Fiona’s favourite part of nature is the sea.  That great and many-sided wonder, whether with its glare of phosphorescence or the stillness of its dead calm, fascinates the poems of Sharp and lends them its spell.  But of the prose of Fiona it may be truly said that everything

     “... doth suffer a sea-change,
     Into something rich and strange.”

These marvellous lines were never more perfectly illustrated than here.  As we read we behold the sea, now crouching like a gigantic tiger, now moaning with some Celtic consciousness of the grim and loathsome treasures in its depths, ever haunted and ever haunting.  It is probable that Sharp never wrote anything that had not for his ear an undertone of the ocean.  Sitting in London in his room, he heard, on one occasion, the sound of waves so loud that he could not hear his wife knocking at the door.  Similarly in Fiona Macleod’s writing seas are always rocking and swinging.  Gulfs are opening to disclose the green dim mysteries of the deeper depths.  The wind is running riot with the surface overhead, and the sea is lord in all its mad glory and wonder and fear.

Mr. Yeats has the same characteristic, but again it is possible to draw a fantastic distinction like that between the soprano and the alto.  It is lake water rather than the ocean that sounds the under-tone of Mr. Yeats’ poetry—­

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,

        I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

The oldest sounds in the world, Mr. Yeats tells us are wind and water and the curlew:  and of the curlew he says—­

“O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast: 
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.”

In all this you hear the crying of the wind and the swiftly borne scream of the curlew on it, and you know that lake water will not be far away.  This magic power of bringing busy city people out of all their surroundings into the green heart of the forest and the moorland, and letting them hear the sound of water there, is common to them both.

Fiona Macleod is a lover and worshipper of beauty.  Long before her, the Greeks had taught the world their secret, and the sweet spell had penetrated many hearts beyond the pale of Greece.  It was Augustine who said, “Late I have loved thee, oh beauty, so old and yet so new, late I have loved thee.”  And Marius the Epicurean, in Pater’s fine phrase, “was one who was made perfect by love of visible beauty.”  It is a direct instinct, this bracing and yet intoxicating love of beauty for its own sake.  Each nation produces a spiritual type of it, which becomes one of the deepest national characteristics,