Whether it came from Slieve-na-Mon or Mount Abora, AE. found it with his gods and I in my ‘Land of Heart’s Desire,’ which no longer pleases me much.  And then it seemed far enough till Mr. Edward Martyn discovered his ragged Peg Inerney, who for all that was a queen in faery; but soon John Synge was to see all the world as a withered and witless place in comparison with the dazzle of that dream; and now Lord Dunsany has seen it once more and as simply as if he were a child imagining adventures for the knights and ladies that rode out over the drawbridges in the piece of old tapestry in its mother’s room.  But to persuade others that it is all but one dream, or to persuade them that Lord Dunsany has his part in that change I have described I have but my superstition and this series of little books where I have set his tender, pathetic, haughty fancies among books by Lady Gregory, by AE., by Dr. Douglas Hyde, by John Synge, and by myself.  His work which seems today so much on the outside, as it were, of life and daily interest, may yet seem to those students I have imagined rooted in both.  Did not the Maeterlinck of ‘Pelleas and Melisande’ seem to be outside life? and now he has so influenced other writers, he has been so much written about, he has been associated with so much celebrated music, he has been talked about by so many charming ladies, that he is less a vapour than that Dumas fils who wrote of such a living Paris.  And has not Edgar Allen Poe, having entered the imagination of Baudelaire, touched that of Europe? for there are seeds still carried upon a tree, and seeds so light they drift upon the wind and yet can prove that they, give them but time, carry a big tree.  Had I read ‘The Fall of Babbulkund’ or ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ when a boy I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream.  We are idle, unhappy and exorbitant, and like the young Blake admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver.

IV

These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god’s name but more often ‘Time.’  His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility.  This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated