to the spirit than it did."

The secret of the play's power is its capacity for standing
afar off, and mingling, if we may say so, sympathy with
relentlessness. There is a wonderful beauty of speech in the
words of every character, wherein the latent power of
suggestion is almost unlimited. "In the big world the old
people do be leaving things after them for their sons and
children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving
things behind for them that do be old." In the quavering
rhythm of these words, there is poignantly present that quality
of strangeness and remoteness in beauty which, as we are coming
to realise, is the touchstone of Celtic literary art. However,
the very asceticism of the play has begotten a corresponding
power which lifts Synge's work far out of the current of the
Irish literary revival, and sets it high in a timeless
atmosphere of universal action.

Its characters live and die. It is their virtue in life to be
lonely, and none but the lonely man in tragedy may be great.
He dies, and then it is the virtue in life of the women
mothers and wives and sisters to be great in their
loneliness, great as Maurya, the stricken mother, is great in
her final word.

"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of
the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the
white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want
than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must
be satisfied." The pity and the terror of it all have brought