existence is keener. Southward and in the warm west are the Happy
Isles among the Shadowy Waters. The pearly phantoms are dancing
there with blown hair amid cloud tail daffodils. They have known
nothing but beauty, or at the most a beautiful unhappiness. Everything
there moves in procession or according to ritual, and the agony of
grief, it is felt, must be concealed. There are no faces blurred with
tears there; some traditional gesture signifying sorrow is all that
is allowed. I have looked with longing eyes into this world. It is
Ildathach, the Many-Colored Land, but not the Land of the Living Heart.
That island where the multitudinous beatings of many hearts became
one is yet unvisited; but the isle of our poet is the more beautiful
of all the isles the mystic voyagers have found during the thousands
of years literature has recorded in Ireland. What wonder that many wish
to follow him, and already other voices are singing amid its twilights.

They will make and unmake. They will discover new wonders; and
will perhaps make commonplace some beauty which but for repetition
would have seemed rare. I would that no one but the first discoverer
should enter Ildathach, or at least report of it. No voyage to the
new world, however memorable, will hold us like the voyage of Columbus.
I sigh sometimes thinking on the light dominion dreams have over the
heart. We cannot hold a dream for long, and that early joy of the
poet in his new-found world has passed. It has seemed to him too
luxuriant. He seeks for something more, and has tried to make its
tropical tangle orthodox; and the glimmering waters and winds are
no longer beautiful natural presences, but have become symbolic
voices and preach obscurely some doctrine of their power to quench
the light in the soul or to fan it to a brighter flame.

I like their old voiceless motion and their natural wandering best,