of Britain; by way of Tubal Cain, "an artificer in brass and iron," of the seed of Cain, "a tiller of the ground."
One wonders is it not of himself that the poet writes, though what he writes takes us far from him, carrying us in thought halfway round the world and back through civilizations that have passed. But whether it is of himself that Mr. Colum writes or not, he is certainly, in a sense, "The dawn-man ... in the sunset." The "Glory of the Gael" that is to-day, if it is "glory," is glory of sunset, of "purples and splendors" that pass; there are those who hold that the race that "went forth to battle," but "always fell," is already passed beyond the sunset, into the twilight, that twilight that is the time of day so surely symbolical of the writing of the many Irish poets that have followed after Mr. Yeats. Mr. Colum, however, whether his race be in twilight or sunset, is of the dawn. He is of the dawn not only because he is the youth, at oldest the young man, in his writing, who sees the world freshly and fresh, none the less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set down "three characters that stood as first types in my human comedy, the peasant, the artist, the official, Murtagh
