What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death.  I cannot think it wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel of some enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in “every household of them.”  It is natural, too, that there should be a queen to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom.  The self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey.  The man who saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, “If I had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and her visions do not interest her.”  And I know of another woman, also not a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house and her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he called it.  Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like the dying Shakespeare spoke of.  There is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it.  They will have it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of the earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery in November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes.  Because the soul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and the wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who will not understand the verse—­

    Heardst thou not sweet words among
    That heaven-resounding minstrelsy? 
    Heardst thou not that those who die
    Awake in a world of ecstasy? 
    How love, when limbs are interwoven,
    And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
    And thought to the world’s dim boundaries clinging,
    And music when one’s beloved is singing,
    Is death?

1901.

THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY

Those that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most of their wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought to have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one has passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun saw the dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again.