ere, if one can believe many
devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked upon the
roads, bringing the needy to some warm fireside, and sending one of His
Saints to anoint the dying.

I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for centuries,
for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient Irish poets,
the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and death. The emotion
that in other countries has made many love songs has here been given, in
a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is not a difference in
the substance of things that the lamentations that were sung after battles
are now sung for men who have died upon the gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to his death with the thought--

'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote,
some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_, Lady
Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--

'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs.'

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems
which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions
which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One could still, if
one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write for these people
plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the greatest poetry always
require a people to listen to it? England or any other country which takes
its tune from the great cities and gets its taste from schools and not
from old custom, may have a mob, but it cannot have a people. In England
there are a few groups of men and women who have good taste, whether in
cookery or in books; and the great multitudes but copy them or their
copiers. The poet must always prefer the community where the perfected
minds express the people, to a community that is vainly seeking to copy
the perfected