Every Irishman forms some vague ideal of his country, born from
his reading of history, or from contemporary politics, or from
imaginative intuition; and this Ireland in the mind it is, not
the actual Ireland, which kindles his enthusiasm. For this he
works and makes sacrifices; but because it has never had any
philosophical definition or a supremely beautiful statement in
literature which gathered all aspirations about it, the ideal
remains vague. This passionate love cannot explain itself; it
cannot make another understand its devotion. To reveal Ireland
in clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart,
is the province of a national literature. Other arts would add
to this ideal hereafter, and social life and politics must in the
end be in harmony. We are yet before our dawn, in a period
comparable to Egypt before the first of her solemn temples
constrained its people to an equal mystery, or to Greece before
the first perfect statue had fixed an ideal of beauty which mothers
dreamed of to mould their yet unborn children. We can see, however,
as the ideal of Ireland grows from mind to mind, it tends to assume
the character of a sacred land. The Dark Rosaleen of Mangan
expresses an almost religious adoration, and to a later writer it
seems to be nigher to the spiritual beauty than other lands:

And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon her holy quietude.

The faculty of abstracting from the land their eyes beheld another
Ireland through which they wandered in dream, has always been a
characteristic of the Celtic poets. This inner Ireland which the
visionary eye saw was the Tirnanoge, the Country of Immortal Youth,