“Often he had heard of her.  When any man met this woman his fate depended on whether he saw her before she caught sight of him.  If she saw him first, she had but to sing her wild strange song, and he would go to her; and when he was before her, two flames would come out of her eyes, and one flame would burn up his life as though it were dry tinder, and the other would wrap round his soul like a scarlet shawl, and she would take it and live with it in a cavern underground for a year and a day.  And on that last day she would let it go, as a hare is let go a furlong beyond a greyhound.  Then it would fly like a windy shadow from glade to glade, or from dune to dune, in the vain hope to reach a wayside Calvary:  but ever in vain.  Sometimes the Holy Tree would almost be reached; then, with a gliding swiftness, like a flood racing down a valley, the Walker in the Night would be alongside the fugitive.  Now and again unhappy nightfarers—­unhappy they, for sure, for never does weal remain with any one who hears what no human ear should hearken—­would be startled by a sudden laughing in the darkness.  This was when some such terrible chase had happened, and when the creature of the night had taken the captive soul, in the last moments of the last hour of the last day of its possible redemption, and rent it this way and that, as a hawk scatters the feathered fragments of its mutilated quarry.”

We have said that nature may be either an intoxication or a sacrament, and paganism might be defined as the view of nature in the former of these two lights.  But where you have a growing spirituality like that of William Sharp, you are constantly made aware of the hieratic or sacramental quality in nature also.  It is this which gives its peculiar charm and spell to Celtic folklore in general.  The Saxon song of Beowulf is a rare song, and its story is the swinging tale of a “pagan gentleman very much in the rough,” but for the most part it is quite destitute of spiritual significance.  It may be doubted if this could be said truly of any Celtic tale that was ever told.  Fiona Macleod describes The Three Marvels as “studies in old religious Celtic sentiment, so far as that can be recreated in a modern heart that feels the same beauty and simplicity in the early Christian faith”; and there is a constant sense that however wild and even wicked the tale may be, yet it has its Christian counterpart, and is in some true sense a strayed idealism.

At this point we become aware of one clear distinction between William Sharp and Fiona Macleod.  To him, literature was a craft, laboured at most honestly and enriched with an immense wealth both of knowledge and of cleverness; but to her, literature was a revelation, with divine inspirations behind it—­inspirations authentically divine, no matter by what name the God might be called.  So it came to pass that The Pagan Review had only one number.  That marked the transition moment, when Fiona Macleod began to