The Project Gutenberg eBook, Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay,
by Lord Dunsany, Edited by W. B. Yeats

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Title: Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay

Author: Lord Dunsany

Release Date: October 7, 2004 [eBook #13664]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF
LORD DUNSAY***

E-text prepared by S. R. Ellison, David Starner, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team

Transcriber's Note:

Two names are accented with Macrons (a short horizontal bar over
the letter), for which there is no ASCII character. They are usually
marked as [=e], as in Argim[=e]n[=e]s. For legibility, they have been
replaced here by the bare letter. To restore the original accents,

change Oonrana to Oonr[=a]na
change Argimenes to Argim[=e]n[=e]s

SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF LORD DUNSANY

MCMXII

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

The Gods of the Mountain
The First Act of King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior
The Fall of Babbulkund
The Sphinx at Gizeh
Idle Days on the Yann
A Miracle
The Castle of Time

INTRODUCTION

I

Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped
in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to
escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed.
She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, 'the funeral of Thomas
Davis, a poet.' She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought
a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became
interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself,
being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth.

That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come.
Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living,
though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations
he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published
but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret
too often that it has vanished, and left us poe