History of Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was
more than a man in it, there was the soul of a people, its noblest and
most exalted life symbolized in the story of one heroic character.

With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many others who
were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a man who, through
some accident, had lost memory of his past, Who could recall no more
than a few months of new life, and could not say to what songs his
cradle had been rocked, what mother had nursed him, who were the
playmates of childhood, or by what woods and streams he had wandered.
When I read O'Grady I was as such a man who suddenly feels ancient
memories rushing at him, and knows he was born in a royal house, that he
had mixed with the mighty of heaven and earth and had the very noblest
for his companions. It was the memory of race which rose up within me as
I read, and I felt exalted as one who learns he is among the children
of kings. That is what O'Grady did for me and for others who were my
contemporaries, and I welcome the reprints, of his tales in the hope
that he will go on magically recreating for generations yet unborn the
ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For many centuries the youth
of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the life of bygone ages, and
there were always some who remade themselves in the heroic mould before
they passed on. The sentiment engendered by the Gaelic literature was an
arcane presence, though unconscious of itself, in those who for the
past hundred years had learned another speech. In O'Grady's writings the
submerged river of national culture rose up again, a shining torrent,
and I realized as I bathed in that stream, that the greatest spiritual
evil one nation could inflict on another was to cut off from it the
story of the national soul. For not all music can be played upon any
instrument, and human nature for most of us is like a harp on which can
be rendered the music written for the harp but nor that written for the
violin. The harp strings quiver for the harp-player alone, and he who
can utter his passion through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar
instrument. That is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred by
English literature, though it is one of the great literatures of the
world. Our history was different and the evolutionary product was a
peculiarity of character, and the strings of our being vibrate most in
ecstasy whe