A description of a furniture removal would have appealed to my aesthetic sense twenty years ago, and my style of Médan thread was strong enough to capture packers and their burdens; but the net that I cast now is woven of fine silk for the capture of dreams, memories, hopes, aspirations, sorrows, with here and there a secret shame. So I will say no more than that I was out of the house one morning early, lest I should see a man seize the coal-scuttle and walk away with it, and on returning home that night I found that everything in the drawing-room and the dining-room and the spare-room and the ante-room had been taken away, only the bedroom remained intact, and I wandered round the shell that I had lived in so long, pondering on the strange fact that my life in Victoria Street was no more than a dream, and with no more reality in it, I added, than the dream that I shall dream here tonight.

Jane, this is the last time you'll call me, for I'm going away by the mail at half past eight from Euston.

Your life is all pleasure and glory, but I shall have to look round for another place, I heard her say, as she pulled at the straps of my portmanteau, and her resentment against me increased when I put a sovereign into her hand. She cooked me excellent dinners, making life infinitely agreeable to me; a present of five pounds was certainly her due, and a sovereign was more than enough for the porter, whom I suspected of poisoning my cat—a large, grey, and affectionate animal upon whom Jane, without the aid of a doctor, had impressed the virtue of chastity so successfully that he never sought the she, but remained at home, a quiet, sober animal that did not drink milk, only water, and who, when thrown up to the ceiling, refrained from turning round, content to curl himself into a ball, convinced that my hands would receive him—an animal to whom I was so much attached that I had decided to bring him with me in a basket; but a few weeks before my departure he died of a stoppage in his entrails, brought about probably by a morsel of sponge fried in grease—a detestable and cruel way of poisoning cats often practised by porters. It was pitiful to watch the poor animal go to his pan and try to relieve himself, but he never succeeded in passing anything, and after the third day refused to try any more. We had recourse to a dose of castor oil, but it did not move him and after consultation we resolved to give an enema if he would allow us. The poor animal allowed us to do our will; he seemed to know that we were trying to help him, and received my caresses and my words with kindly looks while Jane administered the enema, saying that she didn't mind if the whole courtyard saw her do it, all she cared for was to save Jim's life. But the enema did not help him, and after it he neither ate nor drank, but lay down stoically to die. Death did not come to him for a long while; it seemed as if he would never drop off, and at last, unable to bear the sight of his sufferings any longer, Jane held his head in a pail of water, and after a few gasps the trial of life was over. It may have been that he died of the fur that he licked away, collecting in a ball in his entrails, and that there is no cause for me to regret the sovereign given to the porter when the great van drove up to my door to take away the bedroom and kitchen furniture.

Everything except my personal luggage was going to Ireland by a small coasting steamer, which would not arrive for three weeks, and my hope was that the house in Upper Ely Place would then be ready to receive my furniture; but next morning only one workman could be discovered in my new house, and he lazily sweeping. The builder was rung up on the telephone; he promised many things. Three weeks passed away; the furniture arrived, but the vans had to go away again; communications were received from the firm who removed my furniture, demanding the return of the vans, and it was not until a fortnight later that my Aubusson carpet was unrolled in the drawing-room one afternoon in AE's presence, the purple architecture and the bunches of roses shocking him so much that I think he was on the point of asking me to burn my carpet. It affected him so much that it was with difficulty I persuaded him to withdraw his eyes from it and look at the pictures. I would conceal the fact if I dared, but a desire of truth compels me to record that when he first saw Manet's portrait it seemed to him commonplace, even uncouth.

I asked him if the beautiful grey of the background were not in harmony with the exquisite grey of the dress, and if the paint were not spilt upon the canvas like cream, and if the suffused colour in a tea-rose were more beautiful?

Oh, Moore!

