Apples of ashes, golden bright;
Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
O banquet of a foul delight,

Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete !

Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
The hinting tone, the haunting laugh ;
Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
The minstrel of mine epitaph.

I fight thee, in the Holy Name!

Yet what thou dost is what God saith.
Tempter! should I escape thy flame,

Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death

The second Death, that never dies,

That cannot die, when time is dead;
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.

Dark Angel, with thine aching lust !
Of two defeats, of two despairs :
Less dread, a change to drifting dust,
Than thine eternity of cares.

Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel triumph over me :
Lonely unto the Lone I go;

Divine, to the Divinity.

THE CHURCH OF A DREAM

SADLY the dead leaves rustle in the whistling wind,

Around the weather-worn, grey church, low down the vale;
The Saints in golden vesture shake before the gale;
The glorious windows shake, where still they dwell enshrined;
Old Saints, by long dead, shrivelled hands long since designed;
There still, although the world autumnal be, and pale,
Still in their golden vesture the old saints prevail;

Alone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind.
Only one ancient Priest offers the sacrifice,

Murmuring holy Latin immemorial;

Swaying with tremulous hands the old censer full of spice,

In grey, sweet, incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical;
To him in place of men, for he is old, suffice
Melancholy remembrances and vesperal.

THE AGE OF A DREAM

IMAGERIES of dreams reveal a gracious age;

Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn.
The courtesy of Saints, their gentleness and scorn,
Lights on an earth more fair than shone from Plato's page;
The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage;

The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne.
Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
We hunger against hope for that lost heritage.

Gone now, the carven work! Ruined, the golden shrine !
No more the glorious organs pour their voice divine ;

No more rich frankincense drifts through the Holy Place;
Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

NORA HOPPER

MODERN poetry grows weary of using over and over again the personages and stories and metaphors that have come to us through Greece and Rome, or from Wales and Brittany through the Middle Ages, and has found new life in the Norse and German legends. The Irish legends, in popular tradition and in old Gaelic literature, are more numerous and as beautiful, and alone among great European legends have the beauty and wonder of altogether new things. May one not say, then, without saying anything improbable, that they will have a predominant influence in the coming century, and that their influence will pass through many countries?

The latest of a little group of contemporary writers, who have begun to found their work upon them, as the Trouveres founded theirs upon the legends of Arthur and his knights, is Miss Nora Hopper, whose two books, though they have many of the faults of youth, have at their best an extraordinary delicacy and charm. I got BALLADS IN PROSE when it came out, two or three years ago, and it haunted me as few new books have ever haunted me, for it spoke in strange wayward stories and birdlike little verses of things and of persons I remembered or had dreamed of; it did not speak with the too emphatic manner that sometimes mars the more powerful stories Miss Fiona Macleod has told of like things and persons, but softly-more murmuring than speaking. Even now, when the first enchantment is gone and I see faults I was blind to, I cannot go by certain brown bogs covered with white tufts of bog-cotton-places where the world seems to become faint and fragile without remembering the verses her Daluan-a kind of Irish Pan-sings among the bogs; and when once I remember them, they run in my head for hours—

All the way to Tir na n'Og are many roads that run,

But the darkest road is trodden by the King of Ireland's son.
The world wears on to sundown, and love is lost and won,
But he recks net of loss or gain, the King of Ireland's son.
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,
He follows after shadows-the King of Ireland's son.

One does not know why he sings it, or why he dies on November Eve, or why the men cry over him 'Daluan is dead-dead! Daluan is dead!' and the women, 'Da Mort is king,' for 'Duluan' is but Monday and 'Da Mort' is but Tuesday; nor does one well know why any of her best stories, 'Bahalaun and I,' 'The Gifts of Aodh and Una,' 'The Four Kings,' or 'Aonan-nan Righ,' shaped itself into the strange, drifting, dreamy thing it is, and one is content not to know. They delight us by their mystery, as ornament full of lines, too deeply interwoven to weary us with a discoverable secret, delights us with its mystery; and as ornament is full of

strange beasts and trees and flowers, that were once the symbols of great religions, and are now mixing one with another, and changing into new shapes, this book is full of old beliefs and stories, mixing and changing in an enchanted dream. Their very mystery, that has left them so little to please the mortal passionate part of us, which delights in the broad noonlight men need if they would merely act and live, has given them that melancholy which is almost wisdom.

A great part of QUICKEN BOUGHS was probably written before BALLADS IN PROSE; for, though it is all verse, it has few verses of the same precise and delicate music as those scattered among the stories in the earlier book. But 'Phyllis and Damon' is perfect in its kind, while 'The Dark Man' gives beautiful words to that desire of spiritual beauty and happiness which runs through so much modern true poetry. It is founded upon the belief, common in Ireland, that certain persons are, as it is called, 'away' or more with the fairies than with us, and that 'dark' or blind people can see what

we cannot.

W. B. YEATS.

Miss Hopper's volumes are: BALLADS IN PROSE, QUICKEN BOUGHS, and

SONGS OF THE MORNING.

THE FAIRY FIDDLER

'TIS I go fiddling, fiddling,
By weedy ways forlorn :
I make the blackbird's music
Ere in his breast 'tis born;

The sleeping larks I waken

'Twixt the midnight and the morn.

No man alive has seen me,

But women hear me play
Sometimes at door or window,
Fiddling the souls away—

The child's soul and the colleen's

Out of the covering clay.

None of my fairy kinsmen
Make music with me now:
Alone the raths I wander,

Or ride the whitethorn bough;
But the wild swans they know me,

And the horse that draws the plough.

THE DARK MAN

ROSE O' THE WORLD, she came to my bed
And changed the dreams of my heart and head ;
For joy of mine she left grief of hers,

And garlanded me with a crown of furze.

Rose o' the World, they go out and in,
And watch me dream and my mother spin :
And they pity the tears on my sleeping face
While my soul's away in a fairy place.

Rose o' the World, they have words galore,
And wide's the swing of my mother's door :
And soft they speak of my darkened eyes-
But what do they know, who are all so wise?

Rose o' the World, the pain you give
Is worth all days that a man may live-
Worth all shy prayers that the colleens say
On the night that darkens the wedding-day.

Rose o' the World, what man would wed When he might dream of your face instead?— Might go to his grave with the blessed pain Of hungering after your face again?

Rose o' the World, they may talk their fill,
For dreams are good, and my life stands still
While their lives' red ashes the gossips stir;
But my fiddle knows-and I talk to her.