heaven and earth and had the very noblest for his companions. It
was the memory of race which rose up within me as I read, and I
felt exalted as one who learns he is among the children of kings.
That is what O'Grady did for me and for others who were my
contemporaries, and I welcome these reprints of his tales in the
hope that he will go on magically recreating for generations yet
unborn the ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For many
centuries the youth of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the
life of bygone ages, and there were always some who remade
themselves in the heroic mould before they passed on. The
sentiment engendered by the Gaelic literature was an arcane
presence, though unconscious of itself, in those who for the past
hundred years had learned another speech. In O'Grady's writings
the submerged river of national culture rose up again, a shining
torrent, and I realised as I bathed in that stream, that the
greatest spiritual evil one nation could inflict on another was to
cut off from it the story of the national soul. For not all music
can be played upon any instrument, and human nature for most of us
is like a harp on which can be rendered the music written for the
harp but not that written for the violin. The harp strings quiver
for the harp-player alone, and he who can utter his passion
through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar instrument. That
is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred by English
literature though it is one of the great literatures of the world.
Our history was different and the evolutionary product was a
peculiarity of character, and the strings of our being vibrate
most in ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral moods or embodies
emotions akin to these. I am not going to argue the comparative
worth of the Gaelic and English tradition. All I can say is that
the traditions of our own country move us more than the traditions