One hand to the heart, another
        We raise to the dawn on high;
For the sun in the heart is brother
        To the sun-heart of the sky.

A light comes rising and falling,
        As ringed in the druid choir
We sing to the sun-god, calling
        By his name of yellow fire.

The touch of the dew-wet grasses,
        The breath of the dawn-cool wind,
With the dawn of the god-light passes
        And the world is left behind.

We drink of a fountain giving
        The joy of the gods, and then—­
The Land of the Ever-living
        Has passed from us again.

Passed far beyond all saying,
        For memory only weaves
On a silver dawn outraying
        A cloud of daffodil leaves.

And not indirectly through remembrance only, but when touched from within by the living beauty, the soul, the ancient druid in man, renews its league with the elements; and sometimes as the twilight vanishes and night lays on the earth her tender brow, the woods, the mountains, the clouds that tinted like seraphim float in the vast, and the murmur of water, wind and trees, melt from the gaze and depart from the outward ear and become internal reveries and contemplations of the spirit, and are no more separate but are part of us.  Yet these vanishings from us and movements in worlds not realized, leave us only more thirsty to drink of a deeper nature where all things are dissolved in ecstasy, and heaven and earth are lost in God.  So we turn seeking for the traces of that earlier wisdom which guided man into the Land of Immortal Youth, and assuaged his thirst at a more brimming flood of the Feast of Age, the banquet which Manannan the Danann king instituted in the haunt of the Fire-god, and whoever partook knew thereafter neither weariness, decay, not death.

These mysteries, all that they led to, all that they promised for the spirit of man, are opening today for us in clear light, their fabulous distance lessens, and we hail these kingly ideals with as intense a trust and with more joy, perhaps, than they did who were born in those purple hours, because we are emerging from centuries indescribably meagre and squalid in their thought, and every new revelation has for us the sweetness of sunlight to one after the tears and sorrow of a prison-house.  The well at Ballykeele is, perhaps, a humble starting-point for the contemplation of such mighty mysteries; but here where the enchanted world lies so close it is never safe to say what narrow path may not lead through a visionary door into Moy Argatnel, the silver Cloudland of Manannan, where

“Feet of white bronze
Glitter through beautiful ages.”

The Danann king with a quaint particularity tells Bran in the poem from which these lines are quoted, that

“There is a wood of beautiful fruit
Under the prow of thy little skiff.”

What to Bran was a space of pale light was to the eye of the god a land of pure glory, Ildathach the Many-coloured Land, rolling with rivers of golden light and dropping with dews of silver flame.  In another poem the Brugh by the Boyne, outwardly a little hillock, is thus described: