Down along the rocky shore Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide-foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain lake, With frogs for their watch-dogs All night awake. High on the hill-top The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He’s nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music, On cold starry nights, To sup with the Queen Of the gay Northern Lights. All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book. _The Horned Women_, _The Priest’s Soul_, {157} and _Teig O’Kane_, are really marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that is not worth reading and thinking over. _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_. Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.) MR. W. B. YEATS (_Woman’s World_, March 1889.) ‘_The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems_ is, I believe, the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is certainly full of promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems are too fragmentary, too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but dimly seen. But the architectonic power of construction, the power to build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic temperament. It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work. One quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us—I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to ‘load every rift with ore,’ yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this from _The Wanderings of Oisin_ is worth quoting. It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness: And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light, For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun, Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light, And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one; Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak, Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk, Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they lay.