'blackbird's singing in Letterlee,'

--this tendency to 'seek in the Impersonal' (Nature is impersonal)
'for the Eternal Self.'

So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh centuries,
I find the forces 'going west,' through Gaul, through Wales,
through Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves
bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so near to the
island the Greeks called "Sacred Ierne of the Hibernians." It
may be that the finest part of them has not come back yet; but
will re-emerge, spiritual and saving, through this same gateway.
One would be ashamed of the Host of the Gods, were they not doing
strenuous battle in the unseen for the regeneration of this poor
Ireland, that will yet mean so much to the world: and one would
marvel at the hellions, indeed one would, were they in their turn
not moving heaven and earth, with their best battle-breaking
champions in the fore-front, to maintain their strangle-hold on
her tortured and beautiful soul.

XXVII. THE IRISH ILLUMINATION

We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and
410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales. The next thing in
China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in
Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.

He was an Irishman, and had been studying in Wales; where,
certainly, there was great activity in churchly circles in those
days. Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names
beginning with _Llan,_--and you will see. There are countless
thousands of them. 'Llan' means 'the holy place of,' and the rest
of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached
there: of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic
calendar. They were most of them active in the fifth and
sixth centuries.

Findian, according to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ had come
under the influence of three of the foremost of them: David,
Gildas, and Catwg the Wise; who were perhaps great men, if
we may judge by the results of their teaching, as Findian
transmitted it to those that came after him. We have seen that
Patrick opened no kind of golden age in Ireland, gave no impulse
to civilization or letters. The church he founded had fallen on
rather evil days since his death; and now Findian came to reform
things in the light of what he had learned in Wales. He began by
founding at Clonard a monastery on the Welsh plan. That was some
twenty-two years before Geoffrey'