Well, if you will not admire the beauty of Manet's paint, admire its morality. How winningly it whispers, Be not ashamed of anything but to be ashamed! And I chose this mauve wallpaper, for upon it this grey portrait will be triumphant. The other Manet is but a sketch, and the casual critic only sees that she is cock-eyed; the whiteness of her shoulders escapes him, and the pink of her breasts blossoms. Manet's pink—almost a white! I remember a peony.... I'll turn the picture a little more to the light. Now, AE, I beseech you to look upon it. No, it doesn't please you. Well, look at my Monet instead; a flooded meadow and willows evanescent in the mist. Compared with Monet, Constable's vision is a journeyman's, and he is by no means seen at his worst in that little picture. But look again at the willows and tell me if the Impressionists did not bring a delicacy of vision into art undreamt-of before. In their pictures the world is young again. Look at this charming girl by Berthe Morisot and tell me, was a girl ever so young before?—an April girl, hyacinth-coloured dress and daffodil hair.



She has caught the mystery of the child's wondering eyes. We call it mystery, he added, but it is merely stupidity. People often say things that are not in the least like them, therefore criticism will reprove me for recording words that AE may have uttered, but which are admittedly not like him.

Ah, here's my Conder! You can't but like this picture of Brighton—the blue sea breaking into foam so cheerfully; a happy lady looks from her balcony at other happy ladies walking in the sunshine. The optimism of painting! AE sighed. You don't like it? Here is a Mark Fisher; women singing under trees. The Land of Wine and Song, he calls it, and if you look through the trees you will see an estuary and a town in long perspective dying in the distance. Like my Mark Fisher, AE. Why do you hesitate?

I do like it, but—

But what?

It is a landscape in some small world, a third the size of our world.

I know what is the matter with you, AE; you're longing for Watts. You try to disguise it, but you are sighing for Time Treading on the Big Toe of Eternity, or Death Bridging Chaos, or The Triumph of Purgatory over Heaven.

Admit—

No, AE, I'll admit nothing, except that he painted a heron rather well, and then dropped into sixteenth-century treacle. Impressionism is a new melodic invention invisible to you at present. One of these days you'll see it. But there's no use talking about painting. Come into the garden. I'm expecting a lady; she will join us there, and if you'll take her out among the hills she'll show you how to draw a round brush from one side of the canvas to the other without letting it turn round in the middle, leaving a delicious ridge of paint with a lot of little waggles—

But little waggles, my dear Moore, are not—

AE, we've talked enough about painting for one afternoon. Come into the garden.

AE took out his watch; it was nearly three, he must be getting back to his office; but would I tell the lady that he'd be glad to go out painting with her any Sunday morning?

It was sad to lose him, and while walking to the wicket it seemed to me clear that he was the one who could restore to me my confidence in life; and when he left me, a certain mental sweetness seemed to have gone out of the air, and, thinking of him, I began to wonder if he were aware of his own sweetness. It is as spontaneous and instinctive in him as.... A breath of scent from the lilac-bushes seemed to finish my sentence for me, and it carried my mind into a little story I had heard from Hughes. He and AE were students together in the Art School in Dublin, and in a few weeks masters and students were alike amazed at AE's talent for drawing and composition; he sketched the naked model from sight with an ease that was unknown to them, and, turning from the model, he designed a great assembly of Gods about the shores of the lake renowned in Celtic tradition. Compared with him we seemed at that time no more than miserable scratchers and soilers of paper. Hughes's very words! Yet, in spite of an extraordinary fluency of expression, abundant inspiration, and the belief of the whole school that a great artist was in him, AE laid aside his brushes, determined not to pick them up again until he had mastered the besetting temptation that art presented at that moment. He feared it as a sort of self-indulgence which, if yielded to, would stint his life; art with him is a means rather than an end; it should be sought, for by its help we can live more purely, more intensely, but we must never forget that to live as fully as possible is, after all, our main concern; and he had known this truth ever since he had defied God on the road to Armagh.

But his life did not take its definite direction until an Indian missionary arrived in Dublin. It seemed odd that I should have personal knowledge of this very Brahmin. Chance had thrown me in his way; I had met him in West Kensington, and had fled before him; but AE had gone to him instinctively as to a destiny; and a few months later the Upanishads and the Vedas were born again in verse and in prose—the metrical version better than the prose; in the twenties our thoughts run into verse, and AE's flowed into rhyme and metre as easily as into line and colour. But, deriving the same pleasure from the writing of verse as he did from painting, he was again assailed by scruples of conscience, and to free himself from the suspicion that he might be still living in time rather than in eternity, he charged his disciples to decide whether he should contribute essays or poems. It is to their wise decision that we owe the two inspired volumes The Earth Breath and Homeward.

