Weary our wild dreams are:
When shall cease our flight
Soft on shores of sleep?

(Fays leading.) At last.

DORA SIGERSON (MRS. CLEMENT SHORTER)

THAT divine discontent with the colourless realisms and the banalities of life which overcomes at uncertain periods the soul of every poet, has been much with Miss Sigerson; but it exhibits itself more in her earlier and less mature than in her later and more objective poems. It is not the joy bells of Nature, but its funeral sounds that strike first upon her listening ear. Her earliest volume is tinged with a profound melancholy—a melancholy which to some extent runs through her later ones also, though in them it does not obtrude nor convey the same feeling of recurrent depression. She weighs life in her balances, and finds it wanting. The very Hill of Fame, upon which life's fortunate ones are crowned, raises in her only a shudder-for is it not built upon the bones of the dead? The shadows of the unfathomed mysteries of life and death hang heavily over all.

White rose must die, all in the youth and beauty of the year.

That is the recurrent burden of many of her songs, the prevailing note of her earlier music. Life as it unfolds itself is cruelty and disillusion. No Prince Charming can ever recover for her her fairy-land. Everything must end in death, and the shadow feared of man is not to be got rid of.

So for the luxury of the flesh, wrap it in fur of fox, that it be warm,

In the bear's coat, sheltering its nakedness from storm;

Give wine for its hot veins, fame for its throne, and laughter for its lips,

All ends in one eclipse.

Sunshine or snows,

We gain a grave, and afterwards-God knows!

The barren and meaningless conventionalities of life. disgust her. They help to make existence less endurable than it might be if dealt with in a more rational manner. Under the constant fret of petty conventionalities 'the world becomes a weariness, life's current choked with straws,' and she longs for a man's freedom to leave it all behind, and come face to face with Nature when the sky is black with thunder and the sea is white with foam.' But the actualities of life tie her down, fetter her, disappoint her, nor can she claim the personal freedom of action that is a man's birthright.

Alas! to be a woman, and a nomad's heart in me.

Of the poet, of the dreamer to whom his dream is the one reality of earth, whose bubble is blown only to be burst, and who yet continues to dream because he can do naught else, she sings with much of the insight of a kindred nature.

Alone among his kind he stands alone,

Torn by the passions of his own sad heart,
Stoned by continual wreckage of his dreams,
He in the crowd for ever is apart.

Is not this the very language of De Musset in his glorious address to his fellow poet Lamartine?

Désir, crainte, colère, inquiétude, ennui,

Tout passe et disparaît, tout est fantôme en lui.
Son misérable cœur est fait de telle sorte

Qu'il faut incessamment qu'une ruine en sorte.

This feeling of depression however is suffused with, and to some extent counteracted by, a strong religious faith and a belief in the soul's immortality. In this respect she has the closest affinities with her friends Katharine Tynan and Miss Furlong, and one of her most powerful poems is that in which, in her last volume, she describes the disastrous influence of an Agnostic husband upon the heart of a believing girl fresh from her convent.

In her second and third volumes Miss Sigerson (now Mrs. Clement Shorter) has struck out into new paths, and

largely sought for her inspiration outside of her own feelings and experience. She has turned herself with signal success to ballad-poetry, and in many of her pieces, especially in her second volume, she has sought inspiration from Irish motives and dealt with Irish superstitions. Her very absence from Ireland has made her- a phenomenon which we may often witness—more Irish than if she had never left it, and we can overhear in more than one poem the cry of the Connacht fiddler :

Da bragrajde arir mé i gceant lar mo daornje
d'imteóċad an aois díom, a'r beidini anís óz.

As a ballad-writer Mrs. Shorter has been successful, chiefly because she is unconventional. Almost all English ballads more or less consciously imitate those splendid folk-tales in verse that are the glory of the Lowlands of Scotland; but the tricks and turns of speech and thought that are in them so delightful, because they are so natural, become at the present moment affectation or worse, and no skill can atone for a conscious unreality of style or expression. Mrs. Shorter's merit is simplicity combined with directness, and the ballads in her second volume are not mere tales in verse, but have almost all of them an underlying motif, and exemplify truths of deep psychical import. In her later ballads the mere story or tale itself seems to have attracted her to versification, which, however skilfully done, does not, I think, always possess the interest of her earlier work, in which the tale evidently counted for less than the eternal truth or feeling which it exemplified. DOUGLAS HYDE (AN CRAOIBHIN).

Mrs. Clement Shorter is the eldest daughter of Dr. George Sigerson, F.R.U.I. (q.v.), and was born in Dublin. Her marriage with Mr. Clement Shorter, then editor of The Illustrated London News, took place in 1895. Her mother, Mrs. Hester Sigerson, was author of a successful novel, A RUINED RACE, and of poems which have appeared in various anthologies. Mrs. Shorter's books are: VERSES, by Dora Sigerson, 1893; THE FAIRY CHANGELING, by Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter), 1898; BALLADS AND POEMS, by Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter), 1899.

CEAN DUV DEELISH

CEAN DUV DEELISH, beside the sea
I stand and stretch my hands to thee
Across the world.

The riderless horses race to shore

With thundering hoofs and shuddering, hoar,
Blown manes uncurled.

Cean duv deelish, I cry to thee
Beyond the world, beneath the sea,
Thou being dead.

Where hast thou hidden from the beat
Of crushing hoofs and tearing feet
Thy dear black head?

Cean duv deelish, 'tis hard to pray
With breaking heart from day to day,
And no reply;

When the passionate challenge of sky is cast
In the teeth of the sea and an angry blast
Goes by.

God bless the woman, whoever she be,
From the tossing waves will recover thee
And lashing wind.

Who will take thee out of the wind and storm,
Dry thy wet face on her bosom warm

And lips so kind?

I not to know! It is hard to pray,

But I shall for this woman from day to day.
'Comfort my dead,

The sport of the winds and the play of the sea.
I loved thee too well for this thing to be,
O dear black head!

THE WIND ON THE HILLS

GO not to the hills of Erin

When the night winds are about ;

Put up your bar and shutter,

And so keep the danger out.

For the good-folk whirl within it, And they pull you by the hand, And they push you on the shoulder, Till you move to their command.

And lo! you have forgotten

What you have known of tears, And you will not remember

That the world goes full of years;

A year there is a lifetime,

And a second but a day;
And an older world will meet you
Each morn you come away.

Your wife grows old with weeping, And your children one by one Grow grey with nights of watching, Before your dance is done.

And it will chance some morning You will come home no more ; Your wife sees but a withered leaf In the wind about the door.

And your children will inherit
The unrest of the wind;
They shall seek some face elusive,
And some land they never find.

When the wind is loud, they sighing
Go with hearts unsatisfied,
For some joy beyond remembrance,
For some memory denied.

And all your children's children,
They cannot sleep or rest,
When the wind is out in Erin

And the sun is in the West.