In this place, and for convenience sake, it may be permitted to speak of aspects of Yeats's work other than that by virtue of which he is to be classed with the group we have just considered. In his narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Usheen", as well as in his plays and lyrics, he is of the best of those—among them we may mention by the way Dr. John Todhunter, Nora Hopper (Mrs. W.H. Chesson), and William Larminie—who have revealed to our day the strange beauty of the ancient creations of the Gaelic imagination. In prose he has written short stories, a novelette, John Sherman and Dhoya, and essays that reveal a subtle critical insight, and a style of beautiful finish and grace, suggestive of the style of Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Yeats's plays constitute a considerable and an important part of his work, but these must be reserved for treatment elsewhere in this book. In prefaces to anthologies of prose and verse of his editing, in the pages of reviews, and elsewhere, he appears as the chief apologist of the aims of the Literary Revival, and in particular of the methods of the dramatists of the Revival. Whatever he has touched he has lifted into the realm of poetry, and this is in large measure true of his prose, which proceeds from the poet's point of view and breathes the poetic spirit. A man of rare versatility, a finished artist with a scrupulous artistic conscience, he has done work of high and sustained quality, and is certain to exert a good and lasting influence upon the literature of his country.
In a literary movement in the "Isle of Saints", we look naturally for religious poetry, and we do not look in vain. This poetry, chiefly Catholic, has a quality of its own as distinctive as that of the writers of the group we have just left. Now it voices a naïve, devoted simplicity of Christian faith; now it attains to a high and keen spirituality; now it is mystic and pagan. Among the religious poets, Lionel Johnson easily stands first—perhaps the Irish poet of firmest fibre and most resonant voice of his generation. A note of high courage and of spiritual triumph rings through his verse, even from the shadow of the wings of the dark angel that gives a title to one of the saddest of his poems. Often he strikes a note of genuine religious ecstasy and exaltation rarely heard in English, as in "Te Martyrum Candidatus":
Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ!
White Horsemen, who ride on white horses, the Knights of God!
They, for their Lord and their Lover who sacrificed
All, save the pleasure of treading where He first trod.
These through the darkness of death, the dominion of night,
Swept, and they woke in white places at morning tide:
They saw with their eyes, and sang for joy of the sight,
They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified.