and the Celtic type is easily distinguished.  No Celt ever cared for landscape.  “It is loveliness I ask, not lovely things,” says Fiona; and it is but a step from this to that abstract mystical and spiritual love of beauty, which is the very soul of the Celtic genius.  It expresses itself most directly in colours, and the meaning of them is far more than bright-hued surfaces.  The pale green of running water, the purple and pearl-grey of doves, still more the remote and liquid colours of the sky, and the sad-toned or the gay garments of the earth—­these are more by far to those who know their value than pigments, however delicate.  They are either a sensuous intoxication or else a mystic garment of the spirit.  Seumas, the old islander, looking seaward at sunrise, says, “Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world.”  And as we read we think of Mr. Neil Munro’s lord of Doom Castle walking uncovered in the night before retiring to his rest, and with tears welling in his eyes exclaiming that the mountains are his evening prayer.  Such mystics as these are in touch with far-off things.  Sharp, indeed, was led definitely to follow such leading into regions of spiritualism where not many of his readers will be able or willing to follow him, but Fiona Macleod left the mystery vague.  It might easily have defined itself in some sort of pantheistic theory of the universe, but it never did so.  “The green fire” is more than the sap which flows through the roots of the trees.  It is as Alfred de Musset has called it, the blood that courses through the veins of God.  As we realise the full force of that imaginative phrase, the dark roots of trees instinct with life, and the royal liquor rising to its foam of leaves, we have something very like Fiona’s mystic sense of nature.  Any extreme moment of human experience will give an interpretation of such symbolism—­love or death or the mere springtide of the year.

It is not without significance that Sharp and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Symons all dreamed on the same night the curious dream of a beautiful woman shooting arrows among the stars.  All the three had indeed the beautiful woman in the heart of them, and in far-darting thoughts and imaginations she was ever sending arrows among the stars.  But Mr. Yeats is calmer and less passionate than Fiona, as though he were crooning a low song all the time, while the silent arrows flash from his bow.  Sometimes, indeed, he will blaze forth flaming with passion in showers of light of the green fire.  Yet from first to last, there is less of the green fire and more of the poppies in Mr. Yeats and it is Fiona who shoots most constantly and farthest among the stars.