A TRIBUTE BY A. E.


In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes
for too many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How
rarely--out of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his
lifetime--can he remember where or when he read any particular
book, or with any vividness recall the mood it evoked in him. When
I close my eyes, and brood in memory over the books which most
profoundly affected me, I find none excited my imagination more
than Standish O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain. Whitman said
of his Leaves of Grass, "Camerado, this is no book: who touches
this touches a man" and O'Grady might have boasted of his Bardic
History of Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was
more than a man in it, there was the soul of a people, its noblest
and most exalted life symbolised in the story of one heroic
character.

With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many
others who were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a
man who, through some accident, had lost memory of his past, who
could recall no more than a few months of new life, and could not
say to what songs his cradle had been rocked, what mother had
nursed him, who were the playmates of childhood or by what woods
and streams he had wandered. When I read O'Grady I was as such a
man who suddenly feels ancient memories rushing at him, and knows
he was born in a royal house, that he had mixed with the mighty of