Alan was a poet, and to dream was his birthright.... He was ever occupied by that wonderful past of his race which was to him a living reality. It was perhaps because he so keenly perceived the romance of the present--the romance of the general hour, of the individual moment--that he turned so insatiably to the past with its deathless charm, its haunting appeal.... His mind was as irresistibly drawn to the Celtic world of the past as the swallow to the sun-way. In a word he was not only a poet but a Celtic poet; and not only a Celtic poet but a dreamer of the Celtic dream. Perhaps this was because of the double strain in his veins. Doubtless, too, it was continuously enhanced by his intimate knowledge of two of the Celtic languages, that of the Breton and that of the Gael. It is language that is the surest stimulus to the remembering nerves. We have a memory within memory as layers of skin underlie the epidermis. With most of us this anterior remembrance remains dormant throughout life: but to some are given swift ancestral recollections. Alan was of these. With this double key Alan unlocked many doors. In his brain ran ever that Ossianic tide which has borne so many marvellous argosies through the troubled waters of the modern mind. Old ballad of his nature isles, with their haunting Gaelic rhythm of idioms, their frequent reminiscence of Norse viking and the Danish summer-sailor were often in his ears. He had lived with his hero Cuchullin from the days when the boy shewed his royal blood at Emain-Macha till that sad hour when his madness came upon him and he died. He had fared forth with many a Lifting of the Sunbeam, and had followed Oisin step by step on that last melancholy journey when Malvina led the blind old man along the lonely shores of Arran. He had watched the _crann-tara_ flare from glen to glen, and at the bidding of that fiery cross he had seen the whirling of the swords, the dusky flight of arrow-rain, and from the isles, the leaping forth of the war _birlinns_ to meet the Viking galleys. How often, too, he had followed trial of Niall of the nine Hostages and had seen the Irish Charlemagne ride victor through Saxon London, or across the Norman plains or with onward sword direct his army against the white walls of the Alps!... It was all this marvellous life of old which wrought upon Alan's life as by a spell. Often he recalled the words of a Gaelic _Sean_ he had heard Yann croon in his soft monotonous voice,--words which made a light shoreward eddy of the present and were solemn with the deep-sea sound of the past, that is with us even as we speak....