No More Learning

FOOTNOTE:

[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend
of mind found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey
Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or
the story-teller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many
Lough Leaths.




EARTH, FIRE AND WATER


SOME French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert
went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them
what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to
be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be
that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers
better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been
rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and
I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of
mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form
themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some
pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods
everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that
communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories
of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak with
the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand
death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into
the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make
our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they
may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a
clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did
not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of
water, and that 'even the generation of images in the mind is from
water'?

1902.




THE OLD TOWN


I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of
faery.
I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations of my
own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home
talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought
us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking,
where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are always
murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was an
imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made
the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
"the Old Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's
day. We had stood for some few minutes, so far as I can recollect,
looking over the fields full of stones and brambles and elder-bushes,
when I saw a small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed, mounting
up slowly towards the sky; then we saw other faint lights for a minute
or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch moving
rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems
all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly
ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning
impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps
I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of
reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however,
I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat
meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the
more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable
as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I
remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was
sitting reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading
and writing a couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower
of peas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking
at it I heard the sound again, and presently, while I was alone in
the room, I heard a sound as if something much bigger than a pea had
struck the wainscoting beside my head. And after that for some days
came other sights and sounds, not to me but to the girl, her brother,
and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire
that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot moving
about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who
live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in
earlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did they
come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had
shone for a moment?

1902.