s due to excess and abundance,
but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and power. There is
something arcane and elemental in it, a quality that the most careful
stylist cannot attain, however he uses the file, however subtle he is.
O'Grady has noticed this power in the ancient bards and we find it in
his own writing. It ran all through the Bardic History, the Critical
and Philosophical History, and through the political books, The Tory
Democracy and All Ireland. There is this imaginative energy in the tale
of Cuculain, in all its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the capture
of the Liath Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the capture of
the Wild swans, the fight at the ford, and the awakening of the Red
Branch. In the later tale of Red Hugh which, he calls The Flight of
the Eagle there is the same quality of power joined with a shining
simplicity in the narrative which rises into a poetic ecstasy in that
wonderful chapter where Red Hugh, escaping from the Pale, rides through
the Mountain Gates of Ulster and sees high above him Sheve Gullion,
a mountain of the Gods, the birth-place of legend "more mythic than
Avernus"; and O'Grady evokes for us and his hero the legendary past and
the great hill seems to be like Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals,
and it lives and speaks to the fugitive boy, "the last great secular
champion of the Gael," and inspires him for the fulfillment of his
destiny. We might say of Red Hugh, and indeed of all O'Grady's heroes,
that they are the spiritual progeny of Cuculain. From Red Hugh down to
the boys who have such enchanting adventures in Lost on Du Corrig and
The Chain of Gold they have all a natural and hardy purity of mind, a
beautiful simplicity of character, and one can imagine them all in an
hour of need, being faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red
Branch. These shining lads never grew up amid books. They are as much
children of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It might be said
of them as the poet of the Kalevala sang of himself: "Winds and waters
my instructors."

These were O'Grady's own earliest companions, and no man can find better
comrades than earth, water, air and sun. I imagine O'Grady's own
youth was not so very different from the youth of Red Hugh before his
captivity; that he lived on the wild and rocky western coast, that he
rowed in coracles, explored the caves, spoke much with hardy natural
people, fishermen and workers on the land