achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with "God possesses the heavens--God possesses the
heavens--but He covets the world"; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, "Who is
that old fellow there?" "The fret [Irish for doom] is over me," he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, "Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago"; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.

This old man always rises before me when I think of X-----. Both seek
--one in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry-to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X----- will forgive me, have within them the
vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic
heart. The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duelists that
were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the sea
for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming
the palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years
to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland,
these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the
central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and
this mind that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of that
great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor
any angel revealed.