Douglas Hyde

“ I never belonged at all to that lot of fairies who carried you away with them. I am the son of an honest farmer, and I went with them without knowing it. If I’ll be able to send you back to your father I’ll do it, and I pray you make any use of me now that you may wish.”
He looked into her face, and he saw the mouth moving as if she were going to speak, but there came no word from it.
“It cannot be,” said Guleesh, “that you are dumb. Did I not hear you speaking to the king’s son in the palace to-night? Or has that devil really made you dumb, when he struck his nasty hand on your jaw?” ”

“ If we take a bird's eye view of our island today, and compare it with what it used to be, we must be struck by the extraordinary fact that the nation which was once, as every one admits, one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so; how one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary, and how the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth are now only distinguished for their hideousness. ”

“ There were a hundred tables spread out, and their full of meat and drink on each table of them, flesh-meat and cakes and sweetmeats, and wine and ale, and every drink that ever a man saw. The musicians were at the two ends of the hall, and they playing the sweetest music that ever a man’s ear heard, and there were young women and fine youths in the middle of the hall, dancing and turning, and going round so quickly and lightly that it made Guleesh giddy to be looking at them. ”

“ This is to my mind perhaps the sweetest creation of all Irish literature, the real glory of the modern Irish nation, and of the Scottish Highlands, this is the truest note of the enchanting Celtic siren, and he who has once heard it and remains deaf to its charm can have little heart for song or soul for music. The Gaelic poetry of the last two centuries both in Ireland and in the Highlands is probably the most sensuous attempt to convey music in words, ever made by man. ”

“ I won't stir till I go and get the pardon of my parish priest."
"Guleesh, is it out of your senses you are? You can't go; and there's your answer for you now. I tell you, you can't go."
"Can't ye go on, and to leave me here after ye," said Guleesh, "and when ye come back can't ye hoist the girl up behind me?"
"But we want you at the palace of the king of France," said the sheehogue, "and you must come with us now."
"The devil a foot," said Guleesh, "till I get the priest's pardon; the honestest and the pleasantest man that's in Ireland." ”

“ CHAPTER XXIV THE HEROIC OR RED BRANCH CYCLE—CUCHULAIN
The mythological tales that we have been glancing at deal with the folk who are fabled as having first colonised Erin; they treat of peoples, races, dynasties, the struggle between good and evil principles. The whole of their creations are thrown back, even by the Irish annalists themselves, into the dim cloud-land of an unplumbed past, ages before the dawn of the first Olympiad, or the birth of the wolf-suckled twins who founded Rome. There is over it all a shadowy sense of vagueness, vastness, uncertainty. ”

“ But you are, most of you, not destined to be scholars, and so I should simply advise you—especially such of you as do not already know Irish—to leave all this alone, or rather to be content with what you can easily find in a translated shape in the columns of Hardiman, Miss Brooke, Mangan, and Sigerson." So that the man whose most earnest aspiration in life is Ireland a nation, begins by advising the youth of Ireland not to study the language of their fathers, and to read the gorgeous Gaelic poetry in such pitiful translations as Hardiman and Miss Brooke have given of a few pieces. ”

“ It is the curious certainty that come what may Irishmen will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from becoming Unionists upon the spot. It is a fact, and we must face it as a fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every way, the great bulk of Irishmen and Irishwomen over the whole world are known to be filled with a dull, ever-abiding animosity against her, and right or wrong—to grieve when she prospers, and joy when she is hurt. ”

“ The night was calm as is a lake when there is not a breath of wind to move a wave on it, and there was no sound to be heard but the hum of the insects that would go by from time to time, or the hoarse, sudden scream of the wild geese as they passed from lake to lake, half a mile up in the air over his head; or the sharp whistle of the golden and green plovers, rising and lying, lying and rising, as they do on a calm night. ”

“ It was this half century that produced in rapid succession Geoffrey Keating, the Four Masters, and Duald Mac Firbis, men of whom any age or country might be proud, men who amid the war, rapine, and conflagration, that rolled through the country at the heels of the English soldiers, still strove to save from the general wreck those records of their country which to-day make the name of Ireland honourable for her antiquities, traditions, and history, in the eyes of the scholars of Europe. ”

“ What good have we now out of our journey to Rome and to France? Never mind yet, you clown, but you'll pay us another time for this. Believe us you'll repent it."
"He'll have no good to get out of the young girl," said the little man that was talking to him in the palace before that, and as he said the word he moved over to her and struck her a slap on the side of the head. "Now," says he, "she'll be without talk any more; now, Guleesh, what good will she be to you when she'll be dumb? It's time for us to go—but you'll remember us, Guleesh na Guss Dhu!" ”

“ We are probably at once the most assimilative and the most sensitive nation in Europe. A lady in Boston said to me that the Irish immigrants had become Americanised on the journey out before ever they landed at Castle Gardens. And when I ventured to regret it, she said, shrewdly, 'If they did not at once become Americanised they would not be Irish.' I knew fifteen Irish workmen who were working in a haggard in England give up talking Irish amongst themselves because the English farmer laughed at them. ”

“ Cuchulain's life and love and death entranced the ears of the great for many centuries, and into hundreds of bright eyes tears of pity had for a thousand years been conjured up by the pathetic tones of bards reciting the fate of her who perished for the son of Usnach. The wars of Mève and of Conor mac Nessa were household words in the hall of Muirchertach of the leather cloaks, and in the palace at the head of the weir—Brian Boru's Kincora. ”