ods, and that it would be much better for youth to be
scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear Irish boy, dear Irish
girl, I know as well as any the economic needs of our people. They must
not be overlooked, but keep still in your hearts some desires which
might enter Paradise. Keep in your souls some images of magnificence
so that hereafter the halls of heaven and the divine folk may not seem
altogether alien to the spirit. These legends have passed the test
of generations for century after century, and they were treasured
and passed on to those who followed, and that was because there was
something in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry
with it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and
it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the
imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never out
of date. The figures carved by Pheidias for the Parthenon still shine by
the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been no evolution
of the human form to a greater beauty than the ancient Greek saw, and
the forms they carved are not strange to us, and if this is true of the
outward form it is true of the indwelling spirit. What is essentially
noble is contemporary with all that is splendid today, and until the
mass of men are equal in spirit the great figures of the past will
affect us less as memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which
youth is ever hurrying in its heart.

O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past what was
contemporary to the best in us today, and he was equal in his gifts as
a writer to the greatest of his bardic predecessors in Ireland. His
sentences are charged with a heroic energy, and, when he is telling a
great tale, their rise and fall is like the flashing and falling of the
bright sword of some great battle, or like the onset and withdrawal of
Atlantic surges. He can at need be beautifully tender and quiet. Who
that has read his tale of the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will
forget the weeping of Finn over the kindness of the famine-stricken old
men, and their wonder at his weeping, and the self-forgetful pathos
of their meditation unconscious that it was their own sacrifice called
forth the tears of Finn. "Youth," they said, "has many sorrows that cold
age cannot comprehend."

There are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's
sentences. It is easy to point to fault