The Shingle grinding along the shore,
     When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea;
     The dawn-wind whistling his spears among. 
     And the magic song of his ministrels three.

Whereby you may know, if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe.  When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step to seeing

     ‘Eternal Beauty wander on her way;’

—­that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of God.  It would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit is here; but that the Gods are here, and clearly visible; talk not of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile to the Beauty of the World which is the light that shines from It, and the sign of Its presence!  And the consciousness of this Beauty is one which, since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose and sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more through the minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled from truth.  I cannot over-estimate the importance of this delight in and worship of Beauty in Nature, which the wise Chinese considered the path to the highest things in Art.  Europe has inherited, mainly from the Greeks and the time the western world fell into ignorance, a preoccupation with human personality:  in Art and Literature, I mean, as well as in life.  We are individuals, and would peg out claims for ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us;—­for there, as the poem I quoted about the Great Plain says, “none talk of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’” But down through the centuries of Christendom, after our catching it so near its source in magical Ireland, comes this other music:  this listening, not for the voices of passion, and indecision, and the self-conceit which is the greatest fool’s play of all, within our personal selves,—­but for the meditations of the Omnipresent as they are communicated through the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy of flowers, through the

     ‘blackbird’s singing in Letterlee,’

—­this tendency to ‘seek in the Impersonal’ (Nature is impersonal) ‘for the Eternal Self.’

So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, I find the forces ‘going west,’ through Gaul, through Wales, through Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so near to the island the Greeks called “Sacred Ierne of the Hibernians.”  It may be that the finest part of them has not come back yet; but will re-emerge, spiritual and saving, through this same gateway.  One would be ashamed of the Host of the Gods, were they not doing strenuous battle in the unseen for the regeneration of this poor Ireland, that will yet mean so much to the world:  and one would marvel at the hellions, indeed one would, were they in their turn not moving heaven and earth, with their best battle-breaking champions in the fore-front, to maintain their strangle-hold on her tortured and beautiful soul.