Selections From the Writings of Lord Dunsany #270105

That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come. Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living, though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stations he passed upon a journey into the country the ver ses he had published but that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regret too often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more un popular than are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopular we escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices that sing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse, from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that ideal of reliable, invar iable men and women, which would forbid saintand connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in his elaborate way,do what is unaccount able, and forbid life itself which, being, as the defin itiou says, the only thing that moves itself, is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when its moments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious, students will per haps open these books, printed by village girls at Dundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of history and ballad verse of the old 'li brary of Ireland.' They will notice that this new 'library,' where I have gathered so much that seems to me representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for few people, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by 'mary of the Nation', who wished, as she said, to make no elaborate beauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. If they are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to find some an alogy of the old with O'connell's hearty eloquence, his winged dart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy; and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragic shadow we of modern Ireland began to write.