ach repeating itself
as the cycles of its own lifetime might permit. And then, as the
main current passed eastward from dying Europe, a reserve of it,
a little European _Sishta,_ passing west: from Gaul to Britain,
from Britain to Ireland; from Ireland to Tirnanogue and
Wonderland,* there to hide for some centuries until the Great
Wave should roll westward again from China through Persia, Egypt,
Africa, Sicily and Spain, up into Europe: when the Little Wave,
returning magic-laden out of the Western Paradise should roll
back Europewards again through Ireland, twelfth-century Wales and
Brittany; and spray Christendom with foam from the sea! that
wash the shores of Fairyland: producing first what there was of
mystery and delicacy to uplift mankind in feudal chivalry; then
the wonder-note in poetry which has probably been one of the
strongest and subtlest antidotes against deathly materialism.
Hence one may understand the _raison d'etre_ for that strange
correspondence between Chinese and Celtic happenings which we
have noted: the main wave rolls east; the backwash west; and
they touch simultaneously the extremities of things, which
extremities are, Celtdom and China. In both you get the sense of
being at the limits of the world,--of having beyond you only
nonmaterial and magical realms:--Peng-lai in the East, Hy Brasil
in the West;--the Fortunate Islands of the Sunset, and the
Fortunate Islands of the Dawn.

We have seen opportunities coming to each nation in turn; but
that how they used them depended on themselves: on whether they
would turn them to spiritual or partly spiritual, or to wholly
material uses: whether they would side, in their hour of
prosperity, with the Gods--as China did to some extent; or with
the hellions, as in the main Europe did. And above all, we have
seen how the Gods will never accept defeat, but return ever and
again to the attack, and are in perpetual heroic rebellion
against the despotism of materialism and evil and human blindness;
and we know that the victory they so often failed to achieve
of old, they are out to win now, and in the way of winning it:
that we are in the crisis and most exciting of times, standing
to make the future ages golden; that the measure of the victory
the Gods shall win is somewhat in our own hands to decide. The
war-harps that played victory to Heaven at Moytura of old are
sounding in our ears now, if we will listen for them; and
when Point Loma was fo