ose
who have not known the wonder, how wonderful a mere thing is! A child
who has watched and watched the face of a grandfather's clock, stopped
before he was born, feels this wonder. To grown folk and to those
who have many possessions the things they own are lumber, some more
convenient, some more decorative than others. But to those who have
few possessions things are familiars and have an intimate history.
Hence it is only the poor or only unspoiled children that have the
full freedom of things--who can enter into their adventure and their
enchantment. Mary and her mother have this franchise. And for this
reason also "Mary, Mary" has an inner resemblance to a folk-tale. For
the folk-tale, shaped as it has been by the poor and by unspoiled
people, reveals always the adventure and the enchantment of things.
An old lamp may be Aladdin's. A comb might kill a false queen. A key
may open the door of a secret chamber. A dish may be the supreme
possession of a King. The sense of the uniqueness of things--the sense
that the teller of the folk-tale has always, and that such a poet of
the poor as Burns has often, is in "Mary, Mary." And there is in it
too the zest that the hungry--not the starved but the hungry--have for
life. James Stephens says of the young man who became Mary's champion,
"His ally and stay was hunger, and there is no better ally for any
man: that satisfied and the game is up; for hunger is life, ambition,
good will and understanding, while fulness is all those negatives
which culminate in greediness, stupidity, and decay."

The scene of the story is that grey-colored, friendly capital--Dublin.
It is not the tortuous, inimical, Aristotlian-minded Dublin of James
Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist"--it is the Dublin of the
simple-hearted Dubliner: Dublin with its great grey clouds and its
poising sea-birds, with its hills and its bay, with its streets that
everyone would avoid and with its other streets that everyone
promenades; with its greens and its park and its river-walks--Dublin,
always friendly. It is true that there are in it those who, as the
Policeman told Mary, are born by stealth, eat by subterfuge, drink
by dodges, get married by antics, and slide into death by strange,
subterranean passages. Well, even these would be kindly and humorous
the reader of "Mary, Mary" knows. James Stephens has made Dublin a
place where the heart likes to dwell.

And would to God that I to-day
Saw sunlight on