is my treasure, O she is my treasure, the
woman of the grey eyes ... a woman who would not lay a hand under my
head.... She is my love, O she is my love, the woman who left no strength
in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh after me, a woman who would
not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my secret love, O she is my secret
love. A woman who tells me nothing,... a woman who does not remember me
to be out.... She is my choice, O she is my choice, the woman who would
not look back at me, the woman who would not make peace with me.... She is
my desire, O she is my desire: a woman dearest to me under the sun, a
woman who would not pay me heed, if I were to sit by her side. It is she
ruined my heart and left a sigh for ever in me.' There is another song
that ends, 'The Erne shall be in strong flood, the hills shall be torn
down, and the sea shall have red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and
every mountain valley and every moor shall be on high, before you shall
perish, my little black rose.' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure
their hatred. The nurse of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the
bed of his betrayer may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an
Elizabethan Irish poet cries: 'Three things are waiting for my death. The
devil, who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my
wealth; the worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my
soul or my wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care
nothing for my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one
noose.' Such love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity,
and such love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The
lover who loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the
lover in the poem by 'A. E.,' 'A vast desire awakes and grows into
forgetfulness of thee.'

When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving, and a
proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks of the
lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing, for if your
passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where there are many
cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart soon comes also to
hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love and hatred comes, as I
think, a certain power of saying and forgetting things, especially a power
of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say and
forget. The anci