But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods. Over against these lines you may put,
"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"
Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness unalloyed of heaven.
When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form, melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog, and radiant with cold white light.
the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are,
"the great star swings Along the sapphire zone,"
"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"
"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."
There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry, for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing. The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack association with known and loved things to bring them home to the reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.
It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into his writings chiefly his relation with God,--for all other relations are as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from himself and his fellows into oneness with God.