Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices hurry through the air.  Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea.  Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are gone past.  There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives, calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth, great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.

Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the sadness of Autumn.  So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad one.  Yet each tinges the other—­the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of Spring—­Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn.  When the sad mood comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading valleys.  A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are starred with tears.  A poignant grief is over the land, an almost desolation,—­full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered complaint.  All the world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite.  Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white shrouds of weeping mist.  Wander forth upon the uplands and among the lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find the same sadness everywhere:  a grieving world under a grieving sky.  Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world.

Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer.  Nor have they ever known the real Ireland who have not divined beneath that poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by that sad outward show.

Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history.  For very much of our nation’s life has been like the sadness of those autumn days,—­a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere.  Tragedy upon tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and deprivation.  He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that woe.  Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel within that woe the heart of power and joy,—­the strong life outlasting darkest night,—­the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history.