Quotes letter of April 1932: ‘Ireland as a nation I have no further interest in. Indeed, I have no interest in nations at all. I feel I belong to a spiritual world whose embers are scattred all over the world and these are my kinsmen. And I would sacrifice any nation, my own quite readily, to promote the interest of that spiritual clan.’ (p.473.)

Styles John Eglinton ‘Willie McGee’ [sic]

Quotes AE’s words to the doctor on learning of his own imminent death: ‘I have had a very interesting life, I have done nrearly all the things I wanted to do. I have rejoiced in the love of friends. What man could want more?’ (p.479).

Had said to Charles Weekes, who had protested that by editing a small provincial newspaper he had been lost to the world: ‘I shall go back to the stars without any flourish of trumpets. I am not going anywhere I can be seen.’ (p.480.)

Yeats responded to a wire with another: ‘Give my old friend my love.’ (p.481.)

Gogarty was the last of his visitors. Con Curran also present, was AE’s laywer, said: ‘Let us now praise famous men/and our fathers that begat them.’

Gogarty bBuried at Mt. Jerome, attened by Yeats, de Valera, and Michael O’Donovan (Frank O’Connor), who spoke at the oration:

‘He say the lightning in the East
And he longed for the East;
He saw the lightning in the West
And he longed for the West;
But I, seeking only the lightning and its glory,
Care nothing for the quarters of the earth.’

Lorna Reynolds, speaking of Patrick Lynch’s collecting for Bunting: ‘According to Charlotte Milligan Fox, Patrick Lynch, in that summer journey of 1802, “collected versions of a great many of the songs that are in Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connaught” [sic], and cetainly some of the examples quoted by her come close to the native tenderness and transparent simplicity of the Hyde renderings. (‘The Irish Literary Revival: Preparations and Personalities’, in O’Driscoll, op. cit., p.385.)

Quotes Standish James O’Grady: ‘But perhaps the most valuable work achieved for Ireland by these ancient shapers of legend and heroic tales, is like all that is best done in the world, incapable of being definitely grasped and clearly exhibited. Their best work is probably hidden in the blood and in the brain of the race to this day. Those antique singing men, with their imagined gods and superhuman heroes, breathed into the land and people the gallantry and chivalrousness, the prevailing ideality, the love of action and freedom, the audicity [sic] and elevation of thought which, underneath all rudeness and grotesquerie, characterises those remnants of their imaginings and which we believe no intervening centuries have been powerful enough wholly to destroy. Theirs, not the monks, was the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum. […]

Further: ‘I would also add when I consider the extraordinary stimulus which the perusal of the literature gives to the imagination even in centuries like these, and its wealth of elevated and intensely human characters that as I anticipate with the revival of Irish literary energy and the return of Irish self-esteem the artistic craftsmen of the future will find therein and in unfailing abundance the material of persons and sentiments fit for the highest purposes of epic and dramatic literature, and art, pictorial and sculptural’. (History of Ireland, Critical and Philosophical, Vol. 1, 1881, pp.60-61; here p.388.)

Also quotes Yeats (letter to O’Grady, 1898): ‘There is humour and fantasy as well as miraculous poetry in all our old legends, and onc can find in them all kinds of meanings … They are the greatest treasures the past has handed down to us Irish people and th emost plentiful treasures of legends in Europe; I have always considere3d that you yourself have done more than all others to dig away the earth that has so long lain upon their beauty.’ Wade, p.308; here 388.)

Yeats: ‘The man most important for the future was certainly Dr Douglas Hyde. I had found a publisher while still in London for his Beside the Fire and his Love Songs of Connacht and it was the first literary use of the English dialect of the Connacht country people that had aroused my imagination for those books.’ (Memoirs, ed. Donoghue, 1972, p.54; here p.390.)

He was to greate a great movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I could have made, not matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome nor vain, he will not be angry if I say - for the sake of those who come after us - that I mourn for the greatest folklorist who ever lived, and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got him and kept him until he wrote in our common English … and took for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table.’ (Autobiogs., p.218-19; here p.391. )

Synge, reviwing Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Speaker, June 1902): ‘The intellectual movement that has been taking place in Ireland for the last twenty years has been chiefly a movement towards a nearer appreciation of the country people, and their languagte, so that it is not too much to say that the translation of the old MSS into this idiom is the result of an evolution rather than a merely personal idea.’ (Coll. Work, II, p.367; here p.391.)

Yeats: ‘One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand - the glove is one’s nation, the only thing one knows even a little of.’ Letters to a New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds, Oxford 1970, p.174; here p.392.)