the poet utters many things which are truer than he himself understands.
The same thing applies to many a great artist, who, when he paints
tree or field, or face, or form, finds that there comes on him a
mysterious quickening of his nature, and he paints he knows not what.
It is like and unlike what his eyes have seen. It may be the same
field, but we feel there the presence of the spirit. It may be the
same figure, but it is made transcendental, as when the Word had
become flesh and dwelt among us. His inspiration is akin to that
of the prophets of old, whose words rang but for an instant and
were still, yet they created nations whose only boundaries were
the silences where their speech had not been heard. His majestical
figures are prophecies. His ecstatic landscapes bring us nigh to
the beauty which was in Eden. His art is a divine adventure, in
which he, like all of us who are traveling in so many ways, seeks,
consciously or unconsciously, to regain the lost unity with nature
and the knowledge of his own immortal being, and it is so you will
best understand it.

1906





AN ARTIST OF GAELIC IRELAND


The art of Hone and the elder Yeats, while in spirit filled with a
sentiment which was the persistence of ancient moods into modern
times, still has not the external characteristics of Gaeldom; but