We should not see or feel the landscape of Ireland or its skies, the streams, the woods, the animals and birds, the mountain solitudes, as we feel and see them in the original tales.

We should not hear, as we hear in their first form, the stormy seas between Scotland and Antrim, or the great waves which roar on the western isles, and beat on cliffs which still belong to another world than ours.

The genius of Ireland would desert our work.
And it would be a vast pity to lose the Irish atmosphere in the telling of the Irish tales, because it is unique; not only distinct from that of the stories of other races, but from that of the other branches of the Celtic race.

It differs from the atmosphere of the stories of Wales, of Brittany, of the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

It is more purely Celtic, less mixed than any of them.