Yet say what I will, so strange is the pleasure that they give, so hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and plays delight me. Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a friend's hall, now of St. Mark's at Venice, now of cloud palaces at the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost and have ever mourned and desired.
Not all Lord Dunsany's moods delight me, for he writes out of a careless abundance; and from the moment I first read him I have wished to have between two covers something of all the moods that do. I believe that I have it in this book, which I have just been reading aloud to an imaginative young girl more French than English, whose understanding, that of a child and of a woman, and expressed not in words but in her face, has doubled my own. Some of my selections, those that I have called 'A Miracle' and 'The Castle of Time' are passages from stories of some length, and I give but the first act of 'Argimenes,' a play in the repertory of the Abbey Theatre, but each selection can be read I think with no thoughts but of itself. If 'Idle Days on the Yann' is a fragment it was left so by its author, and if I am moved to complain I shall remember that perhaps not even his imagination could have found adventures worthy of a traveller who had passed 'memorable, holy Golnuz, and heard the pilgrims praying,' and smelt burned poppies in Mandaroon.
SCENE: The East. Outside a city wall; three beggars seated on the ground.
ULF (an older beggar but not grey) Some evil has befallen the rich ones of this city. They take no joy any longer in benevolence, but are become sour and miserly at heart. Alas for them! I sometimes sigh for them when I think of this.
OOGNO Alas for them. A miserly heart must be a sore affliction.
THAHN A sore affliction indeed, and bad for our calling.
OOGNO (reflectively) They have been thus for many months. What thing has befallen them?
ULF There has been a comet come near to the earth of late and the earth has been parched and sultry so that the gods are drowsy and all those things that are divine in man, such as benevolence, drunkenness, extravagance and song, have faded and died and have not been replenished by the gods.