ancestral Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple" under "the diamond night"
"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"
"A. E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some moods sees
"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.
Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"
or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,—
"Absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres,
Beckon the wounded spirit in."
So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in "Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when that failure makes him acknowledge—
"Fade the heaven-assailing moods:
Slave to petty tasks I pine
For the quiet of the woods,
And the sunlight seems divine.
