CONTEMPORARY Irish poets believe in a spiritual life, invisible and troubling, and express this belief in their poetry. Contemporary English poets are interested in the glory of the world, like Mr. Rudyard Kipling; or in the order of the world, like Mr. William Watson; or in the passion of the world, like Mr. John Davidson; or in the pleasure of the world, like Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Francis Thompson, who has fallen under the shadow of Mr. Coventry Patmore, the poet of an older time and in protest against that time, is alone preoccupied with a spiritual life; and even he, except at rare moments, has less living fervour of belief than pleasure in the gleaming and scented and coloured symbols that are the footsteps where the belief of others has trodden. Ireland, upon the other hand, is creating in English a poetry as full of spiritual ardour as the poetry that praised in Gaelic _The Country of the Two Mists_, and _The Country of the Young_, and _The Country of the Living Heart_. ‘A.E.’ has written an ecstatic pantheistic poetry which reveals in all things a kind of scented flame consuming them from within. Miss Hopper, an unequal writer, whose best verses are delicate and distinguished, has no clear vision of spiritual things, but makes material things as frail and fragile as if they were but smouldering leaves, that we stirred in some mid-world of dreams, as ’the gossips’ in her poem ’stir their lives’ red ashes.’ Mrs. Hinkson, uninteresting at her worst, as only uncritical and unspeculative writers are uninteresting, has sometimes expressed an impassioned and instinctive Catholicism in poems that are, as I believe, as perfect as they are beautiful, while Mr. Lionel Johnson has in his poetry completed the trinity of the spiritual virtues by adding Stoicism to Ecstasy and Asceticism. He has renounced the world and built up a twilight world instead, where all the colours are like the colours in the rainbow that is cast by the moon, and all the people as far from modern tumults as the people upon fading and dropping tapestries. He has so little interest in our pains and pleasures, and is so wrapped up in his own world, that one comes from his books wearied and exalted, as though one had posed for some noble action in a strange _tableau vivant_ that cast its painful stillness upon the mind instead of the body. He might have cried with Axel, ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ As Axel chose to die, he has chosen to live among his books and between two memories—the religious tradition of the Church of Rome and the political tradition of Ireland. From these he gazes upon the future, and whether he write of Sertorius or of Lucretius, or of Parnell or of ‘Ireland’s dead,’ or of ’98, or of St. Columba or of Leo XIII., it is always with the same cold or scornful ecstasy. He has made a world full of altar lights and golden vestures, and murmured Latin and incense clouds, and autumn