ge and to forget my own
heart and its more rarely accorded vision of truth. I know I like my own
heart best, but I never look into the world of my friend without feeling
that my region lies in the temperate zone and is near the Arctic
circle; the flowers grow more rarely and are paler, and the struggle for
existence is keener. Southward and in the warm west are the Happy Isles
among the Shadowy Waters. The pearly phantoms are dancing there with
blown hair amid cloud tail daffodils. They have known nothing but
beauty, or at the most a beautiful unhappiness. Everything there moves
in procession or according to ritual, and the agony of grief, it is
felt, must be concealed. There are no faces blurred with tears there;
some traditional gesture signifying sorrow is all that is allowed. I
have looked with longing eyes into this world. It is Ildathach, the
Many-Colored Land, but not the Land of the Living Heart. That island
where the multitudinous beatings of many hearts became one is yet
unvisited; but the isle of our poet is the more beautiful of all the
isles the mystic voyagers have found during the thousands of years
literature has recorded in Ireland. What wonder that many wish to follow
him, and already other voices are singing amid its twilights.

They will make and unmake. They will discover new wonders; and will
perhaps make commonplace some beauty which but for repetition would have
seemed rare. I would that no one but the first discoverer should enter
Ildathach, or at least report of it. No voyage to the new world, however
memorable, will hold us like the voyage of Columbus. I sigh sometimes
thinking on the light dominion dreams have over the heart. We cannot
hold a dream for long, and that early joy of the poet in his new-found
world has passed. It has seemed to him too luxuriant. He seeks for
something more, and has tried to make its tropical tangle orthodox;
and the glimmering waters and winds are no longer beautiful natural
presences, but have become symbolic voices and preach obscurely some
doctrine of their power to quench the light in the soul or to fan it to
a brighter flame.

I like their old voiceless motion and their natural wandering best, and
would rather roam in the bee-loud glade than under the boughs of beryl
and chrysoberyl, where I am put to school to learn the significance
of every jewel. I like that natural infinity which a prodigal beauty
suggests more than that revealed in esoteric hieroglyphs