Front matter
4 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
:'•■ FROM THE
SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND
Contents
PAGB
FOREWORD vii
By Elizabeth A. Sharp
Dedication
of the earth : dark-eyed, shadowy brother of Pan ; and his fane is among the lonely glens and mountains and lonelier isles of " Alba cona lingantaibh." It is because you and I are of the children of Keithoir that I wished to grace my book with your name.
The most nature-wrought of the English poets hoped he was not too late in transmuting into his own verse something of the beautiful mythology of Greece. But while Keats spun from the inexhaustible loom of genius, and I am but an obscure chronicler of obscure things, is it too presumptuous of me to hope that here, and mayhap elsewhere, I, the latest comer among older and worthier celebrants and co-enthusiasts, likewise may do something, howsoever little, to win a further measure of heed for, and more intimate sympathy with, that old charm and stellar beauty of Celtic thought and imagination, now, alas, like so many other lovely things, growing more and more remote, discoverable seldom in books and elusive amid the sayings and oral legends and fragmentary songs of a passing race ?
A passing race: and yet mayhap not so. Change is inevitable; and even if we could hear the wind blowing along Magh Mell — the Plain of Hon^ — :We might list to a new note, bitter-sweet: and, doubtless, the waves falling over the green roof of Tir-na-Thonn' murmur drowsily of a shifting of the veils of circumstance which Keithor weaves blindly in his dark place. But what was, surely is ; and what is, surely may yet be. The form changes ; the essential abides. As the saying goes among the isle-folk : The shadow fleets beneath the cloud driven by the wind, and the cloud falls in rain or is sucked of the sun, but the wind sways this way and that for ever. It may well Be that the Celtic Dream is not doomed to become a memory merely. Were it so, there would be less joy in all Springs to come, less hope in all brown Autumns; and the cold of a deathlier chill in all Winters still dreaming by the Pole. For the Celtic joy in the life of Nature — the Celtic vision — is a thing apart : it is a passion; a visionary rapture. There is none -like it among the peoples of our race.
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