His feminine alter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales; the longer Pharais, A Romance of the Isles, is scarcely less unique.

In ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 From the Hills of Dream appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; The Hour of Beauty, a rather more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellectual and, it must be admitted, the more arresting mood was that of William Sharp.

He died in 1905.

THE VALLEY OF SILENCE

In the secret Valley of Silence
No breath doth fall;

No wind stirs in the branches;

No bird doth call:
As on a white wall

A breathless lizard is still,
So silence lies on the valley
Breathlessly still.

In the dusk-grown heart of the valley
An altar rises white:

No rapt priest bends in awe

Before its silent light:

But sometimes a flight

Of breathless words of prayer
White-wing'd enclose the altar,
Eddies of prayer.

Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna.

career.

Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an æsthete. (See Preface.) Most of his poems in prose (such as The Happy Prince, The Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and His Soul) are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse: but in one long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), he sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol but made possible his most poignant piece of writing, De Profundis, only a small part of which has been published.

Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the forerunners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching ironies.

Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900.

REQUIESCAT

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew

She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast;

I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, peace; she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet;
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

John Davidson

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 1857. His Ballads and Songs (1895) and New Ballads (1897) attained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his great promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his own growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct poetry never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is but the Universe grown conscious.”

Davidson died by his own hand at Penzance in 1909.

IMAGINATION

(From "New Year's Eve")

There is a dish to hold the sea,

A brazier to contain the sun,

A compass for the galaxy,

A voice to wake the dead and done!

That minister of ministers,
Imagination, gathers up
The undiscovered Universe,
Like jewels in a jasper cup.

Its flame can mingle north and south;
Its accent with the thunder strive;
The ruddy sentence of its mouth
Can make the ancient dead alive.

The mart of power, the fount of will,
The form and mould of every star,
The source and bound of good and ill,
The key of all the things that are,

Imagination, new and strange

In every age, can turn the year;
Can shift the poles and lightly change
The mood of men, the world's career.

William Watson

William Watson was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire, August 2, 1858. He achieved his first wide success through his long and eloquent poems on Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson-poems that attempted, and sometimes successfully, to combine the manners of these masters. The Hope of the World (1897) contains some of his most characteristic

verse.

It was understood that he would be appointed poet laureate upon the death of Alfred Austin. But some of his "radical" and semi-political poems are supposed to have displeased the powers at Court, and the honor went to Robert Bridges. His best work, which has both dignity and imagination, may be found in Selected Poems, published in 1903 by John Lane Co.

SONG1

April, April,

Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears,
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears.
April, April,

Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!

ESTRANGEMENT'

So, without, breach, we fall apart,
Tacitly sunder-neither you nor I
Conscious of one intelligible Why,

And both, from severance, winning equal smart.
So, with resigned and acquiescent heart,
Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie,
I seem to see an alien shade pass by,

A spirit wherein I have no lot or part.

Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim,

From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn
That June on her triumphal progress goes

Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him
She is a legend emptied of concern,

And idle is the rumour of the rose.

'From The Hope of the World by William Watson. Copyright, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.