the golden age

a while ago i was in the train, and getting near sligo. the last time i had been there something was troubling me, and i had longed for a message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who inhabit the world of spirits. the message came, for one night i saw with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog, moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light; and i remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go about representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the excellent omen. but now i longed for a message of another kind, and chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though i am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. i seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the golden age. it told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. it said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. the faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. it said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. it said that if only they who live in the golden age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the eternal gates swing open.

we were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was gone.