the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill of
Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but that
he had often heard his grandfather telling them to his mother in Irish.
He did not know Irish, but he was learning it at school, and all the
little boys he knew were learning it. In a little while he will know
enough stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to his children some day.
It is the owners of the land whose children might never have known what
would give them so much happiness. But now they can read Lady Gregory's
book to their children, and it will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and
Benbulben, the great mountain that showed itself before me every day
through all my childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half the
country-sides of south and west, as populous with memories as her
Cuchulain of Muirthemne will have made Dundealgan and Emain Macha and
Muirthemne; and after a while somebody may even take them to some
famous place and say, 'This land where your fathers lived proudly and
finely should be dear and dear and again dear;' and perhaps when many
names have grown musical to their ears, a more imaginative love will
have taught them a better service.

III

I praise but in brief words the noble writing of these books, for words
that praise a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to
sound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of
church bells from the tower of a church when every pew is full.

1903.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE WELL OF THE SAINTS

Six years ago I was staying in a students' hotel in the Latin Quarter,
and somebody, whose name I cannot recollect, introduced me to an
Irishman, who, even poorer than myself, had taken a room at the top of
the house. It was J. M. Synge, and I, who thought I knew the name of
every Irishman who was working at literature, had never heard of him. He
was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, too, and Trinity College does
not, as a rule, produce artistic minds. He told me that he had been
living in France and Germany, reading French and German Literature, and
that he wished to become a writer. He had, however, nothing to show but
one or two poems and impressionistic essays, full of that kind of
morbidity that has its root in too much brooding over methods of
expression, and ways of looking upon life, which come, not out of life,
but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror.