He told me that the Irish Question possessed for him a fascination for which he could give no rational explanation.

He had absolutely no tie of blood or material interest with Ireland, and his friendship for it had brought him the only quarrels in which he had ever been engaged.
What chiefly interested me in Harold Frederic's philosophy of the Irish Question was that he had arrived at a diagnosis of the Irish mind not substantially different from my own.

Since that evening I have come across a passage in one of his novels, which clothes in delightful language his view of the chaotic psychology of the Celt: There, in Ireland, you get a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines.

They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism.

Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it.