which Oisin spent a century. It has a half-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick, who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and the Christian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is a story Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyrical beauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most typically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go with more lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fully diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin" revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The Meditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf fires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of folk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo; but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few others in the little volume have it at all.
In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the country a national literature in English. This project developed side by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance either idea, but each was the first to estab-
