In the preface to The Wild Swans at Coole,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of 'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses written in the seeming-strong vernacular¹ of literary Dublin, as it were a hospitable² bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion of the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from our own), essentially³ vers d'occasion.

[Footnote 3: The Wild Swans at Coole. By W.B. Yeats.(Macmillan.)]

The poet's high and passionate⁴ argument must be sought elsewhere, and precisely⁵ in his expression of his convictions about the world. And here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur⁶. The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest reality he can apprehend⁷. He cannot transcribe⁸ it simply because he does not possess the necessary apparatus⁹ of knowledge, and because if he did possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book of the

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