Llewellyn Jones.
Prose Poems of Ireland
Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
If you believe, with Chesterton, that “should the snap dragon open its little pollened mouth and sing ’twould be no more wonderful a thing” than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy red-breasted bird; if you are of “the young men that dream dreams” or of “the old men who have visions” the songs and the tales and the wanderings and the mysteries of “Red” Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with a sense of your real nearness to “something lovelier than Heaven.”
Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet, and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at dusk—regardless of the optician’s orders.
H. B. S.
To William Butler Yeats
Marguerite O. B. Wilkinson
As one, who, wandering down a squalid street,
Where dingy buildings crowd each other high,