•«ii.. "'-ir ^
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 The Works of 
 "FIONA MACLEOD" 
 
 UNIFORM EDITION 
 
 ARRANGED BY 
 
 MRS. WILLIAM SHARP 
 
 VOLUME V
 
 " Theseus . . . Wilt thou speak of the ancient 
 trouble of thy race?" — CEdipus at Kolonos. 
 
 "For immaterial things, which are the highest and 
 greatest, are shown only in thought aiui idea, and in 
 no other way, and all that we are saying is said for the 
 sake of them." — Plato, The Statesman.
 
 vj^^»t><5C« .<■.'-,. -,..- 
 
 , /,//• ^'/ . '' /?U( 
 
 n
 
 THE WINGED DESTINY 
 
 STUDIES IN THE SPIRITUAL 
 HISTORY OF THE GAEL 
 
 BY 
 
 FIONA MACLEOD" 
 
 (WILLIAM SHARP) 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 1910
 
 
 THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 DEDICATORY INTRODUCTION 
 
 PAGE 
 
 vii 
 
 THE SUNSET OF OLD TALES 
 The Sunset of Old Tales 
 The Treud Nan Ron . 
 The Man on the Moor 
 The Woman at the Cross-ways 
 The Lords of Wisdom 
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 Orpheus and Oisin. 
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 3 
 
 9 
 
 16 
 
 26 
 
 37 
 
 45 
 68 
 
 76 
 91 
 
 CHILDREN OF WATER 
 
 Children of Water 103 
 
 CuiLiDH Mhoire I 10 
 
 Sea-magic 119 
 
 Fara-ciiaol 129 
 
 Sorrow on the Wind 135 
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 146 
 
 Maya 153 
 
 V
 
 Contents 
 
 FOR THE BEAUTY OF AN IDEA page 
 
 Prelude 167 
 
 Celtic 183 
 
 The Gaelic Heart 203 
 
 ANIMA CELTICA 
 
 The Gael and His Heritage , . 223 
 
 Seumas: a Memory 261 
 
 Aileen: a Memory 265 
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn . . . 269 
 
 Two Old Songs of May . . . . 310 
 
 "The Shadowy Waters" .... 320 
 
 A Triad 347 
 
 The Ancient Beauty 355 
 
 THE WINGED DESTINY 367 
 
 VI
 
 TO 
 
 J. A. G. 
 
 To you, dear friend, let me dedicate this 
 bindweed of thoughts and dreams, which had 
 their life by the grey shores you, also, love. 
 Have you not wandered there often, seeking 
 forget fulness, and, wandering, found peace? 
 
 You are in your southern home, by calm 
 waters where mine are foam-white, and under 
 blue skies where mine are dark with cloud 
 and wind: and yet, of all I know, few do so 
 habitually dwell in that fragrant, forgetting 
 and forgot, old world of ours, whose fading 
 voice is more and more lost in the northern 
 seas. The South is beautiful, but has not 
 the secrets of the North. Do you, too, not 
 hold lona, motherland of all my dreams, as 
 something rare and apart, one who has her 
 own lovely solitude and her own solitary 
 loveliness that is like no other loveliness? In 
 your heart, as in mine, it lies an island of rev- 
 elation and of peace. For you, too, is the en- 
 during spell of those haunted lands where the 
 
 vii
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 last dreams of the Gael are gathered, dwelling 
 in sunset beauty. 
 
 In this book I have dealt — as, I hope, 
 in all I write — only with things among 
 which my thought has moved, searching, re- 
 membering, examining, sometimes dreaming. 
 Slightly to adapt a comment I read some- 
 where recently : — while it is true that certain 
 ideas monopolise my imagination, I do not 
 wilfully ignore the lesser nor even the ignoble 
 things of life; above all, I do not dishonestly 
 seek to seem unaware of or to hide them. It 
 is only that I have no time to attend to them, 
 being otherwise busy. 
 
 I think the fundamental idea of this book, 
 as of all my thought in these things from 
 which the book has risen like a phantom out 
 of haunted woods, is utterable in the noble 
 phrase of Renan : " J'avais le sentiment de 
 I'infini et de I'eternel, et de la mes sourires 
 pour les choses qui passent. Mais I'Esprit ne 
 passe point." Nor am I so much concerned 
 to set others right, for which I am not quali- 
 fied, as to interpret, for which I may be : re- 
 membering as I do Goethe's words, "If you 
 call a bad thing bad, you do little; if you call 
 a good thing good, you do much." To each 
 his interest. I shall rest content if I am of 
 the horizon-makers, however humbly ; if I 
 
 viii
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 may be among those who extend the hori- 
 zons. 
 
 You who know the way of the wind in my 
 mind know that I do not, as some say, " dwell 
 only in the past," or that personal sorrow is 
 the one magnet of my dreams. It is not the 
 night-wind in sad hearts only that I hear, or 
 the sighing of vain futilities; but, often, rather 
 an emotion akin to that mysterious Sorrow 
 of Eternity in love with tears, of which 
 Blake speaks in Vala. It is, at times at least 
 I feel it so, because Beauty is more beautiful 
 there. It is the twilight hour in the heart, as 
 Joy is the heart's morning. Perhaps I love 
 best the music that leads one into the moon- 
 lit coverts of dreams, and old silence, and un- 
 awaking peace. But Music, like the rose of 
 the Greeks, is " the thirty petalled one," and 
 every leaf is the gate of an equal excellence. 
 The fragrance of all is Joy, the beauty of all 
 is Sorrow : but the Rose is one — Rosa Sempi- 
 terna, the Rose of Life. As to the past, it is 
 because of what is there, that I look back: not 
 because I do not see what is here to-day, or 
 may be here to-morrow. It is because of 
 what is to be gained that I look back; of what 
 is supremely worth kn(jwing there, of know- 
 ing intimately : of what is supremely worth 
 remembering, (jf remembering constantly : not 
 
 ix
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 only as an exile dreaming of the land left 
 behind, but as one travelling in narrow de- 
 files who looks back for familiar fires on the 
 hills, or upward to the familiar stars where 
 is surety. In truth, is not all creative art re- 
 membrance: is not the very spirit of ideal art 
 the recapture of what has gone away from 
 the world, that by an imperious spiritual law 
 is for ever withdrawing, to come again newly ? 
 
 You wrote to me once, " Beware of the 
 beauty that you seek." You would have me 
 bow down only before the beauty that is be- 
 yond the last careful words of ivory and pale 
 gold, beyond even the airs of the enchanted 
 valleys where Music is. 
 
 And, to-day, with a wind of the south com- 
 ing across glad water, and greenness uplifting 
 itself from the grass to the foam of leaves on 
 swaying elms, I realise in truth how small is 
 the measure of beauty that any can give, say- 
 ing " I have gathered this." Yonder yellow 
 butterfly hovering over the grass-hid nest of 
 the shrew-mouse ... I think of it as a liv- 
 ing flower of the sun, earth-wafted, wonder- 
 ing at the creature of the sod : but how poor 
 that is compared with the excelling simplicity 
 of the unknown peasant who, long ago, ten- 
 derly called the shrew-mouse an dallag fheoir, 
 the little blind one of the grass, and the but- 
 
 X
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 terfly dcalan Dhe, the little flame of God. The 
 one is the beauty of fantasy, the other is the 
 beauty of a child's mind matured in joy. And 
 so it is with Beauty. We dwell on this loveli- 
 ness, or on that : and some white one, flame- 
 winged, passes us on the way, saying, " It is 
 Loveliness I seek, not lovely things." 
 
 In truth. Beauty is the light that we call 
 imagination — the radiance, the glow, the 
 bloom: we think of it as in those lines of 
 Prometheus Unbound: 
 
 " Beloved and most beautiful, who wearest 
 The shadow of that soul by which I live." 
 
 Beauty is less a quality of things than a 
 spiritual energy : it lies not in the things seen 
 but in harmonious perception. Yet, also, it 
 can dwell apart, in the sanctuary of this 
 flower or of that woman's face. But in itself 
 it is as impersonal as dew, as secret and di- 
 vine and immortal — for, as you will remember, 
 Midir, the lord of sleep and youth and love, 
 the son of Angus, lord of death and the years 
 and the winged passions, was made of dew, of 
 the secret dews: Midir of the twilight, of the 
 secret and silent peoples, of the veiled im- 
 mortalities. It can exist for us in one face, 
 on one form, in one spirit, on the lifted waters, 
 on the hills of the west, in trampling marches 
 
 xi
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 of sound, in delicate airs, but it is in all of 
 these, and everywhere : wherever the imagina- 
 tion is become light, and that light is the light 
 of flame. To each the star of his desire: but 
 Beauty is beyond the mortal touch of number, 
 as of change and time. Has any ever spoken 
 more deeply of this than Plato, when in that 
 vision of Perfect Beauty in the Banquet he 
 writes : " It not like any face or hands or bod- 
 ily thing ; it is not word nor thought ; it is not 
 in something else, neither living thing, nor 
 earth nor heaven; only by itself in its own 
 way in one form it for ever Is." 
 
 Is it not he also, the wise and noble dreamer, 
 who makes Socrates say in the Phcedrus, " Be- 
 loved Pan, and all ye other gods . . . give 
 me beauty in the inward soul." 
 
 The vision of the few. Yes. But a hand- 
 ful of pine-seed will cover mountains with 
 the green majesty of forest. And so I too will 
 set my face to the wind and throw my hand- 
 ful of seed on high : — 
 
 Cuiridh mi m'aodann anns a' ghaoith 
 'Us tilgim baslach caoin an aird. 
 
 But you — you are of the little clan, for 
 whom this book is : you who have gone upon 
 dark ways, and have known the starless road, 
 and perchance on that obscure way learned 
 
 xii
 
 To J. A. G. 
 
 what we have yet to learn. For you, and such 
 as you, it is still a pleasure to gather bind- 
 weed of thoughts and dreams ; still a pleasure 
 to set these dreams, these thoughts, to the 
 airs and pauses and harmonies of considered 
 speech. So, by your acceptance of this book, 
 let me be not only of your fellowship but of 
 that little scattered clan to whom the wild bees 
 of the spirit come, as secret wings in the 
 dark, with the sound and breath of forgotten 
 things. 
 
 xni
 
 THE SUNSET OF OLD 
 TALES
 
 'Mieux que les scknes troublantes du jour, ces mu- 
 siques etces voix nocturnes me disaient Vespiritcachi.' 
 E. ScHURE, Sanctuaires d' Orient.
 
 The Sunset of Old 
 Tales 
 
 "And some were woven single, and some twofold, 
 and some threefold." 
 
 Blake: Vala, Night viii. 
 