As the reader follows my tracing of AE's soul at a very difficult point in his life, he must be careful to avoid any inference that AE endeavoured to escape from the sensual will because he believed it to be the business of every one to tear it out of his life; an intellect suckled on the lore of the East does not fall into the error of the parish priest, who accepts chastity as a virtue in itself, thinking that if he foregoes the pleasure of Bridget's he is free to devote himself to that of his own belly; and I smiled, for in my imagination I could see a Yogi raising his oriental eyes in contempt at the strange jargon of metaphysics that a burly priest from Connaught, out of breath from the steep ascent, pours over his bowl of rice.



But of course, I said, waking up suddenly, we have all to yield something to gain a great deal. Were it otherwise, Society would come to pieces like a rotten sponge. The right of property holds good in all Society; but in the West ethics invade the personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts and ideas into the world with him. The East says to the West, You prate incessantly about monogamy, and the fruit of all your labour is a house divided against itself, for man is polygamous if he is anything, and if our deeds go down one set of lines and our ideas go down another, our lives are wasted, and in the end—

A sudden thought darting across my mind left my sentence unfinished, and I asked myself what manner of man I was. The question had often been asked before, had always remained unanswered; but that day, sitting under my apple-tree, it seemed to me that I had suddenly come upon the secret lair in which the soul hides itself. An extraordinarily clear and inflexible moral sense rose up and confronted me, and, looking down my past life, I was astonished to see how dependent my deeds had always been upon my ideas. I had never been able to do anything that I thought wrong, and my conscience had inspired my books. A Modern Lover is half forgotten, but it seems to me that even in those early days I was interested in the relation of thought and deed. The Mummer's Wife declines, for she is without sufficient personal conscience to detach herself from the conventions in which she has been brought up. Alice Barton in Muslin is a preparatory study, a prevision of Esther Waters; both represent the personal conscience striving against the communal, and, feeling that I had learnt to know myself at last, I rose from the seat, and looked round, thinking that in AE as in myself thought and action are at one. Alike, I said, in essentials, though to the casual observer regions apart.... But everybody in Dublin thinks that he is like AE as everybody in the world thinks he is like Hamlet.

He comes to see me every day between two and three, riding his old bicycle through the gateway; I run to the wicket to let him in, and we walk together to the great apple-tree and sit there talking of Manet and the immortality of the soul. It is pleasant to remember these weeks, for I was very happy in these first conversations; but the reader knows how impossible it is for me to believe that any one likes me for my own sake, and at the end of a week—my happiness may have lasted half-way into the second week—at the end of eight or nine days I was trying to find sufficient reason why AE should seek me out in my garden every afternoon, saying, and saying vainly, that he was attracted by something in me he had been seeking a long while and thought he had found at last. And this seeming to me a very unsatisfying explanation, I began to cast about in my mind for another, coming to the belief, or very nearly to it, that AE recognised me as the spiritual influence that Ireland had been waiting for so long. And the fact that he was the only one in Dublin who had shown no surprise at my coming fortified me in the belief, and I dreamed on until his voice called me out of my dream of himself and myself; and, as if he had been aware all the time that I had been thinking about him, he said:

As soon as you had lived as much of your life as was necessary for you to live in Paris and in London you were led back to us through Yeats?

No, AE, not through Yeats. At most he was an instrument, and it is possible to go further back than him. Martyn was before Yeats. But, like Yeats, he was no more than an instrument, for neither of them wanted me to come back. You did, and somehow I can't help feeling that you knew I was coming back. You had read my books, and it was my books, perhaps, that made you wish for my return. Wish—not as one wishes to smoke a cigarette, but you really did want to have me here?

I certainly did wish that England would return to us some of our men of talent.

But this wasn't the answer that I wanted.

What I would like to know, AE, is did you wish to have me back for my own sake, because you felt that something was lacking in my books? Or was it merely for the sake of Ireland? I'm afraid the questions I'm putting to you make me seem very silly and egotistical, yet I don't feel either.

