the idea of a
cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly separate
mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of words and verses that keep
half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain that before the
counting-house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and
without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the
castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was as
closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the
people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in
words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.

Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature and
history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names, and
there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for the
people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear
rhetoric, of 'popular poetry.' It sees that Ireland has no cultivated
minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English
things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other
countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its
illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house has
not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thousand who have
had Irish from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not enough of
the unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if he have
enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia, in America,
in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten thousand the prophet
saw, who have enough of the written tradition education has set in room of
the unwritten to know good verses from bad ones, even though their
mother-wit has made them Ministers of the Crown or what you will? Nor can
things be better till that ten thousand have gone hither and thither to
preach their faith that 'the imagination is the man himself,' and that the
world as imagination sees it is the durable world, and have won men as did
the disciples of Him who--

His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

1901.

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY

I

I have always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and
I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand