Lord Dunsany has seen it once more and as simply as if he were a child
imagining adventures for the knights and ladies that rode out over the
drawbridges in the piece of old tapestry in its mother's room. But to
persuade others that it is all but one dream, or to persuade them that
Lord Dunsany has his part in that change I have described I have but
my superstition and this series of little books where I have set his
tender, pathetic, haughty fancies among books by Lady Gregory, by
AE., by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by John Synge, and by myself. His work which
seems today so much on the outside, as it were, of life and daily
interest, may yet seem to those students I have imagined rooted in
both. Did not the Maeterlinck of 'Pelleas and Melisande' seem to be
outside life? and now he has so influenced other writers, he has been
so much written about, he has been associated with so much celebrated
music, he has been talked about by so many charming ladies, that he is
less a vapour than that Dumas _fils_ who wrote of such a living
Paris. And has not Edgar Allen Poe, having entered the imagination of
Baudelaire, touched that of Europe? for there are seeds still carried
upon a tree, and seeds so light they drift upon the wind and yet can
prove that they, give them but time, carry a big tree. Had I read
'The Fall of Babbulkund' or 'Idle Days on the Yann' when a boy I had
perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first
reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less
circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more
does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy and
exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is
not paved with gold and silver.

IV

These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing
away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is
sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His
travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to
sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does
not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful
things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos
of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and
incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar
Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as
Sir John Mandeville, has yet