to the rebuilding of a nation. The passion, the imagination of Ireland
were thrown into the fight. I often thought to find some poem putting
such passion into fiery or memorable lines. But the first I thought
worth the keeping,--I have it yet, was Katherine Tynan's lament for
Parnell, written two years after his death. In tearing it from the
corner of some newspaper I had unwittingly taken note of almost the
moment of a new impulse in literature, in poetry. For with that death,
the loss of that dominant personality, and in the quarrel that
followed, came the disbanding of an army, the unloosing of forces,
the setting free of the imagination of Ireland.




III


Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to
get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a
part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars
as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might
turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. But my
asking, timid with the fear of mockery, was unheeded. Yet I missed
but by a little an opportunity that might have made me a real Irish
scholar, and not as I am, imperfect, stumbling. For a kinsman learned
in the language, the translator of the wonderful _Silva Gaedelica_
had been sometimes a guest in the house, and would still have been
welcomed there but that my mother, who had a great dislike to the marriage
of cousins had fancied he was taking a liking to one of my elder sisters;
and with that suspicion the "winged nymph, Opportunity" had passed