“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee; And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.” “Sweet babe, in thy face Soft desires I can trace, Secret joys and secret smiles, Little pretty infant wiles. … As thy softest limbs I feel Smiles as of the morning steal O’er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast Where thy little heart doth rest.” “I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart, Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears. Ah, she did depart! … Soon after she was gone from me, A traveler came by, Silently, invisibly: He took her with a sigh.” “Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colors of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night.” Which is Blake, and which is Yeats? You may put the name of either under any of these stanzas, without being guilty of an unpardonable critical lapse. Mr. Yeats took Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it may be, as unconsciously, as many less sophisticated versifiers have imitated Tennyson, or Mr. Swinburne, or Rossetti. It is creditable to him that he should have had discernment enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional and individual content; but why having got hold of that content, having saturated himself with it, as it were, and having found the exploitation of it easy and provocative of praise, Mr. Yeats should turn round and call it Keltic is something of a puzzle. Of course, one has to remember that among a people whose interests are material, rather than spiritual, the poet who would get a hearing is compelled to have resort to a certain amount of adventitiousness and empyricism. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,”