lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in
poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio
fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish
hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical
twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it,
is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever
young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can
touch:

'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Tho' hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill;
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.'

For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism.
The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But
this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary
phase to which I now turn.