There's many feet on the moor to-night, and they fall so light as they turn and pass,

So light and true that they shake no dew from the featherfew

and the Hungry grass.

I drank no sup and I broke no crumb of their food, but dumb at their feast sat I,

For their dancing feet and their piping sweet, now I sit and greet till I'm.like to die.

Oh kind, kind folk, to the words you spoke I shut my ears and I would not hear,

And now all day what my own kin say falls sad and strange on my careless ear

For I'm listening, listening, all day long to a fairy song that is blown to me,

Over the broom and the canna's bloom, and I know the doom of the Ceol-Sidhe.

The metrical movement of these verses (and of the two other stanzas which complete the poem) is very pretty, but their effect is discounted by our feeling that they are as conventional as a troubadour's aubade or a sixteenth-century sonnet. Even when Miss Hopper leaves Ireland behind, and betakes herself to Greece or Norway, one cannot but suspect that in her Hymns to Pan, and her rhapsodies on Phæacia and the land East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon, she is expressing a somewhat superficial romanticism, with no great depth of feeling behind it. Her imagination is rather too easily kindled; and though her work is not verbally imitative in any marked degree, yet it lacks spiritual individuality. She has always great fluency and sweetness of diction, and often real charm. But this first book must, on the whole, be regarded as immature -a volume of experiments. It is in Songs of the Morning (1900) that she gives the true measure of her talent.

Though there is much less untranslated Erse in Miss Hopper's second book than in her first, the influence of race, or rather of environment (for the odds, in any given. instance, are greatly against purity of race), is none the less clearly discernible. It appears in the freshness and coolness

of her diction, her sense of nature as a living thing, and her unabashed, yet never indiscreet, utterance of passion. The Keltic character, I take it, is, more clearly than any other race-character, a product of geographical conditions. The Kelt has for ages inhabited the western fringe of the world, from the mouth of the Loire to the outermost Hebrides. He has been pent between the devil and the deep seabetween hostile races to the eastward, and the haunting enigma of the trackless ocean to the west. He has dwelt in a land of mountains, of wide, windy estuaries, of clear and rushing rivers. The shifting pageantry of sky and sea has from of old encompassed him. His soul has been alternately swathed in fantastic mists and bathed in great billows of pure colour. He has for centuries seen the sun plunge, day after day, over the very edge of the world, into an abyss of waters as mysterious as the grave. And his mind has taken its imprint from this region of mountain. and river and firth, of coolness and moisture and briny fragrance, bounded on the one hand by hostility, and by mystery on the other. Nature can never be the same thing to an inland as to a seaboard people. The plain-dweller, and even the mountain-dweller, knows nothing of the reduplication and etherealisation of colour that the great waters alone can give. The Kelt is the child of a volcanic coast-line and the Atlantic, as the Saxon is the child of alluvial prairies and the narrow seas. If it be objected that by this reasoning the Norseman ought to be the spiritual brother of the Kelt, I reply that he is, as a matter of fact, his spiritual cousingerman, and that such differences as exist may be clearly referred to differences in geographical and political conditions. In the first place, the Norseman has not been subjected in anything like the same degree to the pressure of hostile races from behind; in the second place, his "Ultima Thule" was not really ultimate. He had always something more than the mere dim ocean to the west and south-west of him: he had Iceland, the Faroe Isles,

Shetland, Orkney, nay, Britain and Ireland. Thus he early familiarised himself with the ocean, and made it a highway of conquest and commerce. It affected his imagination deeply, no doubt, but not with a sense of impervious mystery, finality, or (what is really the same. thing) infinitude. Therefore he escaped in a great measure the wide-eyed melancholy of the Kelt, while his soul remained more earthbound and robust, less apt to soar away from the last headland of the material world and lose itself in the insubstantial colour-maze of the sunset.*

These reflections on the Keltic temperament in general may seem to have led us far away from Miss Hopper in particular. But they are really suggested by the sense of wide space, clear colour, wind, water, and the cool breath of flowers that comes to us from her poetry. May we not see in such verses as these, for instance, the quintessence of the Keltic spirit?

BEAUTY.

Beauty was born of the world's desire

For the wandering water, the wandering fire,

Under the arch of her hurrying feet

She has trodden a world full of bittersweet.

The blood of the violet is in her veins,

Her pulse has the passion of April rains.

Out of the heart of a satin flower

God made her eyelids in one sweet hour.

Out of the wind He made her feet

That they might be lovely, and luring, and fleet.

Out of a cloud He wove her hair,

Heavy and black with the rain held there.

What is her name? There's none that knows-
Mother-o'-mischief, or Mouth-o'-rose.

What is her pathway? None may tell,

But it climbs to heaven and it dips to hell.

* Would it be pressing this theory too far to suggest that the peculiar characteristics of the Welsh people, marking them off from other branches of the Keltic stock, may be traced in part to the fact that they alone did not directly confront the Atlantic, but had land, and a very solid mass of land, to the westward of them?