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living world, giving to his listeners the ideas and unfolding the
convictions which in the end permeate his exacter literary expression.
He spoke in a curiously musical way, with a suspected cadence tempt-
ing one to listen not to the sense but to the sound. His, after
all, is the natural way of speaking for the Celt in whom love of
common sense makes unwilling terms with love of sense.

Mr Yeats told of the culture of the ancient Irish, of the
Irish epics, and of the freshness of all Celtic themes. And he
applied to the Society before which he spoke ideas likely to guide
it, which seem to guide him and the men he is working with. He
said it was not necessary to tell an Irish audience that material
things are not the real things of life; but Mr. Yeats knew it was
necessary, and he did endeavour, perhaps inevitably, to draw his
 listeners into that eternal quest after beauty to which all poets
quicken us, the quest which in the Celt grows ever more fainter and
less enchanting with each year of progress in exile.

Here in a land alien because of its great material destiny,
not at all ready to follow him, although attentive in its curiosity
after the New, here in this little room the poet of the Irish race,
articulate of that race in its awakening, came as it were among his
own and in a way almost apostolic gave utterance to aspirations
which must be very near to his own heart. In the name of culture
he spoke of the great future for Irish thought among men prepared
by Irish thought to conceive world-ideas more intimate and more
enduring than those of Hruennhilde, Siegfried, Parsifal. But
beyond this appeal of culture Mr Yeats winged his thought, and into
the hearts of his hearers he bore the real truth for them of the
true spiritual destiny of the Celt; and with it he brought into
their hearts an intense yearning to follow through his inspiration
in the way of the incomparable destiny. Francis Byrne Hackett.

MR YEATS AT THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY.

Mr William Butler Yeats held a reception at the rooms of the Irish Literary Society of New York on March 6th, the last Sunday which he spent in America. Because of the distinguished connection of the "Poet Laureate of Ireland" with the Irish Literary Society of London and the National Literary Society of Dublin his visit to the New York organization was especially significant. The interest which Mr Yeats stimulated by his presence and by the views which he declared will mean much to this Society which for essential reasons should become one of the strongest Irish influences in America.

By this time the personality of Mr Yeats must be familiar to nearly everyone interested in things Irish. The charm which one is led to expect from his poetry is genuinely in him. Perhaps the critic who regards the simplicity of the Celtic poet's work as a perfect artistic attainment might in the same way analyze his manner, but it seems more just to find an attractive naïveté in his unusual somewhat stiff gestures, in his disconcerting lapses into mood, in his ingenuously disarranged clothes.

Mr Yeats's audience was sufficiently diverse, but when he began to address them in a quite informal way as they grouped around him, standing or sitting, his idea arrested each one of them, and the most arbitrary Celt as well as the most blasé critic at once knew that here was a sincere man, inspired with ideals and yet not of a world obscurely aesthetic, a man intimate with existence of the