This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secret and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the dominant theme of the poems, even in The Song of Wandering Aengus, that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver trout" that became
—a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the exquisite last verse—a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr. Yeats's writings after The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Had I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths:—
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's genius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called The Folly of Being Comforted. I have known readers who professed to find this poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and portraiture. I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his incomparable music.
XIX
TCHEHOV: THE PERFECT STORY-TELLER
It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the rivals of the god of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, no doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.