In his Notes to the volume of _Plays in Prose and Verse_, recently reissued (New York, 1924), Mr. Yeats gives credit for the first use of correct dialect to Synge’s _Riders to the Sea_ and Lady Gregory’s _Spreading the News_. In this same Note he declares that his words “never flow freely but when people speak in verse”: it need not be rhymed verse, for some of the finest lines in _Deirdre_ and _The King’s Threshold_ are _rhythmical_ but not in rhyme. In _The Land of Heart’s Desire_ the poet-playwright’s words all “flow freely.” This is a general favorite among his plays with professionals and amateurs upon the stage. Forrest Reid may be extreme in praise when he calls it “the most beautiful thing that has been done in our time,” for it invites comparison with _The Sunken Bell_, _Peter Pan_, and _The Blue Bird_ among poetic, fanciful plays. It lingers in memory, however, as pictorial and dramatic, simple and beautiful in May Eve legends and “fairy spell,” in the natural characters, well contrasted, of Maire Bruin and her husband, Shawn, of Father Hart and the old parents by the fireside. That is an exquisite couplet that Maire speaks to her sturdy husband, when the fairy calls, O you are the great door-post of this house, And I the red nasturtium climbing up.[161] _The Shadowy Waters_ is another symbolic play, with an undertone of idealism. Begun when Yeats was young, it changed form often before the poet was satisfied. Into this he has introduced varied types--the magic harpist, the sailors, and Dectora, the restless, craving woman. The king, Forgel, who cares not for gold or fame, voices some tenets of the author’s creed in the lines: All would be well Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the flowing, changing world That the heart longs for.[162]