[THE GENERAL LIGHT AND DARK]
“The words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark.” One feels the truth of this saying of Walt Whitman’s in a place like the Pass of Glengesh, or the White Strand outside Maghery. Chanting a fragment of the “Leaves” one night in the Pass, when everything was quiet and the smells were beginning to rise out of the wet meadows below, I felt how supremely true it was, and how much it belonged to the time and place—the darkness, the silence, the vibrant stars, the earth smells, the bat that came out of the shadow of a fuchsia-bush and fluttered across a white streak in the sky beyond. And I have tried Wordsworth’s sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us,” by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. Tried by it, the counterfeit fails and the unmixed gold is justified.
[SOUL AND BODY]
“It’s a strange world,” said a tramp to me to-day. I agreed. “And would you answer me this, gaffer?” said he. “Why is it when a man’s soul is in his body, and he lusty and well, you think nothing of kicking him about as you would an old cast shoe? And the minute the soul goes, and the body is stiffening in death, you draw back from him, hardly daring to touch him for the dread that is on you. Would you answer me that, gaffer?” I was silent. “It’s a strange world, sure enough,” said the tramp. He rose from the gripe where he lay making rings in the grass with his stick. “Good-day, gaffer,” said he. “God speed your journey.” And he took the road, laughing.
LOCHROS BEAG.
[A MAN ON SHELTY-BACK]
A man on shelty-back. He has come in from the mountains to the cloth fair at Ardara. He is about sixty-five, black on the turn, clean shaven, but for side whiskers. He wears the soft wide-awake favoured by the older generation of peasants, open shirt, and stock rolled several times round his throat and knotted loosely in front. His legs dangle down on either side of his mount, tied at the knees with sugans. His brogues are brown with bog mud, very thick in the sole, and laced only half-way up. He has a bundle of homespun stuff under his left arm. A pipe is in his teeth, and as I approach he withdraws it to bid me the time of day. “Lá maith,” he says in a strong, hearty voice. I return the greeting, and pass on.
[THE FAIRIES]
I was in a house one night late up in the Gap of Maum, a very lonely place, yarning with two brothers—shepherds—who live there by themselves. I had sat a long time over the griosach, and was preparing to go, when the elder of them said to me: “Don’t stir yet a bit. Sit the fire out. A body’s loath to leave such a purty wee fire to the fairies.”