Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he records in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and looked down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.
To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of shadowy fire"--I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster, Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens, are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial things."