As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is a woman
With her travail done,
Her brood gone from her,
And her thoughts as still
As the waters
Under a ruined mill.
_James Stephens_
This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 1882. Stephens
was discovered in an office and saved from clerical slavery by George
Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, Stephens's most poetic moments are
in his highly-colored prose. And yet, although the finest of his
novels, _The Crock of Gold_ (1912), contains more wild phantasy and
quaint imagery than all his volumes of verse, his _Insurrections_
(1909) and _The Hill of Vision_ (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that
is at once hotly ironic and coolly whimsical.
Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend of
incongruities--he combines in his verse the grotesque, the buoyant and
the profound. No fresher or more brightly vigorous imagination has
come out of Ireland since J. M. Synge.