 I do not know if in anything I have a 
 keener pleasure than in the hearing ... by 
 the hearthside. or looking down into green 
 water, or on the upland road that strings glen 
 upon glen along its white swaying neck . . . 
 of the old tales and poems of beauty and 
 wonder, retold sometimes in an untarnished 
 excellence, sometimes crudely, sometimes so 
 disguised in the savour of the place and hour 
 that not then, and perhaps not for long, are 
 they recognised in accent or discerned in 
 feature. Perhaps this pleasure is the greater 
 because it is the pleasure of the tale-lover, for 
 the tale's sake, rather than of the tale-collec- 
 tor, for the quest's sake. I do not know how 
 many tales and fragments of tales and bro- 
 ken legends I have heard, now here, now there ; 
 
 3
 
 The Sutisct of Old Talcs 
 
 or what proportion of these was old, or what 
 proportion of them was of the fantasy or 
 dreaming mind of to-day, or how many re- 
 tained the phrase and accent of the past in 
 taking on the phrase of to-day and the accent 
 of the narrator's mind. It is the light, the lift, 
 the charm, the sigh, the cadence I want. I 
 care less for the hill-tale in a book than told 
 by the firelight, and a song is better in the 
 wash of the running wave than in crowded 
 rooms. Every sad tale and every beautiful 
 tale should have a fit background for its set- 
 ting ; and I have perhaps grown so used to the 
 shaken leaf, or the lifted water, or the peat- 
 glow in small rooms filled with warm shadow 
 and the suspense of dreams, as the back- 
 ground of sgeul and rami and oran, that I am 
 become unwisely impatient of the common 
 conditions. Yet even in these much lies with 
 ourselves. I have a friend who says he can 
 be happy with a gas-jet in a room in a street- 
 house. He opens a window by the edge of an 
 inch, if there is no wind crying in the chim- 
 ney, so that a thin air may be heard rising 
 and falling: and turns his back to the gas-jet: 
 and keeps his eyes on the book before him. 
 But are there many of his kind, who are un- 
 happy, being kept in towns, and yet know how 
 to become masters of illusion ? I know a fam-
 
 The Su)isct of Old Tales 
 
 ily of distinction in one of our great cities 
 who have never heard tale or song, legend or 
 dream, or any breath of romance, except at 
 entertainments in their own or another's 
 house, or at a concert or at a theatre. I have 
 heard them spoken of as rich people, as hav- 
 ing more than they need or could ever use. 
 They are poor people, I fear. In the pity I 
 have for them I admit there is something, too, 
 of dread. Could one fall into that estate? For 
 they live what is called " life." But as they 
 are never alone, and in a sense have always 
 everywhere, a gas-jet, I cannot see that the 
 existence they lead is life, that they live. If 
 it were not for the imaginative solace of fires, 
 those unconquerable allies of dreams and ro- 
 mance, I suppose the deep love for the things 
 of which I speak would die away from the 
 life of towns. 
 
 It would be a good thing to be a collector, 
 and to know how to winnow the gathering, 
 and where to range and where to place apart. 
 We owe a debt, indeed, to the few who are 
 truly fit for the task they have set themselves. 
 Puit there are some minrls which care very lit- 
 tle to hear about things, when they can have 
 the things themselves. It is not for the ser- 
 vice of beauty, but only for the uses of formal 
 knowledge, that one might desire a stuffed 
 
 5
 
 The Sunset of Old Tales 
 
 cuckoo. But a cuckoo in a case — or a cuckoo 
 in a cage, if one would live barred, which I 
 cannot believe — is not a cuckoo. The bells in 
 the grey cloud when, unseen, the cuckoo swims 
 on the wind . . . that is the cuckoo. 
 
 I have good friends who have urged me to 
 collect folklore. In a sense I have done so 
 since I was a child. But I do not care to go 
 pencilling through the Highlands or from isle 
 to isle. The tale or song thus sought loses 
 its charm for me. I like to be taken by sur- 
 prise when, beyond the hawthorn in bloom, a 
 swallow swoops, and I know that spring is 
 come; or when, in the beech-thicket, the ma- 
 vis suddenly calls the five long calls of joy, 
 and the thrill of June is felt ; or when, above 
 the fern, in a windless moonlit silence, the 
 night-jar throbs the passion of midsummer. 
 
 And, too, I should be uneasy if I had to do 
 more than listen. For I remember a friend's 
 telling how a " folklorist " rejoiced a year or 
 two ago over strange tales gathered out of 
 the wilds of Inverness, and builded on them a 
 theory, and gave much delighted perplexity 
 to himself and others, till another specialist 
 broke the enchantment by pointing out that 
 the so-called oriental survivals were no more 
 than a year old, being, in fact, nothing else 
 than Gaelic renderings of parts of The Ara- 
 
 6
 
 The Sunset of Old Tales 
 
 bian Alights, translated by an enthusiast, who 
 wished to bring to the Gael something of ac- 
 cepted worth. 
 
 I have sometimes given of this sea-drift and 
 wind-drift which has remained with me, as I 
 chanced to remember, or as the theme invited. 
 And I have written, too, of the charm of 
 these old-world legends and romances in 
 their modern survivals or often bewildering 
 changes. 
 
 But if ever I yielded to this quest as a pos- 
 sessing eagerness it would be to catch the last 
 reflections of the sunset of old tales. And not 
 the least curious would be those which have 
 lapsed into all but forget fulness. I take, al- 
 most haphazard, six of these, much as I find 
 them in my notes, or as accident has awak- 
 ened in my memory; and a seventh, "The 
 Wayfarer," I have added partly because it 
 also has, in these old Gaelic lands, the sunset 
 hue of an immortal tale told in supreme 
 beauty so many years ago ; and partly because 
 I have not yet had opportunity to include it 
 fittingly since its original appearance some 
 years back in Cosmopolis. These tales, or 
 their like, that in some form have travelled 
 across so many lands and seas, have lived on 
 so many tongues and seen time rise and fall 
 like the punctual tides, and are now fading 
 
 7
 
 The Sutisel of Old Tales 
 
 into forget fulness with the passing of the last 
 western tongue as ancient as they, are very 
 slight. But they have this to their gain, that 
 they are on the rainbow-side of the sunset, 
 and that few tales of the kind will now be told 
 by the crofter or hill-shepherd or islesman, 
 or by old or young at the ceilidh, or by those 
 who stand back more and more from the 
 ways and the cross-ways. 
 
 8
 
 THE TREUD NAN RON 
 
 "What have I heard but the murmur of sand: 
 What have I seen but foam ..." 
 
 {Refrain of a Gaelic Song.) 
 
 Last August, sailing one day on the Lynn 
 of Morven in a black-green calm, though from 
 Cruachan to Nevis a storm darkened the Ap- 
 pin hills with cloud and wind, I heard from a 
 man of Lome a seal-story that was not so 
 much a tale as a fragment of old legend. 
 There is a low sandy isle among the isles of 
 Lome, lying in Morven waters between the 
 Corrie of the Stags and the island of Li.smore. 
 It is called, I think, Faileag-mhara, which is 
 to say, little lawn or meadow of the sea: a 
 good name, for its pretty beaches and bent- 
 held sands enclose grassy spaces, where the 
 tern descends to her rude nest and the scart 
 and guillemot sometimes breed. My Lome 
 friend spoke of it as the isle of the piocach, 
 because that fish, the saithe, is often to be 
 caught in plenty, in quiet twilights, off its 
 north shore. It might be called, also, the isle 
 
 9
 
 The Trend Nivi Rbn 
 
 of shells, for many beautiful shells lie in its 
 little bays and pools. And a poet might call it 
 the isle of voices, for it is always either in 
 some low tranced song, or shaken with a wild 
 music ; and, besides, it is like a listening ear 
 of the sea, held to a mysterious sighing from 
 the dark mountains of Morven, or from the 
 continual whispering of the tides of Appin 
 running by the head of Lismore. In storm it 
 is like a harp hung among the branches of 
 tormented trees: men have heard terrifying 
 cries and an intolerable wailing when passing 
 it in the mist and the blindness of tempest. 
 
 On the still noon of which I write I had 
 seen a dark head rise from the purple-sha- 
 dowed blueness of the sea about fifty fathoms 
 away, and had remarked to my companion 
 that the seal yonder was " an old man," as the 
 saying is, and of great size. 
 
 " Ay, he is well known here. It's the big- 
 gest bull I've seen this side the west o' Jura. 
 They say he's fey. Howsoever, he'll bide no 
 seal near him — neither man-seal nor woman- 
 seal. He had a mate once. She swam too 
 near a geola, a yawl as we might be saying in 
 the English, where a woman leaned in the 
 moonshine an' played a foreign thing like 
 what we call the cruit-spannteach. A man 
 took a gun an' put a ball into her side. She 
 
 lO
 
 The Trend Nan Rbn 
 
 came up three times, crying like a child or 
 bleating like a lamb-lost ewe maybe : it was 
 between the one and the other, and ill to 
 hearken. The bull yonder dashed at the stern 
 o' the yawl an' broke the steering-gear. The 
 jailm was torn away, ay an' I tell you the 
 crann sgoidc swung this way an' that — the 
 boom swung this way an' that, for all the 
 calmness of the calm. The man with a gun 
 tried to shoot the man-seal, but couldn't. The 
 singing woman with the foreign music went 
 below crying : and I am not wondering at that 
 if she had seen the eyes of the woman-seal. 
 I've seen the pain in them, I have. I've seen 
 tears in their eyes. I saw one once away out 
 by Heiskir, that was made mateless and child- 
 less one red sunset, an' leaned on a rock star- 
 ing motionless acrost the black an' white o' 
 the tost sea. She did not move when a ball 
 struck the rock, an' sent splinters flyin'. She 
 did not turn her head, no not by this or that. 
 She stared out acrost the black an' white. It 
 wasn't where the bull died, or where her 
 young sank. It was out acrost the black an' 
 white o' the tost sea. The red of the set was 
 in her eyes. They were redder : ay, I saw 
 that. The black was green about the rock, 
 an' the splash had the whiteness of snow, an' 
 the nnissels and dog-whelUs on the rock glis- 
 
 1 1
 
 The Treud Nan Rdn 
 
 tered in the shine, A scart flew by her scream- 
 in', an' the terns wailed. She just stared. 
 Her head was up, an' she stared an' stared an' 
 stared an' stared. The shooters left her alone. 
 It was dark when I sailed east o' that." 
 
 " How long has that old man been here? " 
 I asked. 
 
 " I am not knowing that. No one knows 
 that. There's a man over yonder, John Stuart 
 up Ballachulish way, who told me it was nine 
 hundred years old. Is that foam? Maybe, 
 maybe. Did ye ever hear tell of the story of 
 the Seal of the Shiant Isles? No? It was like 
 this : though for sure, it's no story, but only 
 a saying. 
 
