And here is the Bard's song for Fionnuala's little brothers when they long to be foremost in the fight : the Bards Loosing a swarm of humming harp notes, sang All this power over rhythm and harmony, this splendid imagery and wondrous simple beauty of suggestiveness is concentrated in the description of the Vision of Lir, the passing of the Unborn Kings of the Future, and of the Phantom Fleets; the grey Dawn lifting the eaves of Night-the whole culminating in the wild wail of anguish : And naught of them was left Utter blank despair rings out in that "never to come again "-despair like that which Oisin felt when, in one fatal moment, he lost his fairy love and his fairy home for ever! The picture of lonely Lir, his bitter grief eating into his proud heart, haunts us like the vision of Deirdre lamenting her dead. Rarely has sorrow been depicted with such tender, touching pathos. No quotations can give any adequate idea of it; but so it is throughout. To appreciate the Saga fully one must read it. Then and then only can the whole of its wonderful charm be felt. With its noble simplicity, its freshness and breadth of treatment, its melting pathos and rich wealth of imagery, Dr. Sigerson's work stands alone. Often in the rise. and fall of its exquisite rhythms we seem to catch the tinkling of the magic bell-branch which lulled Oisin and Maemh to rest so many long years ago—that magic branch which charmed away the merchant from his guile, VOL. XLII.-No: 487 ELLEN O'Connor. 3 H THE BEAUTY OF BLINDNESS By J. A. FITZPATRICK AVE you ever thought, as you passed by a blind person, that there is a beauty in blindness? Perhaps not. If we meet a person so afflicted we think only of the person's loss; it never occurs to us that there may be some beautiful gift underlying that handicap which Providence, in His own way of dealing with His creatures, allows to rest on the individual so singled out. I do not say that it is wrong that we should only, or at all, think of the material affliction; on the contrary, it is but natural and charitable, for it inspires in us a love and a pity for those less fortunate than ourselves. You see the blind man as you walk, perhaps, into the country. With head erect and eyes wide open, you take in all the beauties of the country; and then you think of the creature just passing you living in darkness. He knows nothing of the greenness of the field; the yellow corn nodding in the sun; or the purple glint on the hills. You can stand on the hill-top and drink in the glories of a sunset glow in the autumn; but the blind man knows it not. These are your privileges, but they are his losses. And so, conjuring up these thoughts, pity rises in your heart for that person; you would, if it were possible, restore to him the beautiful gift of sight. True, indeed, you make answer. But now consider the balancing privileges-the beauty of his blindness, let me call it. You, perhaps, were born into the world the same time as he; you had the light of the world in your eyes, he its darkness; you have seen the glories of nature; he has not. In short, God has given you a great gift and taken it away from the other. That the possession of sight is a great gift we need not stop to discuss, but, unfortunately, how often do we forget the fact! How often we should have shut our eyes as one blind when we have kept them open; or how blind we have been at others. St. Thomas à Kempis expresses it much better in his Imitation when he says: The more and better thou knowest, the more heavy will be thy judgment, unless thy life be also more " holy." And again, in the same chapter of the same book, he says very truly: "Indeed an humble husbandman, that serveth God, is better than a proud philosopher, who, neglecting himself, considers the course of the heavens." This gift of sight, is, thus a heavy responsibility. Here, then, is the Beauty of Blindness, the great privilege of the blind man. How truly, in a sense, can he say like the great Cardinal. Newman, "I have not sinned against the Light." This remark of Newman's is not the proud boast of a vain man. taken out of its setting and requires an explanation. It has been Readers who have studied the works of the great Oratorian will remember in those beautiful letters of his, written home to his friends in England when he was passing a winter in the Mediterranean with his dearest friend, Hurrell Froude, and his father, how Newman, who had been travelling about in the various places, had caught a fever which confined him to bed for a long time; he has left us a record of that illness, and very often he exclaimed that he would not die then, as he had a work to do in England; and again and again he would say that he had not sinned against the Light. How pathetic that remark is when we think of his whole life! The soul of that great man had been tossing about in the sea of religious controversy, and in the utter darkness searching for the Light that has guided numberless souls to the haven of rest. He was fearing that he might shut his eyes as one blind, that he might not make the proper use of them. He realised the greatness of sight. Remember, too, it was on that voyage out to the Mediterranean that he