ng nobility of
Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of
Donne as one reads "In Kerry":--

"We heard the thrushes by the shore and sea,
And saw the golden stars' nativity,
Then round we went the lane by Thomas Flynn,
Across the church where bones lie out and in;
And there I asked beneath a lonely cloud
Of strange delight, with one bird singing loud,
What change you'd wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,
This new wild paradise to wake for me ...
Yet knew no more than knew those merry sins
Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins."

One thinks of no other writer at all, however, when one reads Christy's
wooing of Pegeen, even when one puts down the book in the quiet that
always comes on one in the presence of something great; one thinks of no
other writer, of course, when one sees the lovers and listens to their
words, on the stage, for one is rapt out of one's self by the perfect
accord of drama and actors at one in the service of beauty:--

_Christy_ (_indignantly_). Starting from you, is it? (_He follows
her._) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four
months or five, it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin
in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and
you'll see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.

_Pegeen_ (_looking at him playfully_). And it's that kind of a
poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin,
when the night is down?

_Christy_. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an
earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you,
and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind
of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden
chair.

_Pegeen_. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would
walk her heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for
eloquence, or talk at all.

_Christy_ (_encouraged_). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till
we're astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a
well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in
a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace,
in the flowers of the earth.

_Pegeen_ (_in a low voice, moved by his tone_). I'd be nice, so, is
it?

_Christy_ (_with rapture_