unlike Yeats and his Irish colleagues to whom Art or Imagination in another word was first, and Life followed after; “Homeward Return” would not have existed, I think, if Yuan-ming had not been obliged to appear in the regular robe proper to his rank of magistrate at a certain function, only to make his freedom-loving soul rebel and exclaim that “he could not crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice a day,” and to resign his office at once after holding the post for only eighty-three days. Not only do I read in his resignation his misery of heart on seeing the speedy fall of his Tsin Dynasty and the gradual rise of the Liu Sung, but I see in his ode that he was after all a Chinese pessimist and not a Celt, whose pessimism always makes a desperate revolt under the peace and content, whose surrender to Nature is more to her fact itself than the mystery she inspires, when he finishes the famous ode as follows:
“I will whistle along the eastern hill,
By the clear rivulet weave my song:
Let my allotted span work its own way at will.
I will enjoy my fate … Oh, how can I doubt it?”
My responsiveness to the modern Irish litera-
