Haunted, that is the word for this world into which we have entered.  The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as these.  The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro—­phantoms of spectral lives which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon the stage.  They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to some former life.  They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind us, and often they are changing the course of our visible adventures by the power of sins and follies that were committed in the dim and remotest past.  Certainly the author is, as he says, “Aware of things and living presences hidden from the rest.”  “The shadows are here.”  The spirits of the dead and the never born are out and at large.  These or others like them were the folk that Abt Vogler encountered as he played upon his instrument—­“presences plain in the place.”

One of the most striking chapters in that very remarkable book of Mr. Fielding Hall’s, The Soul of a People, is that in which he describes the nats, the little dainty spirits that haunt the trees of Burmah.  But it is not only the Eastern trees that are haunted, and Sharp is always seeing tree-spirits, and nature-spirits of every kind, and talking with them.  Now and again he will give you a natural explanation of them, but that always jars and sounds prosaic.  In fact, we do not want it; we prefer the “delicate throbbing things” themselves, to any facts you can give us instead of them, for to those who have heard and seen beyond the veil, they are far more real than any of your mere facts.  Here we think of Mr. Yeats again with his cry, “Come into the world again wild bees, wild bees.”  But he hardly needed to cry upon them, for the wild bees were buzzing in every page he wrote.

A world haunted in this fashion has its sinister side, allied with the decaying corpses deep in the earth.  When passion has gone into the world beyond that which eye hath seen and ear heard, it takes, in presence of the thought of death, a double form.  It is in love with death and yet it hates death.  So we come back to that singular sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The beauty and the terror of the world,” which so adequately describes the double fascination of nature for man.  Her spell is both sweet and terrible, and we would not have it otherwise The menace in summer’s beauty, the frightful contrast between the laughing earth and the waiting death, are all felt in the prolonged and deep sense of gloom that broods over much of Fiona’s work, and in the second-sight which very weirdly breaks through from time to time, forcing our entrance into the land from which we shrink.

Mr. Yeats is not without the same sinister and moving undergloom, although, on the whole, he is aware of kindlier powers and of a timid affection between men and spirits.  He actually addresses a remonstrance to Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and fairies, and his reconstructions of the ancient fairyland are certainly full of lightsome and pleasing passages.  Along either lane you may arrive at peace, which is the monopoly neither of the Eastern nor of the Western Celt, but it is a peace never free from a great wistfulness.