I'm not entirely sure where this could be included--it's from a lovely gift edition of the essay--but if we do something about Christmas, or Anglo-Irish views of the "simple life," or simply something about the imagination, it could be useful.
- "Each of us, probably, has in mind one ideal and absolute of the Christmas card, as received in childhood. My own taste (date around 1910) is this—I behold a cottage gable in deep, dusky silhouette against an inspiring gleam of sunset, one window lit; smoke goes up from the chimney. To this, a woodman returning, footprint by footprint, across the foreground snow; all around stretch white wastes, the bare trees are dark. How it glows and glows through that one small window—core of the world, magnet to man, the home! Towards it, the coach lurches among the drifts, the cravatted rider whips up his horse, the red-mittened children drag their laden sledge, the spotted dog lollops, the cat leads her train of kittens, the crinolined lady picks her delicate way. All Christmas-card-land creatures have the same destination. My woodman’s cottage, crouched in smouldering evening, remains for me forever the symbol-scene—no better picture, before or since, has so fixed for me that light in the falling dark; or, by contrast, the elemental and daunting loneliness of Elsewhere. That sense of the Elsewhere, and of those straying in it, can but encircle Christmas, if one has any heart."
