Swift horses gather nigh,
Where half dry the river goes;
Tufted heather crowns the height;
Weak and white the bog-down blows.
Corncrake singing, from eve til morn,
Deep in corn, the strenuous bird;
Sings the virgin waterfall,
White and tall, her one sweet word.
Loaded bough of little power
Goodly flower-harvests win;
Cattle roam with muddy flanks;
Busy ants go out and in.
————-
Carols loud the lark on high,
Small and shy, his tireless lay,
Singing in wildest, merriest mood
Of delicate-hued delightful May.
And here, from the same source, are the Delights of Finn, as his son Oisin sang them to Patrick:
These are the things that were dear to Finn,—
The din of battle, the banquet's glee,
The bay of his hounds through the rough glen ringing,
And the blackbird singing in Letterlee.
The Shingle grinding along the shore,
When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea;
The dawn-wind whistling his spears among.
And the magic song of his ministrels three.
Whereby you may know, if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step to seeing
'Eternal Beauty wander on her way;'
—that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of God. It would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit is here; but that the Gods are here, and clearly visible; talk not of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile to the Beauty of the World which is the light that shines from It, and the sign of Its presence! And the consciousness of this Beauty is one which, since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose and sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more through the minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled from truth. I cannot over-estimate the importance of this delight in and worship of Beauty in Nature, which the wise Chinese considered the path to the highest things in Art. Europe has inherited, mainly from the Greeks and the time the western world fell into ignorance, a preoccupation with human personality: in Art and Literature, I mean, as well as in life. We are individuals, and would peg out claims for ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us;—for there, as the poem I quoted about the Great Plain says, "none talk of 'mine' and 'thine.'" But down through the centuries of Christendom, after our catching it so near its source in magical Ireland, comes this other music: this listening, not for the voices of passion, and indecision, and the self-conceit which is the greatest fool's play of all, within our personal selves,—but for the meditations of the Omnipresent as they are communicated through the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy of flowers, through the