Padraic Colum has followed the suggestion of Synge, and made deep excavations for the foundations of his poetry. It grows up out of the soil like a hardy plant; and while it cannot be called major work, it has a wholesome, healthy earthiness. It is realistic in a different way from the town eclogues of James Stephens; it is not merely in the country, it is agricultural. His most important book is _Wild Earth_, published in Dublin in 1901, republished with additions in New York in 1916. The smell of the earth is pungent in such poems as _The Plougher_ and _The Drover_; while his masterpiece, _An Old Woman of the Roads_, voices the primeval and universal longing for the safe shelter of a home. I wonder what those who believe in the abolition of private property are going to do with this natural, human passion? Private property is not the result of an artificial social code--it is the result of an instinct. The first three stanzas of this poem indicate its quality, expressing the all but inexpressible love of women for each stick of furniture and every household article. O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall! To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delft, Speckled and white and blue and brown! I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store! Lord Dunsany brought to public attention a new poet, Francis Ledwidge, whose one volume, _Songs of the Fields_, is full of promise. In October, 1914, he enlisted in Kitchener's first army, and was killed on the thirty-first of August, 1917. Ledwidge's poetry is more conventional than that of most of his Irish contemporaries, and he is at his best in describing natural objects. Such poems as _A Rainy Day in April_, and _A Twilight in Middle March_ are most characteristic. But occasionally he arrests the ear with a deeper note. The first four lines of the following passage, taken from _An Old Pain_, might fittingly apply to a personality like that of Synge: I hold the mind is the imprisoned soul, And all our aspirations are its own Struggles and strivings for a golden goal, That wear us out like snow men at the thaw. And we shall make our Heaven where we have sown Our purple longings. Oh! can the loved dead draw Anear us when we moan, or watching wait Our coming in the woods where first we met, The dead leaves falling in their wild hair wet, Their hands upon the fastenings of the gate?