Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we
left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August
night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they
pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader
of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob
orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and
tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions,
to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other
unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the
spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has
been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and
druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief,
might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of
prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of
Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as
she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet
monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all
of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth,
and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains
and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and
wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples,
proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that
unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to
any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.

You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish
Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary
Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always
as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer,
wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by
night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever
shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human
atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of
world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it
all;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the
vast of God."

CHAPTER VI

LADY GREGORY

When one stops to think how much of the blood of the Gael, Irish and
Scotch, there is