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I
Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stopped
in some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop to
escape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed.
She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, 'the funeral of Thomas
Davis, a poet.' She had never heard of Davis; but because she thought
a country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she became
interested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself,
being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth.
That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come.
Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living,
though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations
he passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had published
but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret
too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopular
than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular
we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that
sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse,
from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal
of reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saint
and connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his
elaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which,
being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself,
is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when its
moments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious,
students will perhaps open these books, printed by village girls at
Dundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of history
and ballad verse of the old 'Library of Ireland.' They will notice
that this new 'Library,' where I have gathered so much that seems to
me representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for few
people, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by
'Mary of the Nation', who wished, as she said, to make no elaborate
beauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. If
they are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to find
some analogy of the old with O'Connell's hearty eloquence, his winged
dart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy;
and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragic
shadow we of modern Ireland began to write.
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