The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Wind Bloweth, by Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne,
Illustrated by George Bellows

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Title: The Wind Bloweth

Author: Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

Release Date: July 5, 2007 [eBook #21999]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE WIND BLOWETH

by

DONN BYRNE

Author of "Messer Marco Polo," etc.

Illustrated by George Bellows

[Illustration]

New York
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.
Printed in U. S. A.

A DEDICATION: A PRAYER

Whilst I was working on the various problems of "The Wind
Bloweth"--problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to
capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity,
and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that
affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of
the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander the wide
world over, a race that loves battle, and yet always falls--whilst doing
this, it seemed to me that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that
was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone.

Perhaps it was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a
sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone
already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that
haunting misty loveliness.... It is a very pathetic thing to see a
literature and a romance die.

But then, what ever dies? There is only change. For people in the coming
times the economist and the expert in politics may have the beauty and
wisdom old men have known in poems and strange t