and Italy seem noble and beautiful with broken pillars
and temples made in their day of glory. But before ever there was a
white marble temple shining on a hill it shone with a more brilliant
beauty in the mind of some artist who designed it. Do many people know
how that marvelous Greek civilization spread along the shores of the
Mediterranean? Little nations owning hardly more land than would make up
an Irish barony sent out colony after colony. The seed of beautiful
life they sowed grew and blossomed out into great cities and half-divine
civilizations. Italy had a later blossoming of beauty in the Middle
Ages, and travelers today go into little Italian towns and find them
filled with masterpieces of painting and architecture and sculpture,
witnesses of a time when nations no larger than an Irish county rolled
their thoughts up to Heaven and miked their imagination with the angels.
Can we be contented in Ireland with the mean streets of our country
towns and the sordid heaps of our villages dominated in their economics
by the vendors of alcohol, and inspired as to their ideals by the
vendors of political animosities?

I would not mind people fighting in a passion to get rid of all that
barred some lordly scheme of life, but quarrels over political bones
from which there is little or nothing wholesome to be picked only
disgust. People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and
backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had
immortal souls, and it was only in the city that the flame of divinity
breathed into the first men had any unobscured glow. The countryside in
Ireland could blossom into as much beauty as the hillsides in mediaeval
Italy if we could but get rid of our self-mistrust. We have all that
any race ever had to inspire them, the heavens overhead, the earth
underneath, and the breath of life in our nostrils. I would like to
exile the man who would set limits to what we can do, who would take the
crown and sceptre from the human will and say, marking out some petty
enterprise as the limit--"Thus far can we go and no farther, and
here shall our life be stayed." Therefore I hate to hear of stagnant
societies who think because they have made butter well that they have
crowned their parochial generation with a halo of glory, and can rest
content with the fame of it all, listening to the whirr of the steam
separators and pouching in peace of mind the extra penny a gallon for
the