her on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I
remember my own childhood--do not understand large design, and they
delight in little shut-in places where they can play at houses more than
in great expanses where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression
of a thought. The wild creatures and the green things are more to them
than to us, for they creep towards our light by little holes and
crevices. When they imagine a country for themselves it is always a
country where you can wander without aim, and where you can never know
from one place what another will be like, or know from the one day's
adventure what may meet you with to-morrow's sun.

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they
will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary
men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and
nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are
there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not
fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels.
The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are
set in a world so fluctuating and dreamlike, that nothing can hold them
from being all that the heart desires.

I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird and
it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by
nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make
a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.
They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste
heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise? for it is at all times
the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people
of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is 'as joyful as
the leaves of a tree in summertime'; and whatever they do, whether they
listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake
of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;
and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a
good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live
always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any
deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen
and be worthy of the songs of the poets. It has been said, and I think
the Japanese were the first to say it, that the four e