DUBLIN LETTER
ALTHOUGH Dublin has never inspired in any of its poets quite the feelings with which Sir Walter Scott apostrophized Edinburgh—"piled close and high, mine own romantic town!"—it has not lacked honour in literature. Without reckoning two conspicuous works produced within the last dozen years, enormous in volume and unique in form and design, one might make a considerable list of novels and social studies of life in Dublin, historic or domestic; and of recent years there has been evident in our poets a desire to see Dublin in the light of romance, to name its streets in verse (with something of the defiant spirit of Walt Whitman) in a word, by means of art, to create a spiritual Dublin, not built with hands. The Anglo-Irish, however, it must be owned, have never evolved a local sentiment for "dear dirty Dublin" comparable with that of the Lowland Scotch for "Auld Reekie." Its squares and streets, named hitherto mostly after members of the English nobility, are paced by its citizens with little glow of communal feeling. "Sydney Parade!" I once exclaimed to A. E., "Could Villon himself have brought that name into a poem?" His reply was that there was no locality in Dublin which he would shrink from naming proudly in verse; and when next I met him he had, in fact, produced some resounding verses in which he had not hesitated to mention Rathgar Road in the same breath with Nineveh and Babylon. His poem was a noble one; but I had been thinking less of such daring poetic coups as Francis Thompson's stanza about Charing Cross, or Walt Whitman's occidental orientalism in Broadway, than of such simple things as "Within a mile of Edinboro' town," or "The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith," or even, "The Lord in his mercy be kind to Belfast!" A folk-spirit flowering spontaneously and cordially into local references of this kind, the poets of Dublin do not inherit. And the reason is that Dublin, for all its antiquity and romance (it is mentioned, as is well known, on Ptolemy's map of about 150 A. D.) and its beauty of hills and waters, possesses only a vague historic individuality. It wears its metropolitan crown with a rakish and
