Chapter VI: Epilogue: (From "The Flower of Old Japan")

Carol, every violet has
Heaven for a looking-glass!

Every little valley lies
Under many-clouded skies;
Every little cottage stands
Girt about with boundless lands.
Every little glimmering pond
Claims the mighty shores beyond--
Shores no seamen ever hailed,
Seas no ship has ever sailed.

All the shores when day is done
Fade into the setting sun,
So the story tries to teach
More than can be told in speech.

Beauty is a fading flower,
Truth is but a wizard's tower,
Where a solemn death-bell tolls,
And a forest round it rolls.

We have come by curious ways
To the light that holds the days;
We have sought in haunts of fear
For that all-enfolding sphere:
And lo! it was not far, but near.
We have found, O foolish-fond,
The shore that has no shore beyond.

Deep in every heart it lies
With its untranscended skies;
For what heaven should bend above
Hearts that own the heaven of love?

Carol, Carol, we have come
Back to heaven, back to home.

_Padraic Colum_

Padraic Colum was born at Longford, Ireland (in the same county as Oliver Goldsmith), December 8, 1881, and was educated at the local schools. At 20 he was a member of a group that created the Irish National Theatre, afterwards called The Abbey Theatre.

Colum began as a dramatist with _Broken Soil_ (1904), _The Land_ (1905), _Thomas Muskerry_ (1910), and this early dramatic influence has colored much of his work, his best poetry being in the form of dramatic lyrics. _Wild Earth_, his most notable collection of verse, first appeared in 1909, and an amplified edition of it was published in America in 1916.

THE PLOUGHER

Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage,
earth broken;
Beside him two horses--a plough!

Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn man
there in the sunset,
And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder
of cities!

"Brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker! Can'st hear?
There are ages between us.
"Is it praying you are as you stand there alone in the
sunset?

"Surely our sky-born gods can be naught to you, earth
child and earth master?
"Surely your thoughts are of Pan, or of Wotan, or Dana?

"Yet, why give thought to the gods? Has Pan led your
brutes where they stumble?
"Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put
hands to your plough?

"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing
lone and bowed earthward,
"Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the
night-giving God."

* * * * *

Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend
with the savage;
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth
only above them.

A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and
the height up to heaven,
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots,
purples, and splendors.

AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

O, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods upon the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there's never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying Him night and day,
For a little house--a house of my own--
Out of the wind's and the rain's way.

_Joseph Campbell_

(_Seosamh MacCathmhaoil_)

Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for _The Rushlight_ (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen books of verse, the most striking of which is _The Mountainy Singer_, first published in Dublin in 1909.