Читать книгу Ireland in Travail онлайн

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First, in 1893, the language movement and talk of a Celtic revival. A Dublin professor becomes inspired, and disciples gather about him to master an antique tongue. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in everyday life a pleasant sociable man, is touched with the geist when he pleads for the Gaelic tongue. The movement grows, pen and pencil are snatched up, and the remotest country-side is explored for folklore and fairy tales. There arrives the Celtic illuminator with his paintbrush and his parchment, and the Celtic jeweller, hammering out his brooches old fashioned a thousand years ago. The prophets awaken—the seers of visions, the dreamers of dreams. One dreams of the avatar that is to come, and sees a phantom drummer drumming about the land. A second, reading a telegram of the Russo-Japanese war, receives the intuition that Japan is the masculine pole of the earth and Ireland is the feminine pole, and that some mystic union of the two peoples will bring order into disorder. A third, on Howth Hill, sees bloody giant figures moving across the sky. A fourth, on the top of a tram, sees letters of fire in the heavens.