The Celtic Twilight | Page 3

shortly in
the village.
Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to believe much
unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and
unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to
guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh,
and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where dwell
the mis-shapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil if we
keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome with
open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it be
man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls
themselves, "Be ye gone"? When all is said and done, how do we not

know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for
it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the
wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into
the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
MORTAL HELP
One hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a
battle, and Cuchullan won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her
married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of
the Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery
cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal,
whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller
would say, is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy
and cannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some
marshy land in Galway with a friend when we found an old,
hard-featured man digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man
had seen a wonderful sight of some kind, and at last we got the story
out of him. When he was a boy he was working one day with about
thirty men and women and boys. They were beyond Tuam and not far
from Knock-na-gur. Presently they saw, all thirty of them, and at a
distance of about half-a-mile, some hundred and fifty of the people of
faery. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like people of
our own time, who stood about a hundred yards from one another, but
the others wore clothes of all colours, "bracket" or chequered, and some
with red waistcoats.
He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been playing
hurley, for "they looked as if it was that." Sometimes they would
vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of the
bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the size
of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about
half-anhour, and then the old man he and those about him were
working for took up a whip and said, "Get on, get on, or we will have
no work done!" I asked if he saw the faeries too, "Oh, yes, but he did
not want work he was paying wages for to be neglected." He made
every body work so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.

1902.
A VISIONARY
A young man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many
poems and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but
latterly had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set
upon making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional
life of the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems
readily, however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had
never been written down. They, with their wild music as of winds
blowing in the reeds,[FN#1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of
Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has
never seen. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a
little eagerly. "Do you see anything, X-----?" I said. "A shining, winged
woman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway," he
answered, or some such words. "Is it the influence of some living
person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that
symbolic form?" I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of the
visionaries and in the fashion of their speech. "No," he replied; "for if it
were the thoughts