f with a little smile that out of the wisdom of his
life had always come sorrow, and out of his foolishness had come joy....
Granya, and peace, and meaning to his life.... A very foolish thing it
had been, that expedition.... But he wouldn't have it laughed at, nor
laugh at it himself.... Over the mists of the past the thing took
glamour.... He had been more moved than he had allowed himself to
believe then. And here in his New York drawing-room, remembering the old
heroic-comic gesture, and remembering tragedies of material that were
glorification of spirit, he thought for an instant he had solved the
mystery of Ireland, ... Ireland was a drug.... Out of the gray sweeping
stones, and the bogs of red moss and purple water, and from the proud
brooding mountains, and the fields green as a green banner, there
exhaled some subtle thing that made men lose sense of worldly
proportion.... It was in their mothers' milk, a subtle poison. It crept
into their veins, and though they might leave Ireland, yet for
generations would it persist.... It gave them the gift of laughter, and
contempt for physical pain, and an egregious sensitiveness.... So that
the world wondered ... their wars were merry wars, and their poetry
sobbed, like a bereaved woman.... They threw their lives away
recklessly, and a phrase meant much to them.... Perhaps they knew that
action counted nothing, and emotion all.... Ah, there he was losing
himself!

At any rate, Ulster Scot though he was, he didn't regret it--apart even
from its bringing him Granya. Perhaps at the news of it, some hard
English official might feel a twitch at his heart-strings, and
remembering that the Irish were as little children, be kind to some
reprobate Celt.... An action had so many antennae. One never knew where
its effects stopped, if ever....

A foolish thing that had brought him joy where wisdom brought him
sorrow! Strange. Until then he had been existent, sentient, but never
until then alive. Wonder, disillusionment, passion, tragedy, despair. In
each of these moods he had had a glimpse, now and then, of an immense
universal design, as a bird may have it, and its throat quivering with
song, or as a salmon may have it, and he flinging himself tremendously
over a weir. He knew it, as a tree knows when the gentle rains of April
come. But that he existed, as an entity apart from trees, from salmon,
and from birds, he had not known until Granya, broken, had crept weeping
into his ar