Tattered Thoughts

Abstract

When you have said slan libh to the boys, or seen a girl home, or come back from the class, or the dance or from a long brisk walk, or done one of the thousand things one does when the blood is brisk, the heart is not always tame enough to permit you to sleep. There is an itch in the tenor, and, perhaps the strong call of the darkness comes upon you and the deep memory of your ancestors’ night hunts forbids sleep: it is possible that you may not at once proceed to bed. Perhaps you sit with the light out and your fiddle in your hand, with the mute on, scraping away softly at the old, old tunes, old sad tunes, the melodies of which have in their sweetness something of pain, tunes of a long vanished age, music that was hummed by lips that have been clay — how many centuries? As you play, could you but conjure up the environment in which it was possible to make those tunes, see the time when they were fashioned by the artist, you might feel a foreigner, back there in the ages, among the forest folk, or where the armed men gathered to the battle, or in some little, lonely, stone cell the harper may be seen glowing with the first fire of that genius which you are remembering and interpreting. Who was he? What was his standing? Where is he? All you know is that he was a countryman of yours who lived somewhere, sometime; and whose song has come down through the dark with the song of the birds and the laughter of the streams.