han the physical nature has. Many things
live in it--empires which have never crumbled, beauty which has never
perished, love whose fires have never waned: and, in this formidable
competition for use in the artist's mind, today stands only its chance
with a thousand days. To question the historical accuracy of the use of
such memories is not a matter which can be rightly raised. The question
is--do they express lofty things to the soul? If they do they have
justified themselves.

I have written at some length on the two paths which lie before us, for
we have arrived at a parting of ways. One path leads, and has already
led many Irishmen, to obliterate all nationality from their work. The
other path winds upward to a mountain-top of our own, which may be in
the future the Mecca to which many worshippers will turn. To remain
where we are as a people, indifferent to literature, to art, to ideas,
wasting the precious gift of public spirit we possess so abundantly in
the sordid political rivalries, without practical or ideal ends, is to
justify those who have chosen the other path, and followed another star
than ours. I do not wish any one to infer from this a contempt for those
who, for the last hundred years, have guided public opinion in Ireland.
If they failed in one respect, it was out of a passionate sympathy for
wrongs of which many are memories, thanks to them, and to them is due
the creation of a force which may be turned in other directions, not
without a memory of those pale sleepers to whom we may turn in thought,
placing--

A kiss of fire on the dim brow of failure,
A crown upon her uncrowned head.

1899

STANDISH O'GRADY

In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes for too
many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How rarely, out
of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his lifetime, can he remember
where or when he read any particular book, or with any vividness recall
the mood it evoked in him. When I close my eyes, and brood in memory
over the books which most profoundly affected me, I find none excited my
imagination more than Standish O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain.
Whitman said of his Leaves of Grass: "Camerado, this is no book. Who
touches this touches a man," and O'Grady might have boasted of his
Bardic