devoted to the reconstruction of English history, is remarkable for the justness and saneness of its temper.  There are other faults—­a lack of sureness in taste is one—­that could be mentioned but they do not affect the main greatness of his work.  He is great because he discovered a new subject-matter, and because of the white heat of imagination which in his best things he brought to bear on it and by which he transposed it into poetry.  It is Mr. Kipling’s special distinction that the apparatus of modern civilization—­steam engines, and steamships, and telegraph lines, and the art of flight—­take on in his hands a poetic quality as authentic and inspiring as any that ever was cast over the implements of other and what the mass of men believe to have been more picturesque days.  Romance is in the present, so he teaches us, not in the past, and we do it wrong to leave it only the territory we have ourselves discarded in the advance of the race.  That and the great discovery of India—­an India misunderstood for his own purposes no doubt, but still the first presentiment of an essential fact in our modern history as a people—­give him the hold that he has, and rightly, over the minds of his readers.

It is in a territory poles apart from Mr. Kipling’s that the main stream of romantic poetry flows.  Apart from the gravely delicate and scholarly work of Mr. Bridges, and the poetry of some others who work separately away from their fellows, English romantic poetry has concentrated itself into one chief school—­the school of the “Celtic Revival” of which the leader is Mr. W.B.  Yeats.  Two sources went to its making.  In its inception, it arose out of a group of young poets who worked in a conscious imitation of the methods of the French decadents; chiefly of Baudelaire and Verlaine.  As a whole their work was merely imitative and not very profound, but each of them—­Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who are both now dead, and others who are still living—­produced enough to show that they had at their command a vein of poetry that might have deepened and proved more rich had they gone on working it.  One of them, Mr. W.B.  Yeats, by his birth and his reading in Irish legend and folklore, became possessed of a subject-matter denied to his fellows, and it is from the combination of the mood of the decadents with the dreaminess and mystery of Celtic tradition and romance—­a combination which came to pass in his poetry—­that the Celtic school has sprung.  In a sense it has added to the territory explored by Coleridge and Scott and Morris a new province.  Only nothing could be further from the objectivity of these men, than the way in which the Celtic school approaches its material.  Its stories are clear to itself, it may be, but not to its readers.  Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied.  Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which they weave a delicate and dim embroidery