In all these figures, pirates or peasants, there is an ever present
suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or
in the colors; and these people who laugh in the fairs will have
after hours as solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve."
This poetry is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so
elusive and so original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing
at first thought seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the
country circus, with its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the
Petrified Man, and the Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the
heart carries with it its own mood, and this flaring scene has
undergone some indefinite transformation by the alchemy of genius,
and it assumes the character of a fairy tale or Arabian Nights
Entertainment imagined in the fantastic dreams of childhood. The
sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps the charm of it
all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the heart is
strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and smile
on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent, knowing
they are only dreams.

Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of
conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After
the Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests
the horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary
dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed
his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting
victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an
excess of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace
deeper than mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures,
which gives them that symbolic character which genius always impresses