Land where he first crept upon the floor, and
that familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a
change that he never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he
is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him from Primum Mobile, the
Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.

1906.

POETRY AND TRADITION

I

When Mr. O'Leary died I could not bring myself to go to his funeral,
though I had been once his close fellow-worker, for I shrank from seeing
about his grave so many whose Nationalism was different from anything he
had taught or that I could share. He belonged, as did his friend John F.
Taylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality on which Lionel
Johnson and myself founded, so far as it was founded on anything but
literature, our Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps his spirit, if it
can care for or can see old friends now, will accept this apology for an
absence that has troubled me. I learned much from him and much from
Taylor, who will always seem to me the greatest orator I have heard; and
that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland, in whose
service I labour, will always be in many essentials their Ireland. They
were the last to speak an understanding of life and Nationality, built
up by the generation of Grattan, which read Homer and Virgil, and by the
generation of Davis, which had been pierced through by the idealism of
Mazzini,[2] and of the European revolutionists of the mid-century.

O'Leary had joined the Fenian movement with no hope of success as we
know, but because he believed such a movement good for the moral
character of the people; and had taken his long imprisonment without
complaining. Even to the very end, while often speaking of his prison
life, he would have thought it took from his Roman courage to describe
its hardship. The worth of a man's acts in the moral memory, a continual
height of mind in the doing of them, seemed more to him than their
immediate result, if, indeed, the sight of many failures had not taken
away the thought of success. A man was not to lie, or even to give up
his dignity, on any patriotic plea, and I have heard him say, 'I have
but one religion, the old Persian: to bend the bow and tell the truth,'
and again, 'There are things a man must not do to save a nation,' and
again, 'A man must not cry in public to save a nation,' and that we
might not forget justice in the passion of controversy, 'There w