Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/155

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GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A. E.")
131

"While I paced the valley's gloom
Where the rabbits pattered near,
Shone a temple and a tomb
With the legend carven clear.

"Time put by a myriad fates
That her day might dawn in glory;
Death made wide a million gates
So to close her tragic story."

And so it is in "A. E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as

"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep
Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";

and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory;
Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave
More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve,
Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";

and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er
Hill and vale puts out the day—
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What's away in yonder grey?"

but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past "the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."

A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of Good, and that a Platonist must