Perhaps Ireland needs you a little.

I wonder. I suppose Ireland needs us all. But there is something I have never told you—something I have never told anybody.

AE puffed at his pipe in silence, and I strove against the temptation to confide in him the story of the summons I had received on the road to Chelsea, for his idea of me was not of one that saw visions or heard spirit voices. I felt that to be so, without, however, being able to rid myself of the belief that he had discovered in me the spiritual influence that Ireland was waiting for. How complicated everything is!... Nothing will be gained by telling him. I won't tell him. The conversation took a different turn; I felt relieved; the temptation seemed to have passed from me, but a few minutes after my story slipped from my lips as nearly as possible in these words:

You know that I came over here to publish an article in the Freeman's Journal about the Boer War, and the article attracted a great deal of attention? AE nodded, and I could see that he was listening intently. If it hadn't been for that article all the Boers would have been murdered and England would have saved two hundred million pounds. Providence has to make a choice of an instrument; you are chosen today, another tomorrow; that day I was the chosen instrument, and on the road to Chelsea, thinking of this great and merciful Providence, I heard a voice bidding me back to Ireland. It is difficult to know for certain what one hears and what one imagines one has heard; one's thoughts are sometimes very loud, but the voice was from without. I am sure it was, AE. Three or four days afterwards I heard the same words spoken within my ear while I was lying in bed asleep. And the voice spoke so distinctly that I threw out my arms to retain the speaker. Nor is this all. Very soon afterwards, in my drawing-room in Victoria Street about eleven o'clock at night, I experienced an extraordinary desire to pray, which I resisted for a long time. The temptation proved stronger than my power to resist it; and I shall never forget how I fell forward and buried my face in the armchair and prayed.

What prayer did you say?

One can pray without words, surely?

When the hooker that was taking Yeats over to Arran or taking him back to Galway was caught in a storm Yeats fell upon his knees and tried to say a prayer; but the nearest thing to one he could think of was Of man's first disobedience and the fruit, and he spoke as much of Paradise Lost as he could remember.

But, AE, you either believe or you don't believe what I say.

I can quite understand that you're deeply interested in the voice you heard, or think you heard; but our concern isn't so much with it as with the fact that you have been brought back to Ireland.

A cloud then seemed to come between us, and out of this cloud I heard AE saying that if he were to tell people that all his drawings were done from sittings given to him by the Gods, it would be easy for him to sell every stroke he put on canvas, and to pass himself off as a very wonderful person.

But your drawings are done from sittings given to you by the Gods. I remember your telling me that three stood at the end of your bed looking at you one morning.

Three great beings came to my bedside, but I cannot tell you if I saw them directly, as I see you (if I see you directly), or whether I saw them reflected as in a mirror. In either case they came from a spiritual world.

A vision was vouchsafed to you. Why not to me?

I don't dispute the authenticity of your vision, my dear Moore. Why should I? How could I even wish to dispute it? On what grounds?

But you seem to doubt it?



No more! Who sent the vision? Whose voice did I hear? An angel's?

Angels are Jehovah's messengers and apparitors. And this I can say: the Gods that inspired your coming were not Asiatic.

The Gods to whom the English are praying that strength may be given them to destroy the Boers quickly and at little cost—a poor little nation, no bigger than Connaught! The lust for blood was in everybody's face. I had to leave. If the news came in that five hundred Boers were taken prisoners faces darkened, and brightened if the news were that five hundred had been killed. England has made me detest Christianity.... Born in the amphitheatre, which it didn't leave without acquiring a taste for blood, and the newspapers are filled with scorn of Kruger because he reads the Bible. Think of it, AE! Because he reads his Bible!

But don't think of it, my dear Moore.

It would be better not, for when I do life seems too shameful to be endured.... The Bishops of York and Canterbury praying to Jesus or to His Father—which?

Probably to His Father. But go on with your story.

What story?

The message that you received didn't come round to you by way of Judaea.

