But Mr. Yeats is calmer and
less passionate than Fiona, as though he were crooning a low song all
the time, while the silent arrows flash from his bow. Sometimes, indeed,
he will blaze forth flaming with passion in showers of light of the
green fire. Yet from first to last, there is less of the green fire and
more of the poppies in Mr. Yeats and it is Fiona who shoots most
constantly and farthest among the stars.
_Haunted_, that is the word for this world into which we have entered.
The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as
these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where
strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro--phantoms of spectral lives
which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon
the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to
some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind
us, and often they are changing the course of our visible adventures by
the power of sins and follies that were committed in the dim and
remotest past. Certainly the author is, as he says, "Aware of things and
living presences hidden from the rest.
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