and would rather roam in the bee-loud glade than under the boughs
of beryl and chrysoberyl, where I am put to school to learn the
significance of every jewel. I like that natural infinity which
a prodigal beauty suggests more than that revealed in esoteric
hieroglyphs, even though the writing be in precious stones.
Sometimes I wonder whether that insatiable desire of the mind for
something more than it has yet attained, which blows the perfume
from every flower, and plucks the flower from every tree, and hews
down every tree in the valley until it goes forth gnawing itself
in a last hunger, does not threaten all the cloudy turrets of the
Poet's soul. But whatever end or transformation, or unveiling may
happen, that which creates beauty must have beauty in its essence,
and the soul must cast off many vestures before it comes to itself.
We, all of us, poets, artists, and musicians, who work in shadows,
must sometime begin to work in substance, and why should we grieve
if one labor ends and another begins? I am interested more in life
than in the shadows of life, and as Ildathach grows fainter I await
eagerly the revelation of the real nature of one who has built so
many mansions in the heavens. The poet has concealed himself under
the embroidered cloths and has moved in secretness, and only at
rare times, as when he says, "A pity beyond all telling is hid
in the heart of love," do we find a love which is not the love of
the Sidhe; and more rarely still do recognizable human figures,
like the Old Pensioner or Moll Magee, meet us. All the rest are
from another world and are survivals of the proud and golden races
who move with the old stateliness and an added sorrow for the dark
age which breaks in upon their loveliness. They do not war upon
the new age, but build up about themselves in imagination the
ancient beauty, and love with a love a little colored by the passion
of the darkness from which they could not escape. They are the sole