The genius of the Gael is awakening after a night of troubled dreams.  I returns instinctively to the beliefs of its former day and finds again the old inspiration.  It seeks the gods on the mountains, still enfolded by their mantle of multitudinous traditions, or sees them flash by in the sunlit diamond airs.  How strange, but how natural is all this!  It seems as if Ossian’s was a premature return.  Today he might find comrades come back from Tir-na-noge for the uplifting of their race.  Perhaps to many a young spirit starting up among us Caolte might speak as to Mongan, saying:  “I was with thee, with Finn.”  Hence, it may be, the delight with which we hear Standish O’Grady declaring that the bardic divinities will remain:  “Nor, after centuries of obscuration, is their power to quicken, purify, and exalt, yet dead.  Still they live and reign, and shall reign.”  After long centuries—­the voice of a spirit ever youthful, yet older than all the gods, who with its breath of sunrise-coloured flame jewels with richest lights the visions of earth’s dreamy-hearted children.  Once more out of the Heart of the Mystery is heard the call of “Come away,” and after that no other voice has power to lure:  there remain only the long heroic labours which end in companionship with the gods.

These voices do not stand for themselves alone.  They are heralds before a host.  No man has ever spoken with potent utterance who did not feel the secret urging of dumb, longing multitudes, whose aspirations and wishes converge on and pour themselves into fearless heart.  The thunder of the waves is deeper because the tide is rising.  Those who are behind do not come only with song and tale, but with stern hearts bent on great issues, among which, not least, is the intellectual liberation of Ireland.  That is an aim at which some of our rulers may well grow uneasy.  Soon shall young men, fiery-hearted, children of Eri, a new race, roll our their thoughts on the hillsides, before your very doors, O priests, calling your flocks from your dark chapels and twilight sanctuaries to a temple not built with hands, sunlit, starlit, sweet with the odour and incense of earth, from your altars call them to the altars of the hills, soon to be lit up as of old, soon to be the blazing torches of God over the land.  These heroes I see emerging.  Have they not come forth in every land and race when there was need?  Here, too, they will arise.  Ah, may darlings, you will have to fight and suffer:  you must endure loneliness, the coldness of friends, the alienation of love; warmed only by the bright interior hope of a future you must toil for but may never see, letting the deed be its own reward; laying in dark places the foundations of that high and holy Eri of prophecy, the isle of enchantment, burning with druidic splendours, bright with immortal presences, with the face of the everlasting Beauty looking in upon all its ways, divine with terrestrial mingling till God and the world are one.