 " He was an old bull-seal, an' there's no 
 man knows or ever knew the years he had. 
 He was grey with the sea and time. Padruig 
 Dhomnullach, the Heiskir bard, made a song 
 on him. He said he had the years back to 
 the days when Oisin was beautiful as the 
 west wind on the yellow banks o' May. Ay, 
 that he swam the Moyle, when the swans o' 
 Lir were on it, with their singing beyond all 
 singing for sweetness and pain. An' that he 
 was older than them : older than the sgeul or 
 the shennachie, than the tale or the teller. His 
 name was Ron, an' he was the first o' the 
 clan. He was the son of the King of Ireland, 
 
 12
 
 • The Trend Nan Rdn 
 
 and a brother of a son of that King. His 
 mother was a beautiful woman of the sea in 
 the north isles. She was called Sea-Sand. 
 Perhaps it was because her hair was yellow as 
 the sands of the sea. Perhaps it was because 
 she was like the sand that is now here an' 
 now there, and is sometimes so light that a 
 mew's foot does not stir it and sometimes so 
 smilin' and treacherous that a man sinks in it 
 to his death. An' one day his brother came 
 over to him with a message. They played a 
 game on the shore. It was with great curved 
 shells, an' they were thrown against the 
 wind they were, an' a skilful and crafty 
 throwing is needed for that, they with the 
 holes in them an' the shape like partans of the 
 sea. But that day the wind caught one of the 
 shells in the midway of the hurl, an' it swung 
 sideway an' struck Ron on the whiteness of 
 the brow. He cried a cry, an' was down. 
 And when the King's son saw that, he had 
 fear. Men would say he had put death on 
 his brother. So he ran from that place. He 
 looked back, an' he saw sand blowing upon 
 the body, an' falling upon it, and heard a 
 moaning an' a crying. Then he knew it was 
 Sea-Sand keening the son of her love. And 
 he saw the wave running up the shore, an' 
 she meeting it. And then she lifted Ron an' 
 
 '3
 
 The Trend Ncui Rdn ^ 
 
 threw him in the wave, an' he rose like a 
 man an' fell down like a seal, for tall he was, 
 an' handsome he was, but he had no arms now 
 an' no legs, but only a slimness and long body. 
 ' The sea for your home,' she cried, an' that 
 crying was on the wind. And that's how 
 Ron took to the sea, but remembers the shore 
 for ever an' ever. He an' his. Ay, air chuan, 
 air niliuir, air chorsa, in the deep ocean, in 
 the narrow sea, by the shores." 
 
 And after that he told me how Ron took a 
 woman of the land and kept her in a pool of 
 the rocks. And the young they had were as 
 good in the sea as on the land : and they had 
 brown eyes that the salt did not sting, and 
 long brown hair like seaweed, and their songs 
 were wild. 
 
 And thinking of this that I was told on the 
 Lynn of Morven, my mind was often trou- 
 bled with some other confused memory. 
 What had I known of this before : when had 
 I heard the like, and if so, where? It was 
 only to-day, at the flying of a bird and the 
 falling of its shadow across a flapping sail, 
 that, in a moment, I know not how, I found 
 myself thinking of an old Greek tale of how a 
 prince of Salamis, Telamon, slew his brother 
 at quoit-throwing on the shore, and he too, a 
 king's son, son of Aeacus, of Aegina : and 
 
 14
 
 The Trend Nan Ron 
 
 how that brother's name was Phocus, which is 
 to say a seal: and how the name of Aeacus' 
 sea-love, and the mother of Phocus, was 
 Psammatheia, which is Sea-Sand, sand of the 
 sea. 
 
 15
 
 THE MAN ON THE MOOR 
 
 "Woe for the doom of a dark soul. ..." 
 
 Sophocles. 
 
 "The desert groweth. Woe unto him who con- 
 taineth deserts." 
 
 Nietzsche. 
 
 On the mainland of Ardnamurchan there is 
 a house by the shore, built of grey stones, 
 against which the yellow flags and gallingale 
 run up like surf, and behind which a long 
 slope of bracken looks like the green sea be- 
 yond rocks when the wind is heavy on it, 
 though with no more to see than a myriad 
 wrinkling. There is no other house near, nor 
 boat on the shore : and I saw or heard never 
 a sheep, but the few thin beasts of Anndra 
 MacCaskill browsing the salt grass by the 
 long, broken, wandering dune where the rocks 
 lie in a heavy jumble. It is a desolate place. 
 I saw no birds in all the bramble, never a 
 finch in the undershaws, nor shilfa in the 
 tansy-wastes. Even on the shore the white 
 wings of the gulls and terns were not catch- 
 
 i6
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 ing the light : I saw nothing but three birds, 
 a dotterel flying and wailing, a scart black- 
 green on a weedy rock, and a grey skua hawk- 
 ing the sighing suck of the ebb. The light 
 was that of storm, though the twilight was al- 
 ready gathering in every corrie and hollow: 
 and in October the day falls soon. The sea 
 south was a dark, tossing waste, with long, 
 irregular dykes of foam that ran and merged 
 when you looked at them, but were like bro- 
 ken walls on fields of black rye when you saw 
 them only through the side of the eyes. 
 South-west and west long splashes of red 
 flame ruddied the wild sea and brought the 
 black to blue. It was not this year, nor last, 
 nor the year before, that I heard that of which 
 I now write : but I remember it all as though 
 it were of yesterday. A bit of loneroid, gale 
 or bog-myrtle as it is called in the south, wet, 
 with the light green and the dark green on 
 the same stem, will often, in a moment, bring 
 Tighnaclachan before me, so that I see just 
 that desolate shore and no other shore, and 
 hear the scattered lamenting of the few sheep 
 yonder, and see that scart on the weedy rock 
 plucking at its black-green feathers, or that 
 grey skua with its melancholy cry hawking the 
 sighing shallows of the ebb beyond the ledges, 
 to this side of the house itself, half windowless 
 
 17
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 yet it may be, and with the byre-doors open 
 and falHng back and rotting. 
 
 It was a matter of no moment that took 
 me there : partly to meet one coming another 
 way, partly to see Dionaid Mackire, a frail 
 old woman who kept the place for Neil Mc- 
 Neil, her brother. I had walked some three 
 miles, and was tired ; not with the distance, 
 but with a something in the wind, and per- 
 haps from the singular gloom of the place at 
 that hour in that grey loneliness, caught be- 
 tween deserted lands and a sea never quiet, 
 an angry troubled waste, perpetually lament- 
 ing, continually shaken with fierce wraths. 
 
 As I came close to Tighnaclachan, I saw no 
 smoke above the boulder-held thatch. The 
 ragged pony I had seen there before was not 
 in the airidh beyond. It was with relief I 
 heard the clucking of a hen somewhere. The 
 only other living thing I saw was a magpie 
 by a pool of rain-water, stalking with sharp 
 cries of anger its own restless image. 
 
 Yet it was here that, before I heard the tale 
 Neil McNeil told me, I heard words from old 
 Janet which put a beauty into that lonely un- 
 homely place for me, then and for always. I 
 forget what led to the beauty in the old heart, 
 and stirred it : but I remember the shape it 
 took on the old lips. She had given me tea, 
 
 i8
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 an we had sat awhile in the brown dusk by 
 the comforting red glow of the peats, and then 
 I told her something, I forget what — perhaps 
 of some one we knew, perhaps a bit of a tale, 
 or a song maybe, likely the sigh of a ballad or 
 song — when she leaned to me, and said, " It's 
 a blessing they are, a healing and a blessing: 
 ay, so they are, the moonlight an' the dew. 
 When we're young, summer's sweet wi' them : 
 when we're old, they're in the heart still. It's 
 the song left, the memory o' the song, a sweet 
 air, when the bird's flown for aye. Ay, my 
 dear, an' there's more than that to be said. 
 God made the sun an' the day: the Holy 
 Spirit, the night an' the stars; but Christ 
 made the moonlight an' the dew." 
 
 She was tender and sweet, old Dionaid : 
 fair in life and fair in death. Strange that 
 the beauty of a single thought can thence- 
 forth clothe the desolation in loveliness, and 
 change the grey air and the grey sea and the 
 grey face of a seared land into a sanctuary of 
 peace, as though unknown birds builded there, 
 doves of the spirit. I remember, once, on the 
 waste of Subasio behind Assisi, that some 
 one near me said the barrenness was terrible, 
 more lifeless and sad than any other solitude. 
 To me, at that moment, as it happened, this 
 was not so: the hill glowed with the divine 
 
 19
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 light, that came, not from the east welling it 
 or the west gathering it, but from the immor- 
 tal life of the heart of St. Francis — and a 
 storm of white doves rose with flashing wings, 
 so that I was dazzled : and only when I saw 
 that they were not there did I know I had seen 
 the prayers and joy of a multitude of hearts, 
 children of him to whom the wind was 
 " brother " and the grass " sister." 
 
 But now I must go back to that of which 
 I meant to write. I have given the lonely 
 setting of the place where, when we came in 
 at dayfall for the porridge, Neil McNeil — a 
 tired man, tall, gaunt, grey-black, with cold 
 blue eyes like the solander's — told me of the 
 man MacRoban, or IMacRobany. 
 
 There is no need to tell of what kept me 
 there till long after dark was come, with the 
 flowing tide making so heavy a noise among 
 the loose rock that at times our words sounded 
 hollow and far away : nor of all that we 
 three, waiting there, talked : nor what dreams 
 and thoughts came into that flame-lit dark 
 room in the desolate house by the sea. When 
 Neil spoke once, unquestioned, it was after 
 a long silence, when we were unconsciously 
 listening to the loud tick-tack, tick-tack of 
 the great wall-clock as though we were eager 
 almost to a strained anxiety to hear urgent 
 
 20
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 tidings, some news expected or feared, or 
 half -guessed, coming mysteriously, on quiv- 
 ering lips : with a foreign sound, broken, 
 meshed in obscurity — hearing at the same time 
 the gathering clamour in the sea's voice, the 
 hoarse scroach-an-scroach of the flung surge 
 on the dragged reluctant beach, and the loud- 
 demanding cry of the wind behind the con- 
 fused and trampling noise of the tide, that by 
 the sound was in the house itself and away 
 inland. 
 
 " I can't tell you much about what you 
 asked," he began slowly. " There isn't much 
 to tell. You've been in or near that place 
 away in the Italian country, and may know 
 more than I know. It was this way, then, 
 since I must tell yoii the little I know. You 
 thought, that day we talked about it, the name 
 was MacCroban. But I'm not knowing if 
 there's any such name : any way it is not the 
 man's name, the man I'm thinking of. the 
 man I have in my mind. His name was IMac- 
 Roban, or MacRobany." 
 
 " Was ? " 
 
 " Ay." 
 
 Tick-tack . . . tick-tack . . . and the loud 
 anger of the sea at the door. I was glad 
 when Neil went on. 
 
 " He had no home. I met him a long way 
 
 21
 
 The Man oh the Moor 
 
 inland — on the Moss of Achnacree, beyond 
 Morven, across the Sound of Lome. It was 
 at the edge o' dark, and he was lying with his 
 head on a stone. I stooped and spoke to him. 
 
 " ' Poor man, have you the heavy sickness 
 on you?' I asked, and again in the English, 
 when he did not answer. 
 
 " ' It is dying you are,' I said. ' I fear, 
 poor man, it is near death you will be if you 
 lie there.' 
 
 " ' I will give you all things,' he said in a 
 thin voice, weary as a three-day wind in the 
 east : ' Ay, I will give you secrets and all 
 things, if you will give me death.' 
 
 " ' And for why that ? ' I asked. 
 
