Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/341

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Ireland and the Arts.

for it is beautiful, and the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and Etain would have served his turn;' but one cannot, perhaps, love or believe at all if one does not love or believe a little too much.

And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write about German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always remember that they could give us a number of little books which would tell, each book for some one country, or some one parish, the verses, or the stories, or the events that would make every lake or mountain a man can see from his own door an excitement in his imagination. I would have some of them leave that work of theirs which will never lack hands, and begin to dig in Ireland, the garden of the future, understanding that here in Ireland the spirit of man may be about to wed the soil of the world.

Art and scholarship like these I have

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