multiply veils on detailed portions of his subject, adding one to another according as the various points of view and possible relations of parts come within his cognizance. His work will have the obscurity of Art.
As the principle of all Art can be exemplified in the production of any Art, and as poetry is the most satisfying of all the Arts, better examples could not be chosen to demonstrate the obscurities of Mist and Mystery than two poets in whose works these opposite tendencies exist. It so happens that something of one of each of these tendencies to obscurity may be observed in two books of poems that have just been issued.
Æ. has followed the two Arts of painting and poetry, and in both of these has manifested the rhythmic creation of beauty. If sometimes we have been in doubt as to which of these arts we ought to attribute some of his work, our confusion is not an arraignment of his methods, but rather an assertion that by means of the two arts sprung from the same necessity, and appealing to like faculties of appreciation he has contrived to satisfy us of their unity and origin and essential identity of purpose. Though many have remarked on the unusual similarity of Æ.'s poetry and his painting—a similarity which leaves his poetry easily the superior from the point of view of craft, as it never has the faulty draughtsmanship nor the glaring crudities of colour occasionally visible in his
