No More Learning

It is indeed fitting that
men pray to her who is the mother of peace, the mother of dreams, and
the mother of purity, to leave them yet a little hour to do good and
evil in, and to watch old Time telling the rosary of the stars.




THE GOLDEN AGE


A WHILE ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last time
I had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for a
message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who
inhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I saw
with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog,
moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal
vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his
pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light;
and I remembered a peasant belief about two faery dogs who go about
representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the
excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and
chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage
and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box,
and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest
emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden
Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a
beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and
flung into a corner. It said that the world was once all perfect and
kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried
like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and
the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over
our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the
song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of
the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the
clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred
by a little vulgarity, or by a pinprick out of sad recollection, and
that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only
they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the
sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must
weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler
put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a copper, and
then opened the door and was gone.




A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTSMEN FOR HAVING SOURED THE DISPOSITION OF THEIR
GHOSTS AND FAERIES


NOT only in Ireland is faery belief still extant.
It was only the
other day I heard of a Scottish farmer who believed that the lake in
front of his house was haunted by a water-horse. He was afraid of it,
and dragged the lake with nets, and then tried to pump it empty. It
would have been a bad thing for the water-horse had he found him. An
Irish peasant would have long since come to terms with the creature.
For in Ireland there is something of timid affection between men and
spirits. They only ill-treat each other in reason. Each admits the
other side to have feelings. There are points beyond which neither
will go. No Irish peasant would treat a captured faery as did the man
Campbell tells of. He caught a kelpie, and tied her behind him on his
horse. She was fierce, but he kept her quiet by driving an awl and a
needle into her. They to a river, and she grew very restless, fearing
to cross the water. Again he drove the awl and needle into her. She
cried out, 'Pierce me with the awl, but keep that slender, hair-like
slave' (the needle) 'out of me. ' They came to an inn. He turned the
light of a lantern on her; immediately she dropped down like a falling
star, and changed into a lump of jelly.