, and what way would you and I, Naisi, have joy
forever.... It's this hour we're between the daytime and a night
where there is sleep forever, and isn't it better thing to be
following on to a near death than to be bending the head down, and
dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon
love where it is sweet and tender?

_Naisi_ (_his voice broken with distraction_). If a near death is
coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over
it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away
into the safety of the woods.

_Deirdre_ (_shaking her head slowly_). There are as many ways to
wither love as there are stars in a night of Samhain; but there is
no way to keep life, or love with it, a short space only.... It's
for that there's nothing lonesome like a love is watching out the
time most lovers do be sleeping.... It's for that we're setting out
for Emain Macha when the tide turns on the sand.

_Naisi_ (_giving in_). You're right, maybe. It should be a poor
thing to see great lovers and they sleepy and old.

_Deirdre_ (_with a more tender intensity_). We're seven years
without roughness or growing weary; seven years so sweet and
shining, the gods would be hard set to give us seven days the like
of them. It's for that we're going to Emain, where there'll be a
rest forever, or a place for forgetting, in great crowds and they
making a stir.

_Naisi_ (_very softly_). We'll go, surely, in place of keeping a
watch on a love had no match and it wasting away. (_They cling to
each other, then Naisi looks up._)

And this is from the unfinished second act, that Synge thought would
scarcely be worth preserving. I have quoted it rather than the great
keen over the body of Naisi that brings the play to a close, because
that must of necessity follow the old poem, and this is as Synge
imagined it. Each is "a thing will be a joy and triumph to the ends of
life and time."

I have thrown what I have to say about the exaltation of Synge to the
forefront of what I have to say of him, that all may be read in the
memory of this emphasis and of the exaltation of what I quote, no matter
how fantastic or grotesque or disillusionizing or even ghoulish it may
be. Whatever other quality may be dominant at any moment in Synge there
is always, along with it, exaltation