spectacle of the world and mix into all he sees that flavour of
extravagance, or of humour, or of philosophy, that makes one understand
that he contemplates even his own death as if it were another's, and
finds in his own destiny but as it were a projection through a burning
glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance
of what life brings, because we have understood the beauty of what it
brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within
us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble,
so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, in the terror or the sweetness
of our exaltation, at death and oblivion.

In no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it
may be Miss Edgeworth in 'Castle Rackrent,' was there anything to change
a man's thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but
play with pictures, persons, and events, that whether well or ill
observed are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from
meditation, a child's show that makes the fables of his art as
significant by contrast as some procession painted on an Egyptian wall;
for in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world
had been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her sleepy
drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its wisdom. All
minds that have a wisdom come of tragic reality seem morbid to those that
are accustomed to writers who have not faced reality at all; just as the
saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell so certainly that
they numbered it among spiritual states, one among other ascending steps,
seem morbid to the rationalist and the old-fashioned Protestant
controversialist. The thought of journalists, like that of the Irish
novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for it has not risen to that
state where either is possible, nor should we call it happy; for who
would have sought happiness, if happiness were not the supreme attainment