 " ' I die like this every night,' he said, ' and 
 there are three of us. I am not knowing 
 where my two brothers will be, in what land, 
 west or east: my brother John, and my 
 brother Raphael. But they, too, are like this, 
 like what I am. like what you see me here. 
 They have their heads on stones, in a waste 
 place. They call upon death. If any man 
 stoops as you do, over John, my brother, he 
 will say what I say — " I will give you all, I 
 will give you all secrets, I will give you 
 knowledge and power, if you will give me one 
 thing, if you will give me death." And if any 
 man stoops over Raphael, my brother, he will 
 
 22
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 say that also — that John our brother would 
 say, and that I say.' 
 
 " At that I thought the poor man had the 
 black trouble. 
 
 No,' he said, as though he knew my 
 thought. * It is not madness I have, but old, 
 old weariness.' 
 
 And what will your name be? ' I asked. 
 
 Here I have been, in this country, for 
 seven years, wandering. And here my name, 
 by some chance of change, is MacRoban, or 
 MacRobany. And that is no ill change, for 
 it means son of Roban or Robany, and that 
 is what I am. But no,' he added, ' it is not 
 the name you have now in your mind. It is 
 an older name than that. It is a name that 
 has the sand of the desert on its feet. It is 
 a name written on the weeping wall in the 
 Holy City of Zion.' 
 
 " I looked at the man, though the darkness 
 was fast falling through the greyness. I 
 remember a crying of many curlews in that 
 waste place, and the suddenness of snipe 
 drumming in a wet hollow a stone's-throw 
 beyond where two lapwings never stopped 
 wheeling and wailing. 
 
 "'And who will you be?' I said. My 
 voice was hard, for the cold of a fear was in 
 my bones. 
 
 23
 
 ^ The Man on the Moor 
 
 " ' My name is Robani,' he said, ' Daniel 
 Robani. I am Daniel Robani, and my 
 brother John is Johannes Robani, and my 
 brother Raphael is Raphael Robani. And 
 there's no weariness like our weariness. And 
 every night we lie down to die, but we never 
 die.' 
 
 " Then I knew the poor man was mad, and 
 seeing I could not lift him, I gave him my 
 cloak and hurried on to the clachan of Le- 
 daig beyond the Moss to get help. I saw the 
 minister, a stranger come for a month, but 
 a good man and kind. He came with me. 
 We saw no man. We found my cloak, but 
 no man. 
 
 " Next day the minister had me into his 
 room. * Tell me again what words he spoke,' 
 he said to me. I told him. Then he leaned 
 from his chair, and said to me : ' Neil 
 McNeil, you have dreamed a dream or seen a 
 mystery. Best go to your home now, and in 
 silence: ay, go away without word of this. 
 For I do not know what is dream and what 
 is vision, and what is truth and what mad- 
 ness. But hear this: In the tenth year of 
 this century we live in, a great vase or jar 
 of marble was found in the excavated ruin of 
 an ancient city in the southlands of Italy, 
 called Aquila — which is to say, lolair. Eagle 
 
 24
 
 The Man on the Moor 
 
 — and in that jar was a copper plate. On the 
 one side was engraved in the Hebrew, " A 
 plate like this has gone unto every tribe." 
 On the other side, and also in the Hebrew, 
 was engraved the Death Warrant of Jesus of 
 Nazareth, called Jesus the Christ. And of 
 the four witnesses who signed the condemna- 
 tion of the Christ the names of three were 
 the names of three brothers, Daniel Robani, 
 and Johannes Robani, and Raphael Robani.' " 
 Neil ceased abruptly. The noise of the 
 waves was as a multitude of hands batting 
 the walls of the house: the wail and cry of 
 the wind was like a dreadful Spirit. Before 
 the red glow of the peat-fire we sat silent. 
 Tick-tack, tick-tack: and the calling of the 
 sea, the calling of the sea. 
 
 25
 
 THE WOMAN AT THE CROSS-WAYS 
 
 "... fiercest is the madness that springeth from 
 inappeasable desires." — Pindar, Nem. xi. 
 
 I do not know in how many old literatures 
 that tradition survives of a being of the veiled 
 world who can at will pass from diminutive 
 shape to a sombre and terrifying aspect. It 
 may not be at will, always, for those shadowy 
 beings who are seen only by loosened pas- 
 sions may be creatures that feed upon these 
 passions, as creatures of the wilds upon sud- 
 den pastures. And as they are fed, these shy 
 divinities change: that which was small is 
 become great: that which was human is now 
 inhuman: the stream flowing past in the 
 darkness is become Terror whispering, the 
 wind among the shaken grasses on the moor 
 is Fear, clothing herself in shadows. 
 
 A friend and kinsman, who at one time 
 had an other-world sight beyond that of any 
 I have known, told me lately that the reason 
 why he had put a chain upon that hound of 
 supernatural vision and kept it in a secret 
 
 26
 
 The Woman at the Cross-Ways 
 
 place in his mind and never willingly let it 
 loose upon the dreams and thoughts and 
 deed-shapes of men and women, was because 
 of this, that often he had seen the disembod- 
 ied passions and desires. Sometimes, he said, 
 they were like swallows flying about the 
 eaves of a house, sometimes like crested de- 
 mons standing with a spear upon the dark 
 brows of advancing tempest, sometimes like 
 trees waving many arms and with starlike 
 eyes in their dim cavernous depths. And 
 often, he told me, these changed, as the em- 
 bodied passions and desires cried out to them 
 with longing and proud laughters, or waited 
 like children in a wood, or bade them slake 
 their thirst at other wells, or commanded 
 them return whence they came, or, in a 
 shaken dread, were still, or, with scornful 
 eyes, silent. And as they were fed, so did 
 these disembodied passions and desires grow; 
 or as they were denied, so did they dwindle; 
 but most were ravenous with hunger, and 
 were glutted with sweet prey. 
 
 " And when the world that we call the 
 other world is become as open to the eyes as 
 this world-in-the-veils that we call our own," 
 he said, " one must either see too much, or 
 be content to shroud his eyes and see only 
 as others see: and that way I have chosen." 
 
 27
 
 The IVomou at the Cross-Ways 
 
 So, I think often, may it be with those 
 beings of the wastes. Some there may be 
 that do not change — creatures of the woods; 
 the Ceasg, lovely and harmless, in the flow- 
 ing brown depths of the hill-stream; the 
 Griamiisg, that herds flocks of white doves; 
 the green Glastig, that milks the wild deer; 
 the Mdrglas, sitting silent on a high boulder 
 in unpeopled glens at twilight. But these 
 have their life apart from us. They are the 
 offspring of another father, as the slim wom- 
 en of the trees and the waves, as the blind 
 grey-girl of the clififs whom the hawks and 
 wild falcons feed and guard. Many fear her, 
 and have heard her crying in rain, or when 
 the broken winds wail among crags and 
 ledges. 
 
 But of the others, many change; some at 
 will, to appal or to deceive or to evade; some 
 because they are as shadows that shrink to 
 daisies or increase to vast and menacing 
 shapes just as the mind that perceives them 
 mirrors them. 
 
 Of these, I think, is the woman of tears, 
 the Beantuiream, the weeping woman, the 
 woman of mourning, she who keens the sor- 
 row of death in lonely places. How many 
 have heard that lament, by running water in 
 the dusk, by pools where the grey owl hawks 
 
 28
 
 The IVoiiian at the Cross-lVays 
 
 the grey moth, on moors when the lapwings 
 sleep and even the curlews are not crying 
 under the moist down-dropping stars. 
 
 Sometimes she is seen as the Washer of 
 the Ford, a tall, gaunt woman, chanting the 
 Seis-Dhais, the Death-Dirge, as she washes 
 the shroud of him who sees her ; and some- 
 times she may suddenly grow great and ter- 
 rible, and inhabit darkness, and the end is 
 come. Sometimes she is seen as the Nig- 
 heag Cheag a Chroin, the little washer of sor- 
 row, perhaps singing low while she steps the 
 stones of a ford, or moves along the dim 
 banks where the dew is white on sorrel and 
 meadowsweet, a leincag cheag bhais na lamh 
 . . . her little shroud of death in her hand 
 ... a caoineadh chroin na ceitl, the keen of 
 sorrow in her mouth for him or her whose 
 death is near, 
 
 I heard once of a meeting with the Woman 
 of Tears told by one whose brother was he 
 who had seen and heard: but of these neither 
 died at that time. It is not of that I am 
 thinking, however, but of something in the 
 brother's tale as he told it, and as it was 
 told to me. 
 
 " It was this way," said he who told me: 
 "... when Micheil went home that night, he 
 went by the old packhorse road on the high 
 
 29
 
 7/jr IVoman at the Cross-lVays 
 
 moor, for the rains had made a bog of the 
 highway for more than a mile near Alltdhu, 
 that was our house, a big stone house with 
 the three byres to it. He was cold and hun- 
 gry, for he had not touched sup or bite since 
 noon of the day; and if he was sad it was not 
 for any who called our hearts their home, 
 but because of his tiredness, it may be, or the 
 darkness and the wet, or mayhap for a song's 
 lament that was on his lips or in his mind, 
 for he was aye fond of sweet sorrowful 
 lilts. 
 
 " But when he was come to within the 
 nearness of a mile, the rain was up, and 
 the half-moon shone. It was so still he 
 could hear the snipe drumming in the bog 
 below Creag-dhu. There wasn't a sound 
 else, no, not a sound, but only the stillness 
 of stillness. 'Tis a place, yon, for the 
 cryin' o' peewits an' the whaup's lamentings : 
 but on this night one might have heard 
 the grey moth dancing above the eyes o' the 
 heather. 
 
 " Micheil hated the deepness of that silence, 
 and it was worse when the snipe were still 
 again. He whistled, but the sound went so 
 far out upon the moor, and was so unlike the 
 thing he had made, that he was troubled. He 
 went on slowly with the heavy dislike on him 
 
 30
 
 The Woman at the Cross-Ways 
 
 for the noise of his feet. Sorrows were in his 
 mind by now, and the lamenting of the heart 
 that is never at peace because the things that 
 cannot be are so great and desirable and the 
 things that are look so broken and poor and 
 desolate. 
 
 " When nigh upon Donnusk Water he 
 stopped: to see the stones of the ford, he 
 said: though he knew the stones, and that 
 the water was shallow, and was aflow below 
 them at that. 
 
 " He thought it was myself at first. 
 
 "'Is it you, John?'" ... he said in the 
 whisper that he thought would be the loud 
 voice. 
 
 " He saw then it wasn't me ; no, nor any 
 man: but a woman, or a girl, stooping over 
 the water. 
 
 " Perhaps he thought it was Elsie the cow- 
 woman, or our niece Kirsteen: he did not 
 think so, but to hide the whisper in his 
 mind he lifted that thought on to the banks 
 above it. 
 
 " ' Galasaidit ' ... he called, his voice fall- 
 ing like a splashing stone. 
 
 " ' Will that be you, Canstinc? ' he called 
 again, but lower, and he looked behind him 
 when he had spoken. 
 
 " Then he saw the woman or the girl look 
 
 31
 
 The Woman at the Cross-Ways 
 
 round. He had not heard her singing before, 
 but he heard it now. By that sorrowful 
 lamentation, low and sweet forbye, and by 
 the tears that glistered white on the grey 
 face, he knew it was the Nigheag Ckcag a 
 Chroin. 
 
 " Micheil was a man who would not let 
 fear eat his heart. He gave a low sob, and 
 waited till the sickness of the cold sweat was 
 gone : then he licked the dryness of his 
 lips. 
 
 " ' Peace to you, good woman,' he said. 
 
 " ' And so you know me, mo cuat,' she an- 
 swered to him, putting down on the grass 
 the whiteness of the Iciiiag dwag bhais, the 
 little white shroud of death. 
 
 " * I know you. Woman of Tears,' he said, 
 ' though why is it calling me mo cuat you 
 are, for I am no lover of yours? And that 
 whiteness there on the grass, sure it is for a 
 child or a maid, that?' 
 
 " ' Let me look at you,' she said. 
 
 "He saw her tall now, and dark: bigger 
 than the great alder on the bank not far from 
 her. 
 
 " * Do you remember ? ' she said. 
 
 " Micheil was still at that. ' No, ' he 
 whispered, when the high reed near him was 
 no more shaken with the breath of his pulse. 
 
 32
 
 The JVoman at the Cross-lVays 
 
 " ' You will never be forgetting me, Micheil 
 Macnamara. As for that whiteness there, it 
 is the cloth of blindness.' 
 
 " ' Mo Brbn,' Micheil moaned ; ' sorrow 
 upon me ! ' 
 
 " ' Look at me,' he said. 
 
 " Micheil put his gaze at her. It was no 
 woman now he saw, not even a batidia, but a 
 power or dominion, he thought. She had 
 her feet far down among roots of trees, 
 and stars thickening in her hair as they 
 gather in the vastness and blackness of the 
 sky on a night of frost. 
 
 "'Are you Death?' Micheil sobbed, his 
 knees shaking with the awe that was on him. 
 
 "'I am older than Death,' she said. Her 
 voice was beyond and above and behind and 
 below; but it was no more than the lowness 
 of a low wind in the dusk. 
 
 " Then he heard a chanting, as of trees in 
 a wind, and of waves rising and falling in 
 caverns by the sea: but he did not know, and 
 never knew, if it was in the tongue of the 
 Gael he heard, or in what tongue. But it 
 would be the Gaelic, for sure: for Micheil had 
 little English, then or after. And the words 
 that he heard were somewhat as are these 
 words, but remembered dimly they are, as in 
 a dream: — 
 
 33
 
 The PVonian at the Cross-lVays 
 
 '"I am she who loveth Loneliness, 
 
 And SoHtude is my breath. 
 
 I have my feet on graves, 
 
 And the resurrection of the dead is my food, 
 
 For the dead rise as a vapour 
 
 And I breathe it as mist. 
 
 As mist that is lickt up of the wind. 
 
 I am she who stands at the pools: 
 
 I stand at the meeting of roads. 
 
 The little roads of the world 
 
 And the dark roads of life and death, 
 
 And the roads of all the worlds of the Universe. 
 
 I am Anama-Bhroin, the Soul of Sorrow: 
 
 I am she who loveth Loneliness, 
 
 And I have the Keys of Melancholy and of Joy. 
 
 My lover is Immortality, 
 
 For I am a Queen, 
 
 Queen of all things on earth and in the sea, 
 
 And in the white palaces of the stars 
 
 Built on the dark walls of Time 
 
 Above the Abyss.' 
 
 " But this that was Sohtude clothing her- 
 self in voice was remembered by Micheil, as 
 I say, only as words in a dream. These may 
 not be the words, but only the dimness of the 
 colour of the words. He heard no more, and 
 saw no more. And when I found him in the 
 morning he was stiff in cold sleep. It was a 
 day and a night and another day before he 
 spoke, and told me what I have told. He 
 wrote it too, later, on a paper : and so neither 
 forgot." 
 
 34
 
 The IVoDian at the Cross-lVays 
 
 But why, this evening, have I copied all 
 this from notes taken some five or more 
 years ago? It is not because both John and 
 Micheil Macnamara are dead. 
 
 It is because, to-day, lying in a solitary 
 place, with the crying of curlews on the 
 west wind, I was reading a book that I 
 had last read in the alien tongue of a great 
 French poet, on a day when another wind of 
 the west stole up across the purple blueness 
 of the Gulf of Corinth, and passed away in 
 the radiance beyond the Steeps of Delphi. 
 And, as I read the ancient Hymn in the 
 as fine English of another translator, I 
 found myself remembering . . . something 
 ... I knew not what : and then I remem- 
 bered. 
 
 For a time I wondered if the Greek mystic 
 and poet had, in his own hour and day, seen 
 a like vision and uttered it in beauty, such as 
 the islander Micheil had confusedly seen and 
 confusedly given again in broken words and 
 crude music. Then I took up the volume, 
 and read again (while a whisper was in the 
 coarse grass and tangled bracken, and far 
 away over the heather the curlews wailed 
 above the long low flowing tide of the west 
 wind) : — 
 
 "/ am Hecate of the IVays, of the Cross- 
 
 35
 
 The IVoniaii at the C ross-lVays 
 
 Ways, of the Darkness, of the Heaven and 
 the Earth and the Sea; saffron-clad Goddess 
 of the Grave, exulting among the spirits of 
 the dead; Perseia, lover of loneliness; Queen 
 who hold est the Keys of the world ..." 
 
 36
 
 THE LORDS OF WISDOM 
 
 " Knowing that knowable spirit, let not death 
 disturb you." — The Prashna U panishad. 
 
 A friend writes to me asking what is " the 
 wisdom of the wild bees " ? He read the 
 phrase, he says, in something I wrote once, 
 and also in an Oban paper last year, quoted 
 there as a Hcbridean saying. I am not sure 
 if I have heard it in English. But in Gaelic, 
 either as '* the old wisdom of the bees," or 
 " the secret knowledge of the bees," the 
 phrase occurs in tales of the islanders of 
 Tiree, Coll, lona, Colonsay, and Islay as 
 naturally as phrases such as cho marbh ri 
 sgadan, " as dead as a herring," or cho luath 
 vis na luinn, " as swift as the wave-tops"; or 
 as, in tales of second-sight, mar thuhradh 
 anus an dailgionn, " as was spoken in the 
 prophecy " ; or as, in tales of love, a ghrai- 
 dhcan mo chridhc, " thou dear one of my 
 heart " ; or a^^, in the telling of the " Tri 
 Brain nan Sfjculachd " ("The Three Sorrows 
 of Story-Telling "), or other old tales, men- 
 
 37
 
 The Lords of Wisdom 
 
 tion of the slacan druidlwaclid, the magic 
 wand, or being fo ghcasoibh, under enchant- 
 ment. 
 
 In lona, some years ago, I heard an old 
 woman speak of the robin-redbreast as " St. 
 Columba's Companion," and of the wild bees 
 as his children: "They have Colum's wis- 
 dom," she said. But I imagine that, in most 
 instances, the phrase is used without much 
 thought of the lost or time-worn meaning, 
 as are used the other phrases I have given. 
 " Ask the wild bee for what the Druids 
 knew," and " ask the children of the heather 
 where I-'ionn sleeps," and the like, point to 
 an old association of the wild bee and ancient 
 wisdom. And, doubtless, the story-teller of 
 to-day might naturally use figuratively or 
 directly allude to a creature so familiar to 
 him; as, last year, in one of the isles, a shep- 
 herd speaking to me ended his narrative with 
 " and I would go to that country, and look 
 till I found, if I had the three wisdoms of the 
 bee, that can find its way in the grass, and 
 over the widest water, and across the height 
 of hills." Here, of course, is meant the nat- 
 ural knowledge of the bee, not the wisdom of 
 druid, or of Colum Cille, or of the masters 
 of illusion, or of the ciunhachdan siorruidh 
 skuas, the everlasting powers above. I re- 
 
 38
 
 The Lords of Wisdom 
 
 member a line too, as part of an invocation 
 or oath, though I cannot recall the latter 
 exactly. The line was fifth or sixth, and 
 ran, " by the wisdom of the air-travellers," or 
 words to that effect (possibly birds in their 
 migration, and not bees, were meant). The 
 invocation, if such it were, began: — 
 
 " 'Air a ghrian anns an iarm, 
 Air an adhar os do chionn, 
 Air an talamh os do bhonn, 
 Air an dreighinn naoimh,' 
 
 and invoked also other things of earth and 
 elemental things. And not long ago I heard 
 a phrase used by a Gaelic preacher so nearly 
 in the words of a great writer that I thought 
 it was a quotation from some poem or legend- 
 ary tale familiar to me, and it was not for 
 some time, in " Who was it put wisdom on 
 the bee, teaching her the direction of the 
 fields of the air, and the homeway to the hive 
 on hillside or in glen; or who showed the sal- 
 mon to leave the depths of the sea, and come 
 up narrow streams; or who gave the raven 
 the old wisdom of the hills?". . .that I 
 recognised an unconscious iterance of Bacon's 
 noble measure: — "Who taught the raven in 
 a drowth to throw pebbles into an hollow 
 tree where she spied water, that the water 
 
 39
 
 The Lords of JJ^isdom 
 
 might rise so as she might come to it? Who 
 taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea 
 of air, and to find the way from a field in 
 flower a great way off to her hive? Who 
 taught the ant to bite every grain of corn 
 that she burieth in her hill, lest it should take 
 root and grow? " 
 
 In Ross, I was told by a man of the Gair- 
 loch, they speak ... in a folk-tale, I think 
 he said, but possibly colloquially ... of the 
 bees as " lords of wisdom " or " the little 
 kings of wisdom." It is a fine phrase, that 
 . . . the lords of wisdom: and not one to 
 forget. 
 
 Oftenest, however, the allusions to the bee 
 are, doubtless, to its " knowingness " rather 
 than to its "wisdom"; its skill in tracking 
 the pathless ways, its intuition of the hour 
 and season, of the way of the wind, of the 
 coming of rain, of gathering thunder. 
 
 But I recall from childhood a memory of 
 another kind: though I cannot say, now, 
 how much is old thought drowned in dreams, 
 or how much is due to the ceaseless teller of 
 tales who croons behind the heart and whis- 
 pers the old enchantment in the twilights of 
 the mind. 
 
 One day when the young Christ was nine 
 years old he saw Mary walking by a thicket. 
 
 40
 
 The Lords of \\'isdo)n 
 
 He ran and hid in the thicket, and sent three 
 wishes of love to her, and gave to each the 
 beat of two wings and the pulse of song. 
 The first rose on wings of blue and sank into 
 the sky, carrying a prayer of Mary. The 
 second rose on white wings and fled seawards 
 by the hills of the west, carrying a hope of 
 Mary. The third rose on wings of green, 
 and sank to the grasses, carrying a dream of 
 Mary. 
 
 Then a voice came from the thicket: a 
 voice so sweet as to send the birds to the 
 branches . . . chuireadh e na h'eoin 'an 
 crannaihh: — 
 
 "The Yellow Star, O Mary, to the bird of the blue 
 
 wing! . . . 
 The rainbow, O Mary, to the white bird! . . . 
 The wild bee, O Mary, to the green bird! . . ." 
 
 At that, Mary worshipped. " O God in the 
 thicket," she said, " sweet the songs and 
 great the beauty. But lo! the birds are gone." 
 Then Christ came out of the thicket, and 
 took her hand. " Mother," said the child, 
 " no trouble to your heart, dear, because of 
 the Yellow Star. Your prayer was that my 
 Father would not forget His secret promise. 
 The sun is steadfast, and so I say that the 
 Yellow Star is set upon your prayer. And 
 
 41
 
 The Lords of JVisdom 
 
 no trouble to your heart, Mother, because 
 of the Rainbow to tlie white bird: for your 
 hope was for the gates of the west and the 
 hidden gardens of Peace: and even now the 
 gates are open, and spices and bahns are on 
 the green wave that flows the long way east 
 of the sun and west of the moon. But as to 
 the wild bee. Mother, of that I cannot speak." 
 
 At that, Mary was sad, for she knew that 
 when a Druid of the east had told her to give 
 her son the friendship of the wind, of the 
 blown dust, of the grass, of the leaf, and of 
 the wild bee, she had done all those things 
 but the last. So she stood and wept. 
 
 Then the young Christ, her son, called to 
 a bee that was among the foam-white pas- 
 tures. 
 
 " What was your dream. Mother? " he 
 said. 
 
 " My dream," said Mary, " was that I 
 should know death at the last, for in the 
 flesh I am a woman, and that of me that is 
 mortal desireth death." 
 
 So Christ asked the wild bee. But the bee 
 said, " Can you see the nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine secret roads of the air?" 
 
 " No," said the child. 
 
 " It is on one of tl*ese roads," said the wild 
 bee, " that Mary's dream went." 
 
 42
 
 The Lords of Wisdom 
 
 So when Mary, sad at heart, but in this 
 thing only, went back to the house where 
 she dweh and made ready the supper for 
 that day's end, Christ gave friendship to the 
 wild bee, and became a bee, and floated above 
 the pastures. And when he came home at 
 twilight he knew all the secrets of the little 
 people of the air. 
 
 That night, after the meal was done, he 
 stood looking at Mary and Joseph. 
 
 " I have known many wisdoms," he said, 
 " but no wisdom like the wisdom of the wild 
 bee. But I have whispered to them a secret 
 thing, and through the years and the ages 
 they will not forget. And some of the 
 children of men shall hear the wild bees, and 
 many shall call upon them; and to that little 
 clan of the unwise and foolish, as they shall 
 ever be accounted, I will send the wild bees 
 of wisdom and of truth." 
 
 And Joseph said, " Are the bees then so 
 wise? 
 
 But Mary whispered: " I do not think it is 
 of the wild bees of the pastures that the 
 Christ my son speaks, but of the wild bees 
 of the Spirit." 
 
 Christ slept, and put his hand in Mary's, 
 and she had no fear: and that of her which 
 was of heaven deepened in joy, and that of 
 
 43
 
 The Lords of Wisdom 
 
 her which was mortal had peace. But Joseph 
 lay awake, and wondered why to a little clan 
 of those held foolish and unwise should come, 
 as secret wings in the dark, the sound and 
 breath of an ancient wisdom. 
 
 44
 
 THE WAYFARER 
 
 "This bright one who is Joy . . ." — The Katha 
 U panishad . 
 
 "... then Salome asked of Him, 'I low then may 
 the woman dwell with the man?' And Jesus an- 
 swered her : ' Eat all fruit save that which is bitter.' " 
 — Clement of Alexandria. 
 
 Among those in the home-straths of Argyll 
 who are now grey, and in the quiet places of 
 whose hearts old memories live green and 
 sweet, there must be some who recall that 
 day when a stranger came into Strath Nair, 
 and spoke of the life eternal. 
 
 This man, who was a minister of God, was 
 called James Campbell. He was what is 
 called a good man, by those who measure the 
 soul by inches and extol its vision by the 
 tests of the purblind. He had rectitude of 
 a kind, the cold and bitter thing that is not 
 the sunlit integrity of the spirit. And he 
 had the sternness that is the winter of a 
 frozen life. In his heart, God was made in 
 the image of John Calvin. 
 
 45
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 With this man the love of love was not 
 even a dream. A poor strong man he was, 
 this granite-clasped soul ; and the sunlight 
 faded out of many hearts, and hopes fell away 
 to dust before the blight of the east wind of 
 his spirit. 
 
 On the day after his coming to Strath Nair, 
 the new minister went from cottage to cot- 
 tage. He went to all, even to the hill-bothy 
 of Peter Macnamara the shepherd; to all save 
 one. He did not go to the cottage of Mary 
 Gilchrist, for the woman lived there alone, 
 with the child that had been born to her. In 
 the eyes of James Campbell she was evil. 
 His ears heard, but not his heart, that no 
 man or woman spoke harshly of her, for she 
 had been betrayed. 
 
 On the morning of the Bell, as some of 
 the old folk still call the morrow of the Sab- 
 bath, the glory of sunlight came down the 
 Strath. For many days rains had fallen, 
 hours upon hours at a time; or heavy, drop- 
 ping masses of vapour had hung low upon 
 the mountains, making the peaty uplands 
 sodden, and turning the grey rocks into a 
 wet blackness. By day and by night the 
 wind had moaned among the corries along 
 the high moors. There was one sound more 
 lamentable still : the incessant mehing of the 
 
 46
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 desolate, soaked sheep. The wind in the 
 corries, on the moors, among the pines and 
 larches; the plaintive cruel sorrow of the 
 wandering ewes; never was any other sound 
 to be heard, save the distant wailing of cur- 
 lews. Only, below all, as inland near the coast 
 one hears continuously the murmur of the 
 sea, so by night and day the Gorromalt 
 Water made throughout the whole reach of 
 Strath Nair an undertone as of a weary sigh- 
 ing. 
 
 But before nightfall on Saturday the rain 
 ceased, and the wet wind of the south sud- 
 denly revolved upon itself beyond the spurs 
 of Ben Maiseach. Long before the gloaming 
 had oozed an earth-darkness to meet the fall- 
 ing dark, the mists had lifted. One by one, 
 moist stars revealed hollows of violet, which, 
 when the moon yellowed the fir-tops, dis- 
 closed a vast untravelled waste of blue, 
 wherein slow silent waves of darkness con- 
 tinuously lapsed. The air grew full of loos- 
 ened fragrances; most poignantly, of the bog- 
 myrtle, the bracken, and the resinous sprays 
 of pine and larch. 
 
 Where the road turns at the Linn o' Gorro- 
 malt there is an ancient disarray of granite 
 boulders above the brown rushing water. 
 Masses of wild rose grow in that place. On 
 
 47
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 this June gloaming the multitudinous blooms 
 were like pale wings, as though the fabled 
 birds that live in rainbows, or the frail crea- 
 tures of the falling dew, had alit there, trem- 
 ulous, uncertain. 
 
 There that evening, the woman, Mary 
 Gilchrist, sat, happy in the silences of the 
 dusk. While she inhaled the fragrance of 
 the wild roses, as it floated above the 
 persistent green odour of the bent and 
 the wet fern, and listened to the noise of 
 Gorromalt Water foaming and surging out 
 of the linn, she heard steps close by her. 
 Glancing sidelong, she saw " the new min- 
 ister," a tall, gaunt man, with lank, iron- 
 grey hair above his white, stern, angular 
 face. 
 
 He looked at her, not knowing who she 
 was. 
 
 Mary Gilchrist did not speak. Her face, 
 comely before, had become beautiful of late. 
 " It's the sorrow," said the Strath folk simply, 
 believing what they said. 
 
 Perhaps the dark eyes under the shadowy 
 hair deepened. The minister, of course, 
 could not see this, could not have noted so 
 small a thing. 
 
 " God be with you," he said at last in 
 Gaelic, and speaking slow and searchingly; 
 
 48
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 " God be with you. This is a fine evening, 
 at last." 
 
 " God be with you, too, Mr. Campbell." 
 
 "So; you know who I am?" 
 
 " For sure, sir, one cannot Hve alone here 
 among the hills and not know who comes and 
 who goes. What word is there, sir, of the 
 old minister? Is he better?" 
 
 " No. He will never be better. He is 
 old." 
 
 When he spoke these words, James Camp- 
 bell uttered them as one drover answers an- 
 other when asked about a steer or a horse. 
 Mary Gilchrist noticed this, and with a barely 
 audible sigh shrank a little among the granite 
 boulders and wild roses. 
 
 The minister hesitated; then spoke again. 
 
 " You will be at the hill-preaching to-mor- 
 row? If fine, the Word will be preached on 
 the slope of Monanair. You will be there?" 
 
 " Perhaps." 
 
 He looked at her, leaning forward a little. 
 Her answer perturbed him. The Rev. James 
 Campbell thought no one should hesitate 
 before the free offering of the bitter tribula- 
 tion of his religion. Possibly she was one of 
 that outcast race who held by Popish abom- 
 inations. He frowned darkly. 
 
 "Are you of the true faith?" 
 
 49
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 " God alone knows that." 
 
 " Why do you answer mc hke that, wom- 
 an? There is but one true faith." 
 
 " Mr. Campbell, will you be for telling me 
 this? Do you preach the love of God? " 
 
 " I preach the love and hate of God, wom- 
 an! His great love to the elect, his burning 
 wrath against the children of Belial." 
 
 For a minute or more there was silence 
 between them. The noise of the torrent 
 filled the night. Beyond, all was stillness. 
 The stars, iimumerous now, flickered in pale 
 uncertain fires. 
 
 At last Mary Gilchrist spoke, whispered 
 rather: 
 
 " Mr. Campbell, I am only a poor woman. 
 It is not for me to be telling you this or that. 
 But for myself, I know, ay, for sure, I know 
 well, that everything God has to say to man 
 is to be said in three words — and these were 
 said long, long ago, an' before ever the Word 
 came to this land at all. An' these three 
 words are, ' God is love.' " 
 
 The speech angered the minister. It was 
 for him to say what was and what was not 
 God's message to man, for him to say what 
 was or was not the true faith. He frowned 
 blackly awhile. Then, muttering that he 
 would talk publicly of this on the morrow, 
 
 50
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 was about to pass on his way. Suddenly he 
 turned. 
 
 " What will your name be? If you will tell 
 me your name and where you live, my good 
 woman, I will come to you and show you 
 what fearful sinfulness you invite by speak- 
 ing of God's providence as you do." 
 
 " I am Mary Gilchrist. I live up at the 
 small croft called Annet-bhan." 
 
 Without a word, Mr. Campbell turned on 
 his heel, and moved whitheraway he was 
 bound. He was glad when he was round the 
 bend of the road, and going up the glen. 
 God's curse was heavy on those who had 
 made iniquity their portion. So this was the 
 woman Gilchrist, whom already that day he 
 had publicly avoided. A snare of the Evil 
 One, for sure, that wayside meeting had been. 
 
 It had angered the new minister to find 
 that neither man nor woman in Strath Nair 
 looked upon Mary Gilchrist as accursed. A 
 few blamed; all were sorrowful; none held 
 her an outcast. To one woman, who replied 
 that Mary was the sinned against, not the 
 sinner, that black misfortune had been hers, 
 Mr. Campbell answered harshly that the All- 
 wise God took no store by misfortune — that 
 at the last day no shivering human soul could 
 trust to that pica. Even when John Mac- 
 Si
 
 The ll'ayfarcr 
 
 allum, the hill-grieve, urged that, whether 
 Mr. Campbell were right or wrong, it was 
 clear nothing could be done, and would it not 
 be wisest for one and all to let bygones be 
 bygones, each man and woman remembering 
 that in his or her heart evil dwelled some- 
 where — even then the minister was wrought 
 to resentment, and declared that the woman, 
 because of her sin, ought to be driven out of 
 the Strath. 
 
 In the less than two days he had "been in 
 Strath Nair this man had brought upon that 
 remote place a gloom worse than any that 
 came out of the dark congregation of the 
 clouds. In many a little croft the bright 
 leaping flame of the pine-log or the comfort- 
 able glow of the peats had become lurid. 
 For the eye sees what the heart fears. 
 
 Thus it was that when the Sabbath came 
 in a glory of light, and the Strath, and the 
 shadowy mountains, and the vast sun-swept 
 gulfs of blue overhead took on a loveliness 
 as though on that very morrow God had re- 
 created the earth and the universe itself, thus 
 it was the people of the Strath were down- 
 cast. Poor folk, poor folk, that suffer so be- 
 cause of the blind shepherds. 
 
 But before that glory of a new day was 
 come, and while he was still striding with 
 
 52
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 bitter thoughts from the place where he had 
 left the woman Gilchrist, Mr. Campbell had 
 again cause for thought, for perplexed anger. 
 As he walked, he brooded sullenly. That 
 this woman, this lost one, had ventured to 
 bandy words with him! What was she, a 
 fallen woman, she with an unhallowed child 
 up there at her croft of Annet-bhan, that she 
 should speak to him, James Campbell, of 
 what God's message was! 
 
 It was then that he descried a man sitting 
 on a fallen tree by the side of the burn which 
 runs out of the Glen of the Willows. He 
 could not discern him clearly, but saw that he 
 was not one of the Strath-folk with whom he 
 had talked as yet. The man seemed young, 
 but weary; yes, for sure, weary, and poor 
 too. When he rose to his feet in courteous 
 greeting, Mr. Campbell could see that he 
 was tall. His long fair hair, and a mien and 
 dress foreign to the straths, made him appear 
 in the minister's eyes as a wayfarer from the 
 Lowlands. 
 
 " God he with you. Good evening," Mr. 
 Campbell exclaimed abruptly, in the English 
 tongue. 
 
 The man answered gravely, and in a low, 
 sweet voice, " God be with you." 
 
 " Will you be for going my way? " the min- 
 
 S3
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 istcr asked again, but now in the Gaelic, for 
 he knew this would be a test as to whether 
 the man was or was not of the Strath. 
 
 " No. I do not go your way. Peradven- 
 ture you will yet come my way, James Camp- 
 bell." 
 
 With a start of anger the minister took a 
 step closer. What could the man mean, he 
 wondered. Still, the words were so gently 
 said that hardly could he put offense into 
 them. 
 
 " I do not understand you, my good man," 
 he answered after a little ; " but I see you 
 know who I am. Will you be at the preach- 
 ing of the W^ord at Monanair to-morrow ; or, 
 if wet, at the house of God close by the Mill 
 o' Gorromalt?" 
 
 " What Word will you preach, James Camp- 
 bell ? " 
 
 " Look you, my man, you are no kinsman of 
 mine to be naming me in that way. I am Mr. 
 Campbell, the minister from Strathdree." 
 
 " What word will you preach, then, Mr. 
 Campbell? " 
 
 " What word ? There is but one Word. I 
 will say unto you, as unto all men who hearken 
 unto me on the morrow, that the Lord God is 
 a terrible God against all who trangress His 
 holy law, and that the day of repentance is 
 
 54
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 wellnigh gone. Even now it may be too late. 
 Our God is a jealous God, who doth not 
 brook delay. Woe unto those who in their 
 hearts cry out, ' To-morrow ! To-morrow ! ' " 
 
 For a brief while the man by the wayside 
 was still. When he spoke, his voice was gen- 
 tle and low. 
 
 " Rather do I believe the Word to be that 
 which the woman Mary Gilchrist said to you 
 yonder by the linn : that God is love." 
 
 And having said this, he moved quietly into 
 the dusk of the gloaming, and was lost to 
 sight. 
 
 James Campbell walked slowly on his way, 
 pondering perplexedly. Twice that evening 
 he had been told what the whole message of 
 God was — an evil, blasphemous, fair-seeming 
 doctrine, he muttered, more fit for the ac- 
 cursed courts of her who sitteth upon seven 
 hills than for those who are within the sound 
 of the Truth. And how had the false wisdom 
 come? He smiled grimly at the thought of 
 the wanton and the vagrant. 
 
 Before he slept that night he looked out 
 upon the vast and solemn congregation of the 
 stars. Star beyond star, planet beyond planet, 
 strange worlds all, immutably controlled, un- 
 relinquished (lay or ni^ht, age or aeon, shep- 
 herded among the infinite deeps, moving or- 
 
 55
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 derly from a dawn a million years far off to 
 a quiet fold a million years away, sheep shep- 
 herded beyond all change or chance, or no 
 more than the dust of a great wind blowing 
 behind the travelling feet of Eternity — what 
 did it all mean? Shepherded starry worlds, 
 or but the dust of Time? A Shepherd, or 
 Silence? But he who had the wisdom of God, 
 and was bearer of His message, turned to his 
 bed and slept, muttering only that man in his 
 wretchedness and sin was unworthy of those 
 lamps suspended there to fill his darkness for 
 sure, for God is merciful, but also to strike 
 terror and awe and deep despair into the 
 hearts of that innumerable multitude who go 
 down daily into a starless night. 
 
 And when he had thought thus, he slept: 
 till the fading bitterness of his thought was 
 lost too in the noise of Gorromalt Water. 
 
 II 
 
 A great stillness of blue prevailed on the 
 morrow. When sunrise poured over the shoul- 
 der of Ben Maiseach, and swept in golden 
 foam among the pines of Strath Nair, it was 
 as though a sweet, unknown, yet anciently 
 familiar pastoral voice was uplifted — a voice 
 
 56
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 full of solemn music, austerely glad, rejoicing 
 with the deep rejoicing of peace. 
 
 The Strath was as one of the valleys of 
 Eden. The rain-washed oaks and birches wore 
 again their virginal green ; the mountain-ash 
 had her June apparel ; the larches were like 
 the delicate green showers that fall out of the 
 rainbow upon opal-hued clouds at sunsetting; 
 even the dusky umbrage of the pines filled 
 slowly with light, as tidal sands at the flow. 
 
 The Gorromalt Water swept a blue arm 
 round the western bend of the Strath ; brown, 
 foam-flecked, it emerged from the linn, tu- 
 multuous, whirling this way and that, leaping, 
 surging. 
 
 In the wet loneroid, in the bracken, in the 
 thyme-set grass, the yellow - hammers and 
 stonechats remembered, perhaps for the last 
 time in this summer-end, their nesting songs, 
 their nestling notes. 
 
 From every green patch upon the hills the 
 loud, confused, incessant bleating of the ewes 
 and four-month lambs made a myriad single 
 crying — a hill-music sweet to hear. 
 
 From the Mill o' Gorromalt, too, where lit- 
 tle Sine Macrae danced in the sunlight, to 
 the turfed cottage of Mary Gilchrist high on 
 the furthest spur of Maiseach, where her 
 child stretched out his hands to catch the sun- 
 
 57
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 rays, resounded tlic laugliter of children. The 
 bhie smoke from the crofts rose Hke the breath 
 of stones. 
 
 A spirit of joy moved down the Strath. 
 Even thus of old, men knew the wayfaring 
 Breath of God. 
 
 It was then the new minister, the Inter- 
 preter, brought to the remembrance of every 
 man and woman in the Strath that the Lord 
 God moveth in shadow, and is a jealous God. 
 
 The water-bell of the Mill, that did duty on 
 the preaching Sabbaths, began its monotonous 
 call. Of yore, most who heard it had gone 
 gladly to its summons. When John Camp- 
 bell had preached the Word, all who heard 
 him returned with something of peace, with 
 something of hope. But now none went save 
 unwillingly ; some even with new suspicions 
 the one against the other, some with bitter 
 searchings, some with latent dark vanities that 
 could not bloom in the light. 
 
 And so the man delivered the Gospel. He 
 " preached the Word," there, on the glowing 
 hillside, where the sun shone with imperious 
 beauty. Was it that while he preached, the 
 sky darkened, that the hillside darkened, the 
 sunglow darkened, the sun itself darkened? 
 That the heart of each man and woman dark- 
 ened, that the mind of each darkened, that 
 
 58
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 every soul there darkened, yea, that even the 
 white innocence of the little children grew 
 dusked with shadow? And yet the sun shone 
 as it had shone before the tolling of the bell. 
 No cloud was in the sky. Beauty lay upon the 
 hillside; the Gorromalt Water leaped and 
 danced in the sunlight. Nothing darkened 
 from without. The darkening was from 
 within. 
 
 The Rev. James Campbell spoke for an 
 hour with sombre eloquence. Out of the deep 
 darkness of his heart he spoke. In that hour 
 he slew many hopes, chilled many aspirations, 
 dulled many lives. The old, hearing him, 
 grew weary of the burden of years, and yet 
 feared release as a more dreadful evil still. 
 The young lost heart, relinquished hope. 
 
 There was one interruption. An old man, 
 Macnamara by name, a shepherd, rose and 
 walked slowly away from where the congre- 
 gation sat in groups on the hillside. He was 
 followed by his two collie dogs, who had sat 
 patiently on their haunches while the minis- 
 ter preached his word of doom. 
 
 " Where will you be going, Peter Macna- 
 mara?" called Mr. Campbell, his voice dark 
 with the same shadow that was in the af- 
 front on his face. 
 
 " I am going up into the hills," the old man 
 
 59
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 answered quietly, " for I am too old to lose 
 sight of God." Then, amid the breathless 
 pause around him, he added : " And here, 
 James Campbell, I have heard no word of 
 Him." 
 
 " Go," thundered the minister, with out- 
 stretched arm and pointed finger. " Go, and 
 when thine hour cometh thou shalt lament in 
 vain that thou didst afifront the most High 
 God ! " 
 
 The people sat awed. A spell was upon 
 them. None moved. The eyes of all were 
 upon the minister. 
 
 And he, now, knew his power, and that 
 he had triumphed. He spoke to or of now 
 one, now another poor sinner, whose evil- 
 doing was but a weakness, a waywardness 
 to guide, not a cancer inassuageable. Sud- 
 denly he remembered the woman, Mary 
 Gilchrist. 
 
 Of her he spoke, till all there shuddered at 
 her sin, and shuddered more at the chastise- 
 ment of that sin. She was impure ; she dwelt 
 in the iniquity of that sin ; she sought neither 
 to repent nor to hide her shame. In that 
 great flame of hell, which she would surely 
 know, years hence — a hundred years hence — 
 a thousand, ten thousand, immeasurably re- 
 mote in eternity — she would know then, when 
 
 60
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 too late, that God was, indeed, a jealous God 
 — in unending torture, in ceaseless 
 
 But at that moment a low hush grew into a 
 rising crest of warning. The wave of sound 
 spilled at the minister's feet. He stared, 
 frowning. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked. 
 
 " Hush ! " some one answered. " There's 
 the poor woman herself coming this way." 
 
 And so it was. Over the slope beyond 
 Monanair Mary Gilchrist appeared. She was 
 walking slowly, and as though intent upon the 
 words of her companion, who was the way- 
 farer with whom Mr. Campbell had spoken 
 at the Glen of the Willows. 
 
 " Let her come," said the minister sullenly. 
 Then, suddenly, being strangely uplifted by 
 the cold night-wind in his heart, he resumed 
 his bitter sayings, and spoke of the woman 
 and her sin, and of all akin to her, from Mary 
 Magdalene down to this Mary Gilchrist. 
 
 " Ay ! " he cried, as the newcomers ap- 
 proached to within a few yards of where he 
 stood, " and it was only by the exceeding over- 
 whelming grace of God that the woman, Mary 
 Magdalene, was saved at all. And often, ay, 
 again and again, has the thought come to me 
 that the mercy was hers only in this life." 
 
 A shudder went through the Strath-folk, 
 
 6i
 
 The H'ayforer 
 
 but none stirred. A sudden weariness had 
 come upon the minister, who had, indeed, 
 spoken for a long hour and more. With a 
 hurried blessing that sounded like a knell, for 
 the last words were, " Beware the wrath of 
 God," Mr. Campbell sat back in the chair 
 which had been carried there for him. 
 
 Then, before any moved away, the stranger 
 who was with Mary Gilchrist arose. None 
 knew him. His worn face, with its large sor- 
 rowful eyes, his long, fair hair, his white 
 hands, were all unlike those of a man of the 
 hills ; but when he spoke it was in the sweet 
 homely Gaelic that only those spoke who had 
 it from the mother's lips. 
 
 " Will you listen to me, men and women of 
 Strath Nair? " he asked. He was obviously a 
 poor man, and a wanderer ; yet none there 
 who did not realise he was one to whom 
 all would eagerly listen. And so the man 
 preached the Word. He, too, spoke of God 
 and man, of the two worlds, of life and death, 
 of time and eternity. As he spoke, it was as 
 though he used, not the symbols of august and 
 immortal things, but, in a still whiteness of 
 simplicity, revealed these eternal truths them- 
 selves. 
 
 Was it that as he preached, the sky, the 
 hillside, the sunglow, the sun itself lightened ; 
 
 62
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 that the heart of each man and woman Hght- 
 ened, that the mind of each Hghtened, that 
 even the white innocence of the Httle children 
 grew more fair to see ? 
 
 The stranger, with the eyes of deep love and 
 tenderness — so deep and tender that tears 
 were in women's eyes, and the hearts of men 
 were strained — spoke for long. Simple words 
 he spoke, but none had ever been so moved. 
 Out of the white beauty of his soul he spoke. 
 In that hour he brought near to them many 
 fair immortal things, clothed in mortal beau- 
 ty ; stilled shaken hearts ; uplifted hopes grown 
 dim or listless. The old, hearing him, smiled 
 to think that age was but the lamp-lit haven, 
 reached at last, with, beyond the dim strait, 
 the shining windows of home. The young 
 grew brave and strong; in the obscure trou- 
 ble of each heart, new stars had arisen. 
 
 There was but one interruption. When the 
 wayfarer said that they who could not read 
 need not feel outcast from the Word of God, 
 for all the Scriptures could be interpreted in 
 one phrase — simply, " God is love " — the min- 
 ister, James Campbell, rose and passed slowly 
 through the groups upon the hillside. 
 
 " Listen," said the wayfarer, " while I tell 
 you the story of Mary Magdalene." 
 
 Then he told the story again as any may 
 
 63
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 read it in the Book, but with so loving words, 
 and with so deep a knowledge of the pitifiil- 
 ness of life, that it was a revelation to all 
 there. Tears were in the heart as well as in 
 the eyes of each man and woman. 
 
 Then slowly he made out of the beauty 
 of all their listening souls a wonderful 
 thing. 
 
 Mary Gilchrist had kneeled by his side, and 
 held his left hand in hers, weeping gently the 
 while. A light was about her as of one glori- 
 fied. It was, mayhap, the light from Him 
 whose living words wrought a miracle there 
 that day. 
 
 For as he spoke, all there came to know and 
 to understand and to love. Each other they 
 understood and loved, with a new love, a new 
 understanding. And not one there but felt 
 how sacred and beautiful in their eyes was 
 the redemption of the woman Mary Gilchrist, 
 who was now to them as Mary Magdalene 
 herself. 
 
 The wayfarer spoke to one and all by name, 
 or so to each it seemed ; and to each he spoke 
 of the sobbing woman by his side, and of the 
 greatness and beauty of love, and of the piti- 
 fulness of the sorrow of love, and of the two 
 flames in the shame of love, the white flame 
 and the red. The little green world, he said, 
 
 64
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 this little whirling star, is held to all the stars 
 that be, and these are held to every universe, 
 and all universes surmised and yet undreamed 
 of are held to God Himself, simply by a little 
 beam of light — a little beam of Love. It is 
 Love that is the following Thought of God. 
 And it is love that is of sole worth in human 
 life. This he said again and again, in fami- 
 liar words become new and wonderful. Thus 
 it was that out of the pain and sorrow, out of 
 the passion and grief and despair of the heart 
 of the woman Mary, and out of the heart of 
 every man, woman, and child in that place, he 
 wrouglit a vision of the Woman Mary, of 
 Mary the Mother, of Mary whose name is 
 Love, whose soul is Love, whose Breath is 
 Love, who is wherever Love is, sees all and 
 knows all and understands all ; who has no 
 weariness, and who solves all impurities and 
 evils, and turns them into pure gold of love ; 
 who is the Pulse of Life, the Breath of Eter- 
 nity, the Soul of God. 
 
 And when he had ceased speaking there was 
 not one there — no, not one — who could see 
 the glory of the beauty of his face because of 
 the mist of tears that were in all eyes. 
 
 None saw him go. Quietly he moved down 
 the path leading to the green birches at 
 the hither end of the Glen of the Willows. 
 
 65
 
 The Wayfarer 
 
 There he turned, and for a brief while 
 gazed silent, with longing blue eyes full of 
 dreatn, and pale face stilled by the ecstasy of 
 prayer. 
 
 All stood beholding him. Slowly he raised 
 his arms. Doves of peace flew out of his 
 heart. In every heart there a white dove of 
 peace nested. Mayhap he who stood under 
 the green birches heard what none whom he 
 had left on the hill-slope could hear — the 
 whispering, the welling, the uplifted voice of 
 spirits redeemed from their mortal to their 
 immortal part. 
 
 Vox suddenly he smiled. Then he bowed 
 his head, and was lost in the green gloom, and 
 was seen no more. 
 
 But in the gloaming, in the dewy gloaming 
 of that day, Mary Gilchrist walked alone, with 
 her child in her arms, in the Glen of the Wil- 
 lows. And once she heard a step behind her, 
 and a hand touched her shoulder. 
 
 " Mary ! " said the low, sweet voice she 
 knew so well, " Mary! Mary! " 
 
 Whereupon she sank upon her knees. 
 
 "Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God!" broke 
 from her lips in faint, stammering speech. 
 
 For long she kneeled trembling. When she 
 rose, none was there. White stars hung 
 among the branches of the dusky green pyra- 
 
 66
 
 The ll^ayfarer 
 
 mids of the Glen of the Willows. On the 
 hillside beyond, where her home was, the 
 moonlight lay, quiet waters of peace. She 
 bowed her head, and moved out of the sha- 
 dow into the light. 
 
 67
 
 QUEENS OF BEAUTY 
 
 " Empires become drifted sand, and the queens of 
 great loveliness are dust. They shall not come 
 again, towered cities of the sands, palaces built upon 
 the sea, roses of beauty that blossomed for an hour 
 on the wind that is for ever silently and swiftly 
 moving out of darkness and turning a sunlit wing 
 and then silently moving into darkness again. But 
 the wind is changeless in that divine continual ad- 
 vent, and the sunlit wing is that immortal we call 
 Beauty, the mirage hung upon the brows of life." — 
 The Ancient Beauty. 
 
 There is a Gaelic saying — both in legend- 
 ary lore and folk-song — of the beauty of the 
 " Woman of Greece," of " the Greek woman," 
 na mna Greuig. 
 
 It is, of course, Helen of Troy who is 
 meant. I do not know if that story of love 
 and death and beauty has survived in some 
 measure intact — that is, perfect in episode if 
 fragmentary in sequence — or if it exist only 
 in a few luminous words, or merely in allu- 
 sion. Something of the old romance of Hel- 
 las, something of the complex Roman mythus, 
 
 68
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 have come down on the GaeHc tide, little 
 altered, or altered only in the loss of the 
 temporal and accidental. But they are some- 
 times hard to trace, and often are as lost in 
 the old Gaelic legendary lore as the fragrance 
 of moor-rose or orchis in the savour of wild- 
 honey. 
 
 " Who were the three most beautiful wom- 
 en of old?" I asked a man, a native of the 
 Gairloch of Ross, one day last summer. We 
 were old friends, for we had often been out 
 on the sea together in rough weather and 
 calm, and I had ever found him somewhat like 
 the sea in this, that he could be silent all day 
 and yet never be other than companionable, 
 and Iiad mysterious depths, and sudden reve- 
 lations. So I was always glad to sail with 
 him when the chance came. 
 
 On this day — it was between Gometra and 
 Ulva, where the fierce tides of the Atlantic 
 sometimes cast up cones from the pine-woods 
 of Maine, or driftwood of old wreckage from 
 the Labrador headlands — we were in a bata- 
 da-chrointi, or wherry, and spun before the 
 wind as though swept along by the resistless 
 hand of Manan himself. The sea was a ju- 
 bilation of blue and white, with green in the 
 shaken tents of the loud-murmuring nomad 
 host of billows. The sky was cloudless in 
 
 69
 
 Quci-ns of Beauty 
 
 the zenith, and a deep blue; of a pale blue in 
 the north and east; but in the south a moun- 
 tainous range of saffron and salmon-pink 
 cloud rose solidly above the horizon-cutting 
 isles. A swirl of long-winged terns hung 
 above a shoal of mackerel fry, screaming as 
 they splashed continually into the moving, 
 dazzle. Far in the blue depths overhead I 
 saw two gannets, like flecks of foam that the 
 wind had lifted. And that was all: not an- 
 other bird, not a boat, no trailed smoke down 
 by lona or over by Tiree, not a single sail, 
 stispended on the horizon like the wing of 
 the fabled condor that moves but does not 
 stir. 
 
 " Who were the three most beautiful wom- 
 en of old