George William Russell

“ I would bring to my mountain the weary spirits who are obscured in the fetid city where life decays into rottenness; and call thither those who are in doubt, the pitiful and trembling hearts who are skeptic of any hope, and place them where the dusky vapors of their thought might dissolve in the inner light, and their doubts vanish on the mountain top where the earthbreath streams away to the vast, when the night glows like a seraph, and the spirit is beset by the evidence of a million of suns to the grandeur of the nature wherein it lives and whose destiny must be its also. ”

“ And sure a strange and beautiful land this Ireland is, with a mystic beauty which closes the eyes of the body as in sleep, and opens the eyes of the spirit as in dreams and never a poet has lain on our hillsides but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an enchanted world of their own: and it has become alive through every haunted rath and wood and mountain and lake, so that we can hardly think of it otherwise than as the shadow of the thought of God. ”

“ It is the saddest of all sorrows to think that pity with no hands to heal, that love without a voice to speak should helplessly heap their pain upon pain while earth shall endure. But there is a truth about sorrow which I think may make it seem not so hopeless. There are fewer barriers than we think: there is, in truth, an inner alliance between the soul who would fain give and the soul who is in need. Nature has well provided that not one golden ray of all our thoughts is sped ineffective through the dark; not one drop of the magical elixirs love distils is wasted. ”

“ Kedar, Narayan, Ananda, farewell! Nay, no farther. It is a long way to return, and the child will tire."
He went on and passed from our sight. But we did not return. We remained long, long in silence, looking at the sacred flower.——————-
Vow, taken long ago, be strong in our hearts today. Here, where the pain is fiercer, to rest is more sweet. Here, where beauty dies away, it is more joy to be lulled in dream. Here, the good, the true, our hope seem but a madness born of ancient pain. Out of rest, dream, or despair may we arise, and go the way the great ones go. ”

“ Humanity is no longer the child it was at the beginning of the world. The spirit which prompted by some divine intent, flung itself long ago into a vague, nebulous, drifting nature, though it has endured through many periods of youth, maturity, and age, has yet had its own transformations. Its gay, wonderful childhood gave way, as cycle after cycle coiled itself into slumber, to more definite purposes, and now it is old and burdened with experiences. It is not an age that quenches its fire, but it will not renew again the activities which gave it wisdom. ”

“ Shall we think more meanly of the future of Ireland than these "dull Saxons" think of the future of their island? Shall we be content with humble crumbs fallen from the table of life, and sit like beggars waiting only for what the commonwealth can do for us, leaving all high hopes and aims to our rulers, whether they be English or Irish? Every people get the kind of Government they deserve. A nation can exhibit no greater political wisdom in the mass than it generates in its units. ”

“ I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world is so full of necessitous life that it is waste of time for young Ireland to brood upon tales of legendary heroes, who fought with enchanters, who harnessed wild fairy horses to magic chariots and who talked with the ancient gods, and that it would be much better for youth to be scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear Irish boy, dear Irish girl, I know as well as any the economic needs of our people. They must not be overlooked, but keep still in your hearts some desires which might enter Paradise. ”

“ Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and the skies are gray and vapor-laden, or the loneliness of dim twilights are over level sands. Whatever else he paints is devoid of its proper interest, for he seems to impose on the cattle in the fields and on the habitable places a sentiment alien to their nature. ”

“ He creates an uncouth symbolism, and blinds his soul within with names drawn from the Kabala or ancient Sanskrit, and makes alien to himself the intimate powers of his spirit, things which in truth are more his than the beatings of his heart. Could we not speak of them in our own tongue, and the language of today will be as sacred as any of the past. From the Golden One, the child of the divine, comes a voice to its shadow. It is stranger to our world, aloof from our ambitions, with a destiny not here to be fulfilled. ”

“ The artist may be no philosopher, no mystic; he may be with or without a moral sense, he may not believe in more than his eye can see; but in so far as he can shape clay into beautiful and moving forms he is imitating Deity; when his eye has caught with delight some subtle relation between color and color there is mysticism in his vision. I am not concerned here to prove that there is a spirit in nature or humanity; but for those who ask from art a serious message, here, I say, is a way of receiving from art an inspiration the most profound that man can receive. ”

“ Never again will that tress drift like a woven wind made visible out of Paradise; never again will that lifted hand, foam-pale, seem like the springing up of beauty in the world; never a second time will that white brow remind him of the wonderful white towers of the city of the gods. To seek a second inspiration is to receive only a second-rate inspiration, and our poet is a little too fond of lingering in his verse round a few things, a face, the swaying poplars, or sighing reeds which had once piped an alluring music in his ears, and which he longs to hear again. ”

“ In the drawing called "Midsummer Eve" there is a mystery which is not merely the mystery of night and shadow. It is the mystery of the mingling of spirit with spirit which is suggested by the solitary figure with face upturned to the stars. We have all memories of such summer nights when into the charmed heart falls the enchantment we call ancient, though the days have no fellows, nor will ever have any, when the earth glows with the dusky hues of rich pottery, and the stars, far withdrawn into faery altitudes, dance with a gaiety which is more tremendous and solemn than any repose. ”

“ The final test of a picture, or of any work of art, is its power of enduring charm. There are many circles in the Paradise of Beautiful Memories, and half unconsciously, but with a justice, we at last place each in its hierarchy, remote or near to the centre of our being; and I propose here rather to speak of the impression left in my memory after seeing the work of Yeats and Hone for many years, than to describe in detail the pictures—some new, some familiar—which by a happy thought have been gathered together for exhibition. ”

“ Life cannot utter words more great Than life may meet by sacrifice, High words were equaled by high fate, You paid the price. You paid the price. You who have fought on fields afar, That other Ireland did you wrong Who said you shadowed Ireland's star, Nor gave you laurel wreath nor song. You proved by death as true as they, In mightier conflicts played your part, Equal your sacrifice may weigh, Dear Kettle, of the generous heart. The hope lives on age after age, Earth with its beauty might be won For labor as a heritage, For this has Ireland lost a son. ”

“ NAISI—Deirdre! Deirdre! It is not right for you, beautiful woman, to come with tears between a thousand exiles and their own land! Many battles have I fought, knowing well there would be death and weeping after. If I feared to trust to the word of great kings and warriors, it is not with tears I would be remembered. What would the bards sing of Naisi—without trust! afraid of the outstretched hand!—freighted by a woman's fears! By the gods, before the clan Usna were so shamed I would shed my blood here with my own hand. ”

“ Where these pictures are impressive is where the artist slipped by his conscious aim, and laid hold of the nobility peculiar to the men and women he used as symbols. It is not Time or Death which awes us in Watts' picture, but majestical images of humanity; and Watts is at his greatest as an inventor when humanity itself most occupies him when he depicts human life only, and lets it suggest its own natural infinity, as in those images of the lovers drifting through the Inferno, with whom every passion is burnt out and exhausted but the love through which they fell. ”

“ They seem truly the earth-born. The waves respond to their deeds; the elemental creatures respond and there are clashing echoes and allies innumerable, and armies in the air continuing their battles illimitably beyond: a proud race, who felt with bursting heart the heavens were watching them, who defied their gods and exiled them to have free play for their own deeds. A very different humanity indeed from those who have come to walk the earth with humility, who are afraid of heaven and its rulers, and whose dread is the greatest of all sins, for in it is a denial of their own divinity. ”

“ I abate no jot of those vaster hopes, yet I would pursue that ardent aspiration, content as to here and today. I do not believe in a nature red with tooth and claw. If indeed she appears so terrible to any it is because they themselves have armed her. Again, behind the anger of the Gods there is a love. Are the rocks barren? Lay your brow against them and learn what memories they keep. Is the brown earth unbeautiful? Yet lie on the breast of the Mother and you shall be aureoled with the dews of faery. The earth is the entrance to the Halls of Twilight. ”

“ It has been my dream for many years that I might at some time dwell in a cabin on the hillside in this dear and living land of ours, and there I would lay my head in the lap of a serene nature, and be on friendly terms with the winds and mountains who hold enough of unexplored mystery and infinitude to engage me at present. I would not dwell too far from men, for above an enchanted valley, only a morning's walk from the city, is the mountain of my dream. ”

“ In such a mood, when the far becomes near, the strange familiar, and the infinite possible, he wrote from whose words we get the inspiration:
To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.
Such a faith and such an unrest be ours: faith which is mistrust of the visible; unrest which is full of a hidden surety and reliance. We, when we fall into pleasant places, rest and dream our strength away. Before every enterprise and adventure of the soul we calculate in fear our power to do. ”

“ Every country has its proportion of little souls which could find ample room on a threepenny bit, and be majestically housed in a thimble, who follow out some little minute practice in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction, seeking some little job which is the El Dorado of their desires as if there were naught else, as if humanity were not going from the Great Deep to the Great Deep of Deity, with wind and water, fire and earth, stars and sun, lordly companions for it on its path to a divine destiny. ”

“ Here are twenty tales, and they are so alike in imaginative character that they seem all to have poured from one mind; and to these twenty we could add a hundred others, all endlessly fertile in difference of incident, but all seeming to own the same imaginative creator. It was so for many centuries, and then the maker of the song seems to have grown weary, and distinct voices not overladen with the tradition of the ages were heard; and today every one wanders in a path of his own, finding or losing the way, the truth, and the life of art in the free play of his desires. ”

“ We have not half a continent to deal with, but size matters nothing. The Russian Empire, which covers half Europe, and stretches over the Ural Mountains to the Pacific, would weigh light as a feather in the balance if we compare its services to humanity with those of the little State of Attica, which was no larger than Tipperary. Every State which has come to command the admiration of the world has had clearly conceived ideals which it realized before it went the way which all empires, even the greatest, must go; becoming finally a legend, a fable, or a symbol. ”

“ It has vanished long ago, For a dream-shaft pierced it through From the Unknown Archer's bow. What of all the soul to think? Some one offered it a cup Filled with a diviner drink, And the flame has burned it up. What of all the hope to climb? Only in the self we grope To the misty end of time, Truth has put an end to hope. What of all the heart to love? Sadder than for will or soul, No light lured it on above: Love has found itself the whole. ”

“ By darkened images we may figure something vaguely akin, as when in rare moments under the stars the big dreamy heart of childhood is pervaded with quiet and brimmed full with love. Dear children of the world, so tired today—so weary seeking after the light. Would you recover strength and immortal vigor? Not one star alone, your star, shall shed its happy light upon you, but the All you must adore. Something intimate, secret, unspeakable, akin to thee, will emerge silently, insensibly, and ally itself with thee as thou gatherest thyself from the four quarters of the earth. ”