Page:The Celtic twilight. Men and women (IA celtictwilightme00yeat).pdf/36

 out with 'God possesses the heavens—God possesses the heavens—but He covets the world'; and once he lamented that his old neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, 'Who is that old fellow there?' 'The fret' [Irish for doom] 'is over me,' he repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, 'Only myself knows what happened under the thorn tree forty years ago;' and as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.

This old man always rises before me when I think of X. Both seek—one in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle allegoric poetry—to express a something that lies