m to Patrick:

These are the things that were dear to Finn,--
The din of battle, the banquet's glee,
The bay of his hounds through the rough glen ringing,
And the blackbird singing in Letterlee.

The Shingle grinding along the shore,
When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea;
The dawn-wind whistling his spears among.
And the magic song of his ministrels three.

Whereby you may know, if you consider it rightly, what great
strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of
Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When
you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother,
and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a
step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a
step to seeing

'Eternal Beauty wander on her way;'

--that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of
God. It would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit is
here; but that the Gods are here, and clearly visible; talk not
of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile to the Beauty
of the World which is the light that shines from It, and the sign
of Its presence! And the consciousness of this Beauty is one
which, since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose and
sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more through the
minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled from truth. I cannot
over-estimate the importance of this delight in and worship of
Beauty in Nature, which the wise Chinese considered the path to
the highest things in Art. Europe has inherited, mainly from the
Greeks and the time the western world fell into ignorance, a
preoccupation with human personality: in Art and Literature, I
mean, as well as in life. We are individuals, and would peg out
claims for ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of
that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us;--for there, as
the poem I quoted about the Great Plain says, "none talk
of 'mine' and 'thine.'" But down through the centuries of
Christendom, after our catching it so near its source in magical
Ireland, comes this other music: this listening, not for the
voices of passion, and indecision, and the self-conceit which is
the greatest fool's play of all, within our personal selves,--but
for the meditations of the Omnipresent as they are communicated
through the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy of
flowers, through the