Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/62

 brought forth memories like blossoms that became completer and more perfect with the years. After the broken attempt for freedom in 1848 a new impetus was given to the cultural movement that had begun with the Young Irelanders, but this now took the form of a search into the forgotten manuscripts in the Irish language, in which the elder culture was stored. After 1867 the active publication of these records began by a number of societies, and the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was started. Irishmen's minds turned to the annals of their own elder history, and viewed with alarm the perishing, under tense economic strain, of their national speech, the only adequate vehicle of their distinctive thought and intuitions. After the Land War the Gaelic League was started as an organised attempt, not only to save the national language and to compel its study and use, but to revive all that was distinctively national by means of that language. It became a shame among Irishmen not to speak their own language, not to delight in their own music, not to dance their own dances, and not to make their national past, especially the past of the days of glory, their intellectual possession. For, as was inevitable, the awakening had passed out of spontaneity into an organised intellectual effort, as the spontaneous hours of youth pass into the discipline of intellectual manhood. Yet neither is artificial, for both partake of the growth that is part of life.

Both instinct and intellect were present, and each was part of the other. When an Irishman threw