All the lovers of Mr. Yeats must have remembered many instances of the same kind in his work.  “And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth?  Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks?  Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart longs for, and have no fear.”

Mr. Yeats is continually identifying these apparently unrelated things; and youth and peace, faith and beauty, are ever meeting in converging lines in his work.  No song of his has a livelier lilt than the Fiddler of Dooney.

     “I passed my brother and cousin: 
       They read in their books of prayer;
     I read in my book of songs
       I bought at Sligo fair.

     When we come at the end of time,
       To Peter sitting in state,
     He will smile on the three old spirits,
       But call me first through the gate.

     And when the folk there spy me,
       They will all come up to me,
     With, ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
       And dance like a wave of the sea.”

In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in the long battle between paganism and idealism.  There is no question that Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side.  Certainly it is true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who take it wrongly.  Meredith’s great line was never truer than it is here, “Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare.”  The effect upon the mind, and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the reading of it.

All this bringing back of the discarded gods has its glamour and its risk.  Such gods are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the quaintest of studies in human nature.  They give us priceless fragments of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments.  Besides all this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.

But, for the unwary, there is the double danger in all this region that they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to worship the old gods; or that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite worship, the old black magic may spring out upon them.  As to the former alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and commanding.  They will cry, “Here is the great god”; and, intoxicated by the mystery, will fall down to worship.  But that which does not command can never save, and for a guiding faith we need something more sure than this.