If you will not go back to your sagas, your sagas will come to you again in new guise: for they are terrible immortal things, not capable of being put down by respectable society or by political economy. The old truths will find new mouths, the old sorrows and ecstasies new interpretation. Beauty is the garment of truth, or perhaps we should put it that beauty is the substance in which truth bodies itself forth; and then we can say that beauty, like matter, is indestructible, however it may change in form. When you think that you have excluded it by your brick walls it flows in upon you, multitudinous. I know not how the old beauty will come back for us in this country and century; through an Irish theatre perhaps, or through a new poetry welling up in Irish-speaking villages. But come back it will, and its coming will be as the coming of God’s angel, when I have to perform here the noble duty of giving thanks.
- Excerpt from: Rejoicings, by Pádraig Pearse
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