This is our secret:  the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the power that is not more in success than in failure—­the one soul whose moods these are, who uses equally life and death.

For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy.  And we may outline now the manner in which that tale will be told.  We shall have, first, a long, dim dawn,—­mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our land from the outlying darkness.  A first period, which has left abundant and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs to.  What can be called forth from that Archaic Darkness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall try to evoke; drawing the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform through the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores; a people everywhere building; looking back into a long past; looking forward through the mists of the future.  A people commemorating the past in a form that should outlast the future.  A people undertaking great enterprises for mysterious ends; whose works are everywhere among us, to this day, imperishable in giant stone; yet a people whose purposes are mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown.  Their works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.

After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may be.  From the surging together of these four races we shall see, in almost pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit polity; firm principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of law.  In this Second Epoch, every thing that in the first was dim and vague grows firm in outline and defined.  Names, places, persons,—­we know them all as if they were of to-day.  This is the age which flowered in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain ’neath the beech-trees, the citadel of northeastern Ireland.  Here we shall find the court of Fergus mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule altogether wisely; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar his stepson, the evil lover of ill-fated Deirdre.  Cuculain, too, the war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,—­in whom one part of our national genius finds its perfect flower.  We shall hear the thunder of his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against