a tree with peacocks' feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that
opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them
with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a
pool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up
from the pool.

What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and
beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think it
wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel of some
enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in "every
household of them." It is natural, too, that there should be a queen to
every household of them, and that one should hear little of their
kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient
peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The
self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by
foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and
therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of
much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who
saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, "If I
had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and
her visions do not interest her." And I know of another woman, also not
a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly
beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house
and her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he called
it. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to
those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like
the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and
the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. They will have it
that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of the
earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their wisdom
when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make the trees
wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery in
November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. Because the
soul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and the
wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who
will not understand the verse--

Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that