for they peopled it only with the young and beautiful. It was
the Land of the Living Heart, a tender name which showed that it
had become dearer than the heart of woman, and overtopped all
other dreams as the last hope of the spirit, the bosom where it
would rest after it had passed from the fading shelter of the world.
And sure a strange and beautiful land this Ireland is, with a
mystic beauty which closes the eyes of the body as in sleep, and
opens the eyes of the spirit as in dreams and never a poet has
lain on our hillsides but gentle, stately figures, with hearts
shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses,
in an enchanted world of their own: and it has become alive through
every haunted rath and wood and mountain and lake, so that we can
hardly think of it otherwise than as the shadow of the thought of God.
The last Irish poet who has appeared shows the spiritual qualities
of the first, when he writes of the gray rivers in their "enraptured"
wanderings, and when he sees in the jeweled bow which arches
the heavens--

The Lord's seven spirits that shine through the rain

This mystical view of nature, peculiar to but one English poet,
Wordsworth is a national characteristic; and much in the creation
of the Ireland in the mind is already done, and only needs retelling
by the new writers. More important, however, for the literature
we are imagining as an offset to the cosmopolitan ideal would be
the creation of heroic figures, types, whether legendary or taken
from history, and enlarged to epic proportions by our writers, who
would use them in common, as Cuculain, Fionn, Ossian, and Oscar
were used by the generations of poets who have left us the bardic
history of Ireland, wherein one would write of the battle fury of