The
sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps the charm of it
all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the heart is
strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and smile
on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent, knowing
they are only dreams.
Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of
conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After
the Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests
the horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary
dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed
his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting
victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an
excess of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace
deeper than mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures,
which gives them that symbolic character which genius always impresses
on its works.
The coloring grows better every year; it is more varied and purer.
It is sometimes sombre, as in the tragic and dramatic "Simon the
Cyrenian," and sometimes rich and flowerlike, but always charged
with sentiment, and there is a curious fitness in it even when it
is evidently unreal.
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