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 symbolized 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 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 the 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