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 ancestral Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" under "the diamond night"
"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"
"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some moods sees
"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.
Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"
or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,—
"Absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres,
Beckon the wounded spirit in."
So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in "Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when that failure makes him acknowledge—