This magic power of bringing busy city people out of all their
surroundings into the green heart of the forest and the moorland, and
letting them hear the sound of water there, is common to them both.

Fiona Macleod is a lover and worshipper of beauty. Long before her, the
Greeks had taught the world their secret, and the sweet spell had
penetrated many hearts beyond the pale of Greece. It was Augustine who
said, "Late I have loved thee, oh beauty, so old and yet so new, late I
have loved thee." And Marius the Epicurean, in Pater's fine phrase, "was
one who was made perfect by love of visible beauty." It is a direct
instinct, this bracing and yet intoxicating love of beauty for its own
sake. Each nation produces a spiritual type of it, which becomes one of
the deepest national characteristics, and the Celtic type is easily
distinguished. No Celt ever cared for landscape. "It is loveliness I
ask, not lovely things," says Fiona; and it is but a step from this to
that abstract mystical and spiritual love of beauty, which is the very
soul of the Celtic genius. It expresses itself most directly in colours,
and the meaning of them is far more than bright-hued surfaces. The pale
green of running water, the purple and pearl-grey of doves, still more
the remote and liquid colours of the sky, and the sad-toned or the gay
garments of the earth--these are more by far to those who know their
value than pigments, however delicate. They are either a sensuous
intoxication or else a mystic garment of the spirit. Seumas, the old
islander, looking seaward at sunrise, says, "Every morning like this I
take my hat off to the beauty of the world." And as we read we think of
Mr. Neil Munro's lord of Doom Castle walking uncovered in the night
before retiring to his rest, and with tears welling in his eyes
exclaiming that the mountains are his evening prayer. Such mystics as
these are in touch with far-off things. Sharp, indeed, was led
definitely to follow such leading into regions of spiritualism where not
many of his readers will be able or willing to follow him, but Fiona
Macleod left the mystery vague. It might easily have defined itself in
some sort of pantheistic theory of the universe, but it never did so.
"The green fire" is more than the sap which flows through the roots of
the trees. It is as Alfred de Musset has called it, the blood that
courses through the veins of God. As we realise the full force of that
imaginative phrase, the dar