rebellion, of hatred of England, of political strife, in ballads sung
in the streets, of a thousand issues of daily life and death--but of
world-wide affairs, of great passions and duties and fates evolving in
epic or clashing in drama, of continuous human lives in narrative
(except in prose), of the social life of cities or of philosophic
thought enshrined in stately verse, it has not sung. What it may do in
the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty
poetry, lies on the knees of the gods. I wish it well, but such a
development seems now too late. The Irish genius, if it is to speak in
drama, in narrative poetry or in an epic, must speak, if it is to
influence or to charm the world beyond the Irish shore, in a
world-language like English, and of international as well as of Irish
humanity.

These elements on which I have dwelt seem to me the most distinctive,
the most Irish, in the Tales in this book. There are many others on
which a more minute analysis might exercise itself, phases of feeling
concerning war or love or friendship or honour or the passions, but
these are not specially Irish. They belong to common human nature, and
have their close analogies in other mythologies, in other Folk-tales,
in other Sagas. I need not touch them here. But there is one element
in all the Irish tales which I have not yet mentioned, and it brings
all the others within its own circumference, and suffuses them with
its own atmosphere. It is the love of Ireland, of the land itself for
its own sake--a mystic, spiritual imaginative passion which in the
soul of the dweller in the country is a constant joy, and in the heart
of the exile is a sick yearning for return. There are not many direct
expressions of this in the stories; but it underlies the whole of
them, and it is also in the air they breathe. But now and again it
does find clear expression, and in each of the cycles we have