‘AE’ (1898; rev. 1900), in A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, ed. Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (1900)

Abstract

Some dozen years ago a little body of young men hired a room in Dublin, and began to read papers to one another on the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Neo-Platonists, and on modern mystics and spiritualists. They had no scholarship, and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and simply and unconventionally, as men perhaps discussed great problems in the mediaeval Universities. When they were scattered by their different trades and professions, others took up the discussions where they dropped them, moving the meetings, for the most part, from back street to back street; and now two writers of genius — ‘AE’† and ‘John Eglinton’ — seem to have found among them, without perhaps agreeing with them in everything, that simplicity of mind and that belief in high things, less common in Dublin than elsewhere in Ireland, for whose lack imagination perishes.¹ ‘John Eglinton’ in Two Essays on the Remnant and in the essays he has published in the little monthly magazine they print and bind themselves, analyses the spiritual elements that are transforming and dissolving the modern world; while ‘AE’†, in Homeward: Songs by the Way and in The Earth Breath,² repeats over again the revelation of a spiritual world that has been the revelation of mystics in all ages, but with a richness of colour and a subtlety of rhythm that are of our age.