ance, of adaptiveness and simplicity, of family stanchness and communal helpfulness, outweigh the drunkenness and roguery that one expects from the primitive. Synge is, indeed, not only loyal, but full of respect and liking for the Aran Islanders, and of admiration for their rich humanity.
It was out of his island life and out of his life of the roads, and out of his mood, once he knew his doom, that he made the twenty-two poems of his that are retained of a great deal that he had written, most of it in his younger years. That Synge faced his fate with bravery the triumphant tone of "Deirdre of the Sorrows" that I have instanced is proof, but there could not but be moments when the thought of death was too instant to be denied. It was in such mood he wrote, either toward the end, or in earlier moments of anticipation of it, "Queens," "On an Anniversary," "To the Oaks of Glencree," "A Question," and "I've Thirty Months." There is in these verses a certain morbidity, an almost ghoulishness, that is very seldom present elsewhere in his writing. And yet I may be wrong in attributing it to his certainty of approaching death, for there is a more intense preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in com-
