ABSTRACT
Mr. Yeats has the courage of his Celtic imagination if he thinks, at this wrong end of a hardened century, to arouse our slumbering Saxon taste for allegory and symbolism. The fashion of Cynewulf's day is a little outworn; and we have ceased to read Guillaume de Lorris with unaffected exhilaration. Yet here, in an age of all the utilities, is a young writer who invites us, with the frank confidence of youth, to follow him through the mystic byways of a new 'Roman de la Rose'. If a fine enthusiasm for his theme could touch our hearts, the appeal must surely strike home. But the hearts of some of us are not in the right
'If you come with evil thoughts and armed men,' said the son of Dermott, flushing, 'no matter how strong your hands to wrestle and to swing the sword, it shall go badly with you, for some of my wife's clan have come out of Mayo, and my three brothers and their servants have come down from the Mountains of the Ox'; and while he spoke he kept his hand inside his coat as though upon the handle of a weapon. 'No,' answered Costello, 'I but come to dance a farewell dance with your daughter' .... The girl lifted her eyes and gazed at Costello, and in her gaze was that trust of the humble in the proud, the gentle in the violent, which has been the tragedy of woman from the beginning.
