E-text prepared by S. R. Ellison, David Starner, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Transcriber's Note:
Two names are accented with Macrons (a short horizontal bar over the letter), for which there is no ASCII character. They are usually marked as [=e], as in Argim[=e]n[=e]s. For legibility, they have been replaced here by the bare letter. To restore the original accents,
change Oonrana to Oonr[=a]na change Argimenes to Argim[=e]n[=e]s
SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF LORD DUNSANY
MCMXII
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
The Gods of the Mountain
The First Act of King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior
The Fall of Babbulkund
The Sphinx at Gizeh
Idle Days on the Yann
A Miracle
The Castle of Time
INTRODUCTION
I
Lady Wilde once told me that when she was a young girl she was stoppedin some Dublin street by a great crowd and turned into a shop toescape from it. She stayed there some time and the crowd still passed.She asked the shopman what it was, and he said, 'the funeral of ThomasDavis, a poet.' She had never heard of Davis; but because she thoughta country that so honoured a poet must be worth something, she becameinterested in Ireland and was soon a famous patriotic poet herself,being, as she once said to me half in mockery, an eagle in her youth.
That age will be an age of romance for an hundred years to come.Its poetry slid into men's ears so smoothly that a man still living,though a very old man now, heard men singing at the railway stationshe passed upon a journey into the country the verses he had publishedbut that morning in a Dublin newspaper; and yet we should not regrettoo often that it has vanished, and left us poets even more unpopularthan are our kind elsewhere in Europe; for now that we are unpopularwe escape from crowds, from noises in the street, from voices thatsing out of tune, from bad paper made one knows not from what refuse,from evil-smelling gum, from covers of emerald green, from that idealof reliable, invariable men and women, which would forbid saintand connoisseur who always, the one in his simple, the other in hiselaborate way, do what is unaccountable, and forbid life itself which,being, as the definition says, the only thing that moves itself,is always without precedent. When our age too has passed, when itsmoments also, that are so common and many, seem scarce and precious,students will perhaps open these books, printed by village girls atDundrum, as curiously as at twenty years I opened the books of historyand ballad verse of the old 'Library of Ireland.' They will noticethat this new 'Library,' where I have gathered so much that seems tome representative or beautiful, unlike the old, is intended for fewpeople, and written by men and women with that ideal condemned by'Mary of the Nation', who wished, as she said, to make no elaboratebeauty and to write nothing but what a peasant could understand. Ifthey are philosophic or phantastic, it may even amuse them to findsome analogy of the old with O'Connell's hearty eloquence, his wingeddart shot always into the midst of the people, his mood of comedy;and of the new, with that lonely and haughty person below whose tragicshadow we of modern Ireland began to write.