ugh he had to wait several minutes and re-state it. One felt
that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he
despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps
because nine years' imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life
had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except
during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told
me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried
the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of
Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. Our negotiations,
which interested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister
and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom
they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation
and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we
said or did stirred him, at other moments also, to some similar remote
thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before
his death he replied to some words of congratulation I sent him after the
speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an
account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish
representation there.

IV

I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking
the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for
years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, it
was as essential to carry the heart upon the sleeve as the tongue in the
cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the
doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not
work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that
you must find "a lever" as it was called, some practical grievance; and I
do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in "levers,"
universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical
philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned
the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it
still permits a work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road."

O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent
Irish American, not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent
him, cabled to Parnell:--"Take up Land Refor