Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/119

 "Nowhere is he more unreservedly himself than when he is depicting that gentle romance, that half-humorous sentiment, that devout and pensive peace, which breathe alike in Breton, Welsh and Irish legend, and which after so many journeyings into the imaginary or invisible world find their truest earthly ideal in the monasteries of Iona and Lindisfarne. Here it is that we discern his spiritual kin; among these saints and dreamers, whose fancy is often too unrestrained, their emotions too femininely sensitive for commerce with the world, these populations who, to the faults inherent in weakness, have too often added the faults that are begotten of oppression, but yet have never wholly sunk to commonness nor desisted from an unworldly hope. There have been races which have had a firmer grasp of this life. There have been races who have risen on more soaring wing when they would frame their conception of another world. But there has been no race perhaps which has borne witness more unceasingly, by its weakness as by its strength to that strange instinct in man's inner being which makes him