Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/151

 Rh "Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light To the field laborer whose heart desires The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright From the housewife long parted from at dawn— So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: We rise, but by the symbol charioted, Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways: By these the soul unto the vast has wings And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A. E." could write of the sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things—as of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink away." Need I quote further to show that "A. E.," like Emerson, holds that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for us," and "A. E." believes that we at times attain "the high