wrote the famous lines that seem like the appeal as in fact they are of a soul in blindness for Light. How often this hymn is sung by blind men and women, without, it is feared, much meaning or without a knowledge of its history. We can understand with what anguish of soul Newman, when on his bed of sickness, must have sighed that he had not sinned against the Light, when we remember that it was just after he had written "Lead, Kindly Light." We know, too, how Cardinal (then Dr.) Wiseman pitied the blindness of Newman, and how he led him gently and kindly along the road; and how Newman, in the dazzling Light which startled him at first, just as the bright light at first dazzles the natural eye when a person comes suddenly out of darknessyou know how that great blind man halted on the road to rest and in his half humorous way said, "Dr. Wiseman is dying to get us.' But the blind man kept on his way; for he had not written these words for nothing: So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still There is, therefore, a beauty in blindness, both physically and spiritually; for the person who is truly blind cannot be guilty of sinning against the Light. There are, of course, those who can see and won't see, but they are not, in the true meaning of the word, Blind. What a great gift the faculty of seeing must be when the blind can say that they have not sinned against the Light! If we meditate on this beauty of Blindness it may help us to appreciate the Light that we have, and help us, too, in our own small way to be more sympathetic towards those who are in darkness. J. A. FITZPATRICK. IN COUNTY CLARE By NORA TYNAN O'MAHONY T is an old saying that "one half of the world never knows how the other half lives"; and the stray visitor from the big rich outer world who finds himself anywhere in the wilds of Co. Clare must certainly wonder how his fellowcreatures there ever manage to exist at all. The wretched little holdings, as most people know, are composed for the greater part of rocks and stones, interspersed with sparse tufts of lush green herbage, which, despite their scarcity, are yet said from their very sweetness and richness to feed the very finest of cattle and sheep. Here and there one sees a small clear plot of green and verdant pasturage redeemed, by God only knows what superhuman effort, from the grey desert of arid rock and stone about it; but these green oases are altogether the exception, and one can well believe that were it not for the regular remittances received by the poor toilers from sons and daughters in America, few indeed could manage to eke out even the barest and hungriest of subsistences here. When one considers, too, the great distance at which the people are removed from towns and shops and all sources of provision, the problem of how the poor live in these desert and desolate places becomes ever yet harder of solution. Yet, if there could be anything more puzzling and amazing, it is the placid air of contentment and resignation with which these poor people view their lot. It would seem as though, despite all their loneliness and hardship and privation, they are as happy in their own way as the American millionaire in his automobile; and certainly the rosy-faced, bare-legged, beautiful children clustering around the cottage doorways in these districts seem as happy and as healthy as any children in the world. A visitor to County Clare, driving on the road from Lisdoonvarna to Ballyvaughan via Blackhead, once asked a country woman at one of the cottages at the latter place, six or eight miles from the nearest town, how they managed to keep house at all when supplies ran short, as it seemed they inevitably must do at times. "But sure, alanna, they don't," the woman assured her comfortably, with an air, as it were, of kindly and tolerant pity for the stranger's excusable ignorance. "But, surely," persisted the latter, you must sometimes run out of such necessary things as bread, and sugar, and tea?" "You Well, no, alanna, we don't," was the placid reply. see, we can aisily guess how long a ten-pound box of tay will last us. An' then we get home a sack of flour and a sack of wheaten meal at a time, and a hundredweight or two of sugar. An' we always have a few eggs from the little hens, or a bit of fish from the nets, an' the sup o' milk from the goats, and good praties from the garden; so that, thanks be to God, we need never be raal hungry at all, at all. And sure, thanks be to God again," she went on, as though divining the visitor's bewilderment as to how poor people of the sort could afford to pay for ten pounds of tea and sacks of meal and hundredweights of sugar at a time. "He has given me good sons to help me in my old age. Two of them are in America, an' doin' right well; an' they don't forget their poor widowed mother far away. An' if you'll step inside, ma'am, till the shower passes, you can see the rest of them, as good an' hardworkin' boys as ever drew breath, though it's meself that says it, ma'am." Inside the smoke-grimed cottage, her three boys sat at dinner round a table innocent, of course, of cloth or covering. In its centre, however, rested a round bottomless sieve or riddle, |