to those who followed, and that was because there was something
in them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry with
it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and
it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among
the imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is
never out of date. The figures carved by Pheidias for the Parthenon
still shine by the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There
has been no evolution of the human form to a greater beauty than
the ancient Greek saw, and the forms they carved are not strange
to us, and if this is true of the outward form it is true of the
indwelling spirit. What is essentially noble is contemporary with
all that is splendid today, and until the mass of men are equal
in spirit the great figures of the past will affect us less as
memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which youth is
ever hurrying in its heart.

O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past what
was contemporary to the best in us today, and he was equal in his
gifts as a writer to the greatest of his bardic predecessors in
Ireland. His sentences are charged with a heroic energy, and,
when he is telling a great tale, their rise and fall is like the
flashing and falling of the bright sword of some great battle, or
like the onset and withdrawal of Atlantic surges. He can at need
be beautifully tender and quiet. Who that has read his tale of
the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will forget the weeping of
Finn over the kindness of the famine-stricken old men, and their
wonder at his weeping, and the self-forgetful pathos of their
meditation unconscious that it was their own sacrifice called
forth the tears of Finn. "Youth," they said, "has many sorrows
that cold age cannot comprehend."