ABSTRACT
YEARS ago, in the adventurous youth of his mind, Mr. O'Grady found the Gaelic tradition like a neglected antique dun with the doors barred. Listening, he heard from within the hum of an immense chivalry, and he opened the doors and the wild riders went forth to work their will. Now he would recall them. But it is in vain. The wild riders have gone forth, and their labours in the human mind are only beginning. They will do their deeds over again, and now they will act through many men and speak through many voices. The spirit of Cuculain will stand at many a lonely place in the heart, and he will win, as of old, against multitudes. The children of Turann will start afresh, still eager to take up and renew their cyclic labours, and they will gain, not for themselves, the Apples of the Tree of Life, and the Spear of the Will, and the Fleece which is the immortal Body. They will not grow weary warring upon things that die, but will be fighters in the spirit against immortal powers, and, as before, the acts will be sometimes noble and sometimes base. They cannot be stayed from their deeds, for they are still in the strength of a youth which is ever renewing itself. Nor for all the wrong which may be done should they be restrained. Mr. O’Grady would now have the tales kept from the crowd to be the poetic luxury of a few. Yet would we, for all the martyrs who perished in the fires of the Middle Ages, counsel the placing of the gospels on the list of books to be read only by a few esoteric worshippers ? The literature which should be unpublished is that which holds the secret of the magical powers. The legends of Ireland are not of this kind. They have no special message to the aristocrat more than to the man of the people. The men who made the literature of Ireland were by no means nobly born, and it was the bards who placed the heroes, each in his rank, and crowned them for after ages, and gave them their famous names. They have placed on the brow of others a crown which belonged to themselves, and all the heroic literature of the world was made by the sacrifice of the nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to others
they never wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers of beauty and pity on women, who, perhaps, had never uplifted a heart in their day, and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in the dreaming soul of the poets.
