1912





A NOTE ON SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN


As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably
from the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without
jealousy and even with delight to those who still make music in
the enchanted land. I often searched in the "Poet's Corner" of
the country papers with a wild surmise that there, amid reports of
Boards of Guardians and Rural Councils, some poetic young kinsman
may be taking council with the stars, watching more closely the
Plough in the furrows of the heavens than the county instructor at
his task of making farmers drive the plough straight in the fields.
I found many years ago in a country paper a local poet making
genuine music. I remember a line:

And hidden rivers were murmuring in the dark.

I went on in the strength of this poem through the desert
of country journalism for many years, hoping to find more hidden
rivers of song murmuring in the darkness. It was a patient life
of unrequited toil, and I have returned to civilization to search
publishers' lists for more easily procurable pleasure. A few years
ago I mined out of the still darker region of manuscripts some