ng brooded upon that he has
almost become that which he contemplated, owes much to the woman who may
never be his; and if he or the world understood aright, he has no cause
of complaint. It is the essentially irreligious spirit of Ireland which
has come to regard love as an unnecessary emotion and the mingling of
the sexes as dangerous. For it is a curious thing that while we commonly
regard ourselves as the most religious people in Europe, the reverse is
probably true. The country which has never produced spiritual thinkers
or religious teachers of whom men have heard if we except Berkeley and
perhaps the remote Johannes Scotus Erigena, cannot pride itself on its
spiritual achievement; and it might seem even more paradoxical, but I
think it would be almost equally true, to say that the first spiritual
note in our literature was struck when a poet generally regarded as
pagan wrote it as the aim of his art to reveal--

In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

The heavens do not declare the glory of God any more than do shining
eyes, nor the firmament show His handiwork more than the woven wind
of hair, for these were wrought with no lesser love than set the young
stars swimming in seas of joyous and primeval air. If we drink in the
beauty of the night or the mountains, it is deemed to be praise of the
Maker, but if we show an equal adoration of the beauty of man or woman,
it is dangerous, it is almost wicked. Of course it is dangerous; and
without danger there is no passage to eternal things. There is the
valley of the shadow beside the pathway of light, and it always will be
there, and the heavens will never be entered by those who shrink
from it. Spirituality is the power of apprehending formless spiritual
essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory, and in the things
which are seen the unseen things of which they are the shadow. I call
Mr. Yeats' poetry spiritual when it declares, as in the lines I quoted,
that there is no beauty so trivial that it is not the shadow of the
Eternal Beauty. A country is religious where it is common belief that
all things are instinct with divinity, and where the love between man
and woman is seen as a symbol, the highest we have, of the union of
spirit and nature, and their final blending in the boundless being. For
this reason the lightest desires even, the lightest graces of women have
a philosophical value for what suggestions