No, indeed, the Gods that inspired me are among our native divinities. Angus seems to be kind and compassionate, and so far as I know, his clergy never ordered that any one should be burnt at the stake for holding that it was not the kisses but the songs of the birds circling about his forehead that created love. All the same, the Druids—

No one may speak ill of the Druids in AE's presence, and he told me that he did not know of any mention in Irish legends of human sacrifices, and if there had been, the Christian revisers of the legends would not have failed to mention them.

You love the Druids, I said, looking into his calm and earnest face. When you were earning fifty pounds a year in Pim's shop you used to go to Bray Head and address a wondering crowd! Standing on a bit of broken wall, all your hair flowing in the wind, you cried out to them to return to the kind, compassionate Gods that never ordered burnings in the market place, and I don't see why, AE, we should not go forth together and preach the Danaan divinities, north, south, east, and west. You shall be Paul. Barnabas quarrelled with Paul. I'll be Luke and take down your words.

It would be your own thoughts, my dear Moore, that you would be reporting, not mine; and, though Ireland stands in need of a new religion—



We fell to talking of the Irish language, I maintaining that it would be necessary to revive it, AE thinking that the Anglo-Irish idiom would be sufficient for literature, until the thought emerged that perhaps it might have been Diarmuid that bade me to Ireland.

I'd like to see the cromlechs under which the lovers slept, but I don't know where to find them.

AE answered that at Whitsuntide he would have three or four days' holiday, and proposed to visit the sacred places with me.

We'll seek the ancient divinities of the Gael together. AE pulled out his watch and said he must be going, and we strolled across the greensward to the wicket. The ash will be in leaf the day we start. I hope, AE, that nothing will happen to prevent us; and I jumped out of bed every morning to see if the promise were for a fine or a wet day.

I had arrived in Ireland in March; it was raining then, but the weather had taken a turn in the middle of April; the fifteenth was the first fine day, and ever since the days had played in the garden like children, shadows of apple-trees and lilac-bushes moving over the sweet grass with skies of ashen blue overhead fading into a dim, creamy pink in the South and East. The hawthorns were in full leaf, and among the little metallic leaves white and pink stars had just begun to appear, and the scent of these floated after us, for no sinister accident had happened. AE called for me as he had promised, and we went away together on bicycles—myself on a new machine bought for the occasion, AE on an old one that he has ridden all over Ireland, from village to village, establishing co-operative creameries and banks. And side by side we rode together through the early streets to Amiens Street Station, where we took second-class tickets to Drogheda—an hour's journey from Dublin. At Drogheda we jumped on our bicycles again; two tramps we were that day, enjoying the wide world, and so intoxicating was the sunlight that it was with difficulty I kept myself from calling to AE that I felt certain the Gods would answer us. I would have done this if a river had not been passing by, and such a pretty river—a brook rather than a river.

AE, AE, look and admire it!

A few minutes afterwards our brook or river acquired such a picturesqueness that perforce he jumped from his bicycle and unslung his box of pastels which he wore over his shoulder.

Trees, he said, emerging like vapours, and while he discovered the drawing of a brook purling round a miniature isle between low mossy banks, I lay beside him, forgetful of everything but the faint stirring of the breeze in the willows and the song of a bird in the reeds—a reed-warbler no doubt; and while I lay wondering if the bird were really a warbler, AE finished his pastel. He leaned it against a tree, looked at it, and asked me if I liked it.... It was a spiritual seeing of the world, and I told him that no one had ever seen Nature more beautifully. He put his picture into his portfolio, I put mine into my memory, and we went away on our bicycles through the pretty neglected country until we came to a grey bridge standing thirty, perhaps fifty, feet above the shallow river; the beauty of its slim arches compelled me to dismount, and, leaning on the parapet, I started this lamentation:

No more stone bridges will be built, and it has come to this, that a crack in one of those arches will supply a zealous county councillor with a pretext for an iron bridge. The pleasure of these modern days is to tear down beautiful yesteryear.

No arch will fall within the next ten years, he answered. Admire the bridge without troubling yourself as to what its fate will be when you are gone.

AE's optimism is delightful, but, while approving it, I could not keep back the argument that a mountain fails to move our sympathies, for it is always with us, whereas a cloud curls and uncurls and disappears. We cling to life because it is for ever slipping from us. Don't you think so? It is strange that, although you know more poetry by heart than any one I ever met, I have never heard you repeat a verse from Omar Khayyám. You love what is permanent, and believe yourself immortal. That is why, perhaps, Shelley's Hymn of Pan is for you the most beautiful lyric in the world. Do say it again—Sileni and Fauns and that lovely line ending moist river lawns. One sees it all—something about Tempe outgrowing the light of the dying day. Say it all over again.

He repeated the verses as we ascended the hill.

Look at that hound!

He came towards us, trotting amiably, gambolling now and again for sheer pleasure. The loneliness of the road had awakened the affection that his nature was capable of. He leaned himself up against me; his paws rested upon my shoulders; I fondled the silken ears and he yawned, perhaps because he wished me to admire his teeth—beautiful they were and skilfully designed for their purpose, to seize and to tear.

Yet his eyes are gentle. Tell me, is his soul in his eyes or in these fangs?

My dear Moore, you've been asking me questions since eight o'clock this morning; and we all three went on together till we reached a farmhouse in which the hound lived with an old woman.

The dog put his long nose into her hand, and she told us that he had been brought to her very ill. It was distemper, but I brought him through it, and now they'll soon be taking him from me. And you'll be sorry to leave me, won't you, Sampson?

At the end of September, I said, he'll be taken away to scent out foxes with his brethren in the woods over yonder, and to lead them across the green plains, for he is a swift hound. Don't you think he is? But you won't look at him. If he were called Bran or Lomair—

We hopped on our bicycles and rode on till we came to a great river with large sloping banks, covered with pleasant turf and shadowed by trees, the famous Boyne, and AE pointed out the monument erected in commemoration of the battle.

The beastly English won that battle. If they'd only been beaten!

We rode on again until we came to a road as straight as an arrow stretching indefinitely into the country with hedges on either side—a tiresome road and so commonplace that the suspicion entered my mind that this journey to Meath was but a practical joke, and that AE would lead me up and down these roads from morning till noon, from noon till evening, and then would burst out laughing in my face; or, perhaps, by some dodge he would lose me and return to Dublin alone with a fine tale to tell about me. But such a trick would be a mean one, and there is no meanness in AE. Besides, the object of the journey was a search for Divinity and AE does not joke on sacred subjects. We rode on in silence. A woman appeared with candles and matches in her hand.

But why should we light candles in broad daylight? There isn't a cloud in the sky.

He told me to buy a candle and a box of matches and follow him across the stile, which I did, and down a field until we came to a hole in the ground, and in the hole was a ladder. He descended into it and, fearing to show the white feather, I stepped down after him. At twenty feet from the surface he went on his hands and knees and began to crawl through a passage narrow as a burrow. I crawled behind him, and after crawling for some yards, found myself in a small chamber about ten feet in height and ten in width. A short passage connected it with a larger chamber, perhaps twenty feet in width and height, and built of great unhewn stones leaned together, each stone jutting a little in front of the other till they almost met, a large flat stone covering in the vault. And it was here, I said, that the ancient tribes came to do honour to the great divinities—tribes, but not savage tribes, for these stones were placed so that not one has changed its place though four thousand years have gone by. Look at this great hollowed stone. Maybe many a sacrificial rite has been performed in it. He did not answer this remark, and I regretted having made it, for it seemed to betray a belief that the Druids had indulged in blood sacrifice, and, to banish the thought from his mind, I asked him if he could read the strange designs scribbled upon the walls. The spot, he said, within the first circle is the earth, and the first circle is the sea; the second circle is the heavens, and the third circle the Infinite Lir, the God over all Gods, the great fate that surrounds mankind and Godkind. Let us sit down, I said, and talk of the mysteries of the Druids, for they were here for certain; and, as nothing dies, something remains of them and of the demigods and of the Gods. The Druids, he answered, refrained from committing their mysteries to writing, for writing is the source of heresies and confusions, and it was not well that the folk should discuss Divine things among themselves; for them the arts of war and the chase, and for the Druids meditation on eternal things. But there is no doubt that the Druids were well instructed in the heavens; and the orientation of the stones that surround their temples implies elaborate calculations. At the same hour every year the sun shines through certain apertures. But, AE, since nothing dies, and all things are as they have ever been, the Gods should appear to us, for we believe in them, and not in the Gods that men have brought from Asia. Angus is more real to me than Christ. Why should he not appear to me, his worshipper? I am afraid to call upon Mananaan or on Dana, but do you make appeal.

AE acquiesced, and he was on the ground soon, his legs tucked under him like a Yogi, waiting for the vision, and, not knowing what else to do, I withdrew to the second chamber, and ventured to call upon Angus, Diarmuid's father, that he or his son might show himself to me. There were moments when it seemed that a divine visitation was about to be vouchsafed to me, and I strove to concentrate all my thoughts upon him that lives in the circle that streams about our circle. But the great being within the light that dawned faded into nothingness. Again I strove; my thoughts were gathered up, and all my soul went out to him, and again the darkness lightened. He is near me; in another moment he will be by me. But that moment did not come, and, fearing my presence in the tomb might endanger AE's chance of converse with the Immortals, I crept along the passage and climbed into the upper air and lay down, disappointed at my failure, thinking that if I had tried a third time I might have seen Angus or Diarmuid. There are three circles, and it is at the third call that he should appear. But it would be useless to return to the tomb; Angus would not gratify so weak a worshipper with vision, and my hopes were now centred in AE, who was doubtless in the midst of some great spiritual adventure which he would tell me presently.

The sun stood overhead, and never shall I forget the stillness of that blue day, and the beauty of the blue silence with no troublesome lark in it; a very faint blue when I raised my eyes, fading into grey, perhaps with some pink colour behind the distant trees—a sky nowise more remarkable in colour than any piece of faded silk, but beautiful because of the light that it shed over the green undulations, greener than any I had seen before, yet without a harsh tone, softened by a delicate haze, trees emerging like vapours just as AE had painted them. And as I lay in the warm grass on the tumulus, the green country unfolded before my eyes, mile after mile, dreaming under the sun, half asleep, half awake, trees breaking into leaf, hedgerows into leaf and flower, long herds winding knee-deep in succulent herbage. It is wonderful to sit on a tumulus and see one's own country under a divine light. An ache came into my heart, and a longing for the time when the ancient Irish gathered about the tumulus on which I was lying to celebrate the marriage of earth and sky. On days as beautiful as this day they came to make thanksgiving for the return of the sun; and as I saw them in my imagination arrive with their Druids, two opaque-looking creatures, the least spiritual of men, with nothing in their heads but some ignorant Christian routine, lifted their bicycles over the stile.

They're not going to descend into the sacred places! I said. They shall not interrupt his vision; they shall not!

As they approached me I saw that they had candles and matches in their hands, and, resolved at any cost to save the tomb from sacrilege, I strove to detain them with speech about the beauty of the summer-time and the endless herbage in which kine were fattening. Fattening was the word I used, thinking to interest them.

The finest fattening land in all Ireland, one of them said, but we're going below.

I should have told them the truth, that a great poet, a great painter, and a great seer was, in their own phraseology, below, and it might be that the Gods would vouchsafe a vision to him. Would they be good enough to wait till he ascended? Mere Christian brutes they were, approvers of the Boer War, but they might have been persuaded to talk with me for ten or fifteen minutes; they might have been persuaded to sit upon the mound if I had told them the truth. I leaned over the opening, listening, hoping their bellies might stick in the narrow passage; but as they seemed to have succeeded in passing through, I returned to the tumulus hopeless. The Gods will not show themselves while Presbyterian ministers are about; AE will not stay in the tomb with them; and at every moment I expected to see him rise out of the earth. But it was the ministers who appeared a few minutes afterwards, and, blowing out their candles in the blue daylight, they asked me if I had been below.

I have been in the temple, I answered.

Did you see the fellow below?

I'm waiting for him—a great writer and a great painter, I answered indignantly.

Is it a history he's brooding down there; one of them asked, laughing; and I lay down on the warm grass thinking of the pain their coarse remarks must have caused AE, who came out of the hill soon after. And it was just as I had expected. The vision was about to appear, but the clergymen had interrupted it, and when they left the mood had passed.