goin’ here, the boys are ill to plase;
      When ones’t I’m out this workin’ hive, ’tis I’ll be back again—­
      Aye, Corrymeela in the same soft rain.

Here, too, should be named Jane Barlow, whose poems and stories are faithful imaginative transcripts of the face of nature and the hearts of men as she knew them in Connemara.  Finally there is William Butler Yeats, who, on the whole, is the representative man of the Revival.  Except in the translator’s sphere, his writings have given him a place in almost all the activities of this movement.  As a lyric poet, he has expressed the moods of peasant and patriot, of mystic, symbolist, and quietist, and it is safe to say that in lyric poetry no one of his generation writing in English is his superior.  We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his “Innisfree”, which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the high mark of Yeats’s achievement, is still a flawless thing in its way: 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

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 linnets’ wings.

In this place, and for convenience sake, it may be permitted to speak of aspects of Yeats’s work other than that by virtue of which he is to be classed with the group we have just considered.  In his narrative poem, “The Wanderings of Usheen”, as well as in his plays and lyrics, he is of the best of those—­among them we may mention by the way Dr. John Todhunter, Nora Hopper (Mrs. W.H.  Chesson), and William Larminie—­who have revealed to our day the strange beauty of the ancient creations of the Gaelic imagination.  In prose he has written short stories, a novelette, John Sherman and Dhoya, and essays that reveal a subtle critical insight, and a style of beautiful finish and grace, suggestive of the style of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry.  Yeats’s plays constitute a considerable and an important part of his work, but these must be reserved for treatment elsewhere in this book.  In prefaces to anthologies of prose and verse of his editing, in the pages of