... From a sleep I emerge. I am clothed again with this woven vesture of laws; But I am not, and never again shall be the man that I was. At the zenith of life I am born again, I begin. Know ye, I am awake, outside and within. I have heard, I have seen, I have known; I feel the bite of this shackle of place and name, And nothing can be the same. ..... I have sent three shouts of freedom along the wind. I have struck one hand of kinship in the hands of Gods, and one in the hands of women and men. I am awake. I shall never sleep again. _Rose Macaulay_ There is one small volume of poems by Miss Macaulay, called _The Two Blind Countries_. It is curiously interesting, since it may be regarded as the testament of mysticism for the year of its appearance, nineteen hundred and fourteen. That is, indeed, the most important fact about it; though no one need begin to fear that he is to be fobbed off with inferior poetry on that account. For the truth is that the artistic value of this work is almost, if not quite, equal to the exceptional power of abstraction that it evinces. Poetry has really been achieved here, extremely individual in manner and in matter, and of a high order of beauty. One is compelled, however, though one may a little regret the compulsion, to start from the fact of the poet's mystical tendency. Not that she would mind, presumably; the title of her book is an avowal, clear enough at a second glance, of its point of view. But the reader has an instinct, in which the mere interpreter but follows him, to accept a poem first as art rather than thought; and if he examine it at all, to begin with what may be called its concrete beauty. I will not say that the order is reversed in the case of Miss Macaulay's poetry, since that would be to accuse her of an artistic crime of which she is emphatically not guilty. But it is significant that the greater number of pieces in this book impress the mind with the idea they convey, simultaneously with the sounds in which it is expressed. And as the idea is generally adventurous, and sometimes fantastic, it is that which arrests the reader and on which he lingers, at any rate long enough to discover its originality.