In the blank-verse piece called "Twilight" it is again the title which conveys the direct sign of affinity, but it will also be found to lurk in every line: The sky is silver-pale with just one star, One lonely wanderer from the shining host Of Night's companions. Through the drowsy woods The shadows creep and touch with quietness The curling fern-heads and the ancient trees. The sea is all a-glimmer with faint lights That change and move as if the unseen prow Of Niamh's galley cleft its waveless floor, And Niamh stood there with the magic token, The apple-branch with silver singing leaves. The wind has stolen away as though it feared To stir the fringes of her faery mantle Dream-woven in the Land of Heart's Desire, And all the world is hushed as though she called Ossian again, and no one answered her. Now that, in inspiration and imagery, is very clearly derived from native legendary sources. But no one would expect to find in such work a direct expression of national feeling. The backward-looking poet, the one who is drawn instinctively to old themes and times, has not usually the temper for politics, even on the higher plane. Or if he have, he will make a rigid separation in style and treatment between his poetry in the two kinds. Thus Miss Milligan sharply differentiates her lays on heroic subjects from her lyrics. The lays try to catch the spirit of the age out of which the stories came. The lyrics, as lyrics should, reflect no other spirit than the poet's own. The lays are somewhat strict in form: they are in a brisk narrative style, with a swinging rhythm and plenty of vigour. The songs, depending on varying sense impressions and fluctuating emotion, are more irregular as to form and, at the same time, stronger in their appeal to human sympathy. It is in them that the poet is able to express the passionate love of country which, superimposed on a deep sense of Ireland's melancholy history and an intense longing for freedom, is the birthright of so many Irish poets. One would like to quote entire the lovely "Song of Freedom," in which the poet hears in wind and wave and brook a joyous prophecy. But here is the last stanza: To Ara of Connacht's isles, As I went sailing o'er the sea, The wind's word, the brook's word, The wave's word, was plain to me---- "_As we are, though she is not As we are, shall Banba be---- There is no King can rule the wind There is no fetter for the sea._" More beautiful and significant, perhaps, is a fragment from "There Were Trees in Tir-Conal":