close to me and that I had been ignorant of. It was not now in the
corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the
singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and
old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what
was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my
childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of
parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.

An Aran man, repeating to me _The Grief of a Girl's Heart_ in
Irish told me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to
sleep as a child. It was from an old woman who had known Mary Hynes
and who said of her "The sun and the moon never shone upon anything
so handsome" that I first heard Raftery's song of praise of her, "The
pearl that was at Ballylee," a song "that has gone around the world
& as far as America." It was in a stonecutter's house where I went
to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript
book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
It was to a working farmer's house I walked on many a moonlit evening
with the manuscript that his greater knowledge helped me to understand
and by his hearth that I read for the first time the _Vision of
Death_ and the _Lament for O'Daly._ After that I met with many
old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with
the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made
and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote.




V