ragging stones. The clouds are long above me
this night. I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of
Finn, listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night.' Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type of
the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the primitive
melancholy; 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is red and the
water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?... Behold, old age,
which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and my teeth, to my
eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall
upon me together--coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I
am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me, the couch of honour
shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How evil
was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night he was brought forth! Sorrows
without end and no deliverance from his burden.' An Elizabethan writer
describes extravagant sorrow by calling it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and
Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little nearer even to us modern Irish than
they are to most people. That is why our poetry and much of our thought is
melancholy. 'The same man,' writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which
he first writes in Gaelic, 'who will to-day be dancing, sporting,
drinking, and shouting, will be soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy
and sick and sad in his own lonely little hut, making a croon over
departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of
death.'

IV

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man
of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers
and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the
ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild
melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life
more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life
beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until
the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel
Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we
must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.' Matthew Arnold
has said that if he were asked 'where English got its turn for melancholy
and its turn for natural magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that
it got much