upremely
beautiful statement in literature which gathered all aspirations about
it, the ideal remains vague. This passionate love cannot explain itself;
it cannot make another understand its devotion. To reveal Ireland in
clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart, is the
province of a national literature. Other arts would add to this ideal
hereafter, and social life and politics must in the end be in harmony.
We are yet before our dawn, in a period comparable to Egypt before the
first of her solemn temples constrained its people to an equal mystery,
or to Greece before the first perfect statue had fixed an ideal of
beauty which mothers dreamed of to mould their yet unborn children. We
can see, however, as the ideal of Ireland grows from mind to mind, it
tends to assume the character of a sacred land. The Dark Rosaleen of
Mangan expresses an almost religious adoration, and to a later writer it
seems to be nigher to the spiritual beauty than other lands:

And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon her holy quietude.

The faculty of abstracting from the land their eyes beheld another
Ireland through which they wandered in dream, has always been a
characteristic of the Celtic poets. This inner Ireland which the
visionary eye saw was the Tirnanoge, the Country of Immortal Youth, for
they peopled it only with the young and beautiful. It was the Land of
the Living Heart, a tender name which showed that it had become dearer
than the heart of woman, and overtopped all other dreams as the last
hope of the spirit, the bosom where it would rest after it had passed
from the fading shelter of the world. And sure a strange and beautiful
land this Ireland is, with a mystic beauty which closes the eyes of
the body as in sleep, and opens the eyes of the spirit as in dreams and
never a poet has lain on our hillsides but gentle, stately figures,
with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant
grasses, in an enchanted world of their own: and it has become alive
through every haunted rath and wood and mountain and lake, so that we
can hardly think of it otherwise than as the shadow of the thought of
God. The last Irish poet who has appeared shows the spiritual qualities
of the first, when he writes of the gray rivers in their "enraptured"
wanderings, and when he sees in the jeweled bow which arches the
heavens--

The Lord's seven spirits that shine through the rain

This mysti