reviews, and elsewhere, he appears as the chief apologist of the aims of the Literary Revival, and in particular of the methods of the dramatists of the Revival.  Whatever he has touched he has lifted into the realm of poetry, and this is in large measure true of his prose, which proceeds from the poet’s point of view and breathes the poetic spirit.  A man of rare versatility, a finished artist with a scrupulous artistic conscience, he has done work of high and sustained quality, and is certain to exert a good and lasting influence upon the literature of his country.

In a literary movement in the “Isle of Saints”, we look naturally for religious poetry, and we do not look in vain.  This poetry, chiefly Catholic, has a quality of its own as distinctive as that of the writers of the group we have just left.  Now it voices a naive, devoted simplicity of Christian faith; now it attains to a high and keen spirituality; now it is mystic and pagan.  Among the religious poets, Lionel Johnson easily stands first—­perhaps the Irish poet of firmest fibre and most resonant voice of his generation.  A note of high courage and of spiritual triumph rings through his verse, even from the shadow of the wings of the dark angel that gives a title to one of the saddest of his poems.  Often he strikes a note of genuine religious ecstasy and exaltation rarely heard in English, as in “Te Martyrum Candidatus”: 

Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ! 
White Horsemen, who ride on white horses, the Knights of God! 
They, for their Lord and their Lover who sacrificed
All, save the pleasure of treading where He first trod.

These through the darkness of death, the dominion of night,
Swept, and they woke in white places at morning tide: 
They saw with their eyes, and sang for joy of the sight,
They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified.

Among the men of the Revival, no personality is stronger or more attractive than that of G.W.  Russell—­“AE”, as he is always called—­who may be regarded as the hero of George Moore’s Hail and Farewell, and who alone in that gallery of wonderful pen-portraits looks forth with complete amiability.  He is a pantheist, a mystic, and a visionary, with what would seem a literal and living faith in many gods, though strongly prepossessed in favor of the ancient divinities of the Gael, now long since in exile.  Impressive and striking by a certain spiritual integrity, so to say, “AE” unites gifts and faculties seldom combined.  He is a poet of rare subtlety, a painter in whose genius so good a judge as George Moore believed, and a most practical man of affairs, who, as assistant to Sir Horace Plunkett, held up the latter’s hands in his labors on behalf of co-operative dairies and the like.  His poems have their roots in a pantheism which half reveals the secrets of an indwelling spirit, speaking alike “from the dumb brown lips of earth” and from the passions of the heart of man.