invented one wonder, heaped another
on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own
childhood--do not understand large design, and they delight in little
shut-in places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses
where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression of a thought. The
wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us, for
they creep towards our light by little holes and crevices. When they
imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can
wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what
another will be like, or know from the one day's adventure what may meet
one with to-morrow's sun. I have wished to become a child again that I
might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is
fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the childhood
that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western
world.

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions
they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into
ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once;
everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient
story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been
like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped
up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power,
and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing
can hold them from being all that the heart desires.

I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and
it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by
nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make
a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.
They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste
heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise, for it is at all times
the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people
of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is "as joyful as
the leaves of a tree in summer-time"; and whatever they do, whether they
listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake
of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;
and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a
good fighter than because