, even though
the writing be in precious stones. Sometimes I wonder whether that
insatiable desire of the mind for something more than it has yet
attained, which blows the perfume from every flower, and plucks the
flower from every tree, and hews down every tree in the valley until it
goes forth gnawing itself in a last hunger, does not threaten all the
cloudy turrets of the Poet's soul. But whatever end or transformation,
or unveiling may happen, that which creates beauty must have beauty in
its essence, and the soul must cast off many vestures before it comes
to itself. We, all of us, poets, artists, and musicians, who work in
shadows, must sometime begin to work in substance, and why should we
grieve if one labor ends and another begins? I am interested more in
life than in the shadows of life, and as Ildathach grows fainter I await
eagerly the revelation of the real nature of one who has built so
many mansions in the heavens. The poet has concealed himself under the
embroidered cloths and has moved in secretness, and only at rare times,
as when he says, "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of
love," do we find a love which is not the love of the Sidhe; and more
rarely still do recognizable human figures, like the Old Pensioner
or Moll Magee, meet us. All the rest are from another world and
are survivals of the proud and golden races who move with the old
stateliness and an added sorrow for the dark age which breaks in upon
their loveliness. They do not war upon the new age, but build up about
themselves in imagination the ancient beauty, and love with a love a
little colored by the passion of the darkness from which they could not
escape. They are the sole inheritors of many traditions, and have now
come to the end of the ways, and so are unhappy. We know why they are
unhappy, but not the cause of a strange merriment which sometimes
they feel, unless it be that beauty within itself has a joy in its own
rhythmic being. They are changing, too, as the winds and waters have
changed. They are not like Usheen, seekers and romantic wanderers, but
have each found some mood in themselves where all quest ceases; they
utter oracles, and even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of hair
there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living
within them, shaping an elaborate beauty in dream for his own delight,
and for no other end than the delight in his dream. Other poets have
written of Wisdom ov