The moonlight of a perfect peace
Floods heart and brain.
and sent it to me in a letter (for I had gone to town in advance of him), and told me:
“Before I left I took up a handful of grassy turf, and kissed it three times, and then threw it to the four quarters—so that the Beauty of the Earth might be seen by me wherever I went and that no beauty I had seen or known there should be forgotten. Then I kissed the chestnut tree on the side lawn where I have seen and heard so much: from the springing of the dream flowers, to the surge of the sea in Pharais.”
Thence he went to Scotland and wrote to me from Kilcreggan, where he was staying with his mother and sisters till I could join him:
“I told you about Whistlefield? how it, and all the moorland parts about here just now, is simply a boggy sop, to say nothing of the railway works. I hope we’ll have fine weather in Iona: it will be lovely there if we go....
(By the way Mr. Traill had a gratifying notice of Pharais in the Graphic a week or two ago.)
I have made friends here with a Celtic Islesman from Iona who is settled here: and have learned some more legends and customs etc. from him—also got a copy of an ancient MS. map of Iona with all its fields, divisions, bays, capes, isles, etc. He says my pronunciation of Gaelic is not only surprisingly good, but is distinctively that of the Isles.
I have learned the rune also of the reading of the spirit. The ‘influence’ itself seems to me purely hypnotic. I was out with this man McC—— on Saty. night last in a gale, in a small two-sailed wherry. We flew before the squalls like a wild horse, and it was glorious with the shriek of the wind, the heave and plunge of the boat, and the washing of the water over the gunwales. Twice ‘the black wind’ came down upon us out of the hills, and we were nearly driven under water. He kept chanting and calling a wild sea-rune, about a water-demon of the isles, till I thought I saw it leaping from wave to wave after us. Strangely, he is a different man the moment others are present. He won’t speak a word of Gaelic, nor be ‘Celtic’ in any way, nor even give the word as to what will be doing in the isles at this time or any other. This, however, I have noticed often: and all I have ever learned has been in intimacy and privily and more or less casually. On Sunday and Monday he avoided me, and would scarce speak: having given himself away and shown his Celtic side—a thing now more than ever foreign to the Celtic nature, which has become passionately reticent. But a few words in Gaelic, and a private talk, put all right again. Last night I got the rune of the ‘Knitting of the Knots’ and some information about the Dalt and the Cho-Alt about which I was not clear. He has seen the Light of the Dead, and his mother saw (before her marriage, and before she even saw the man himself) her husband crossing a dark stream followed by his four unborn children, and two in his arms whom afterwards she bore still-born....”
To me the summer was memorable because of my first visit to Iona. While there he wrote part of The Sin-Eater, and its prefatory dedication to George Meredith, and projected some of the St. Columba tales; he renewed impressions of his earlier days on the sacred isle, and stored new experiences which he afterwards embodied in his long essay on Iona published in The Divine Adventure volume.
From that Isle of Dreams “Fiona” wrote to Mrs. Tynan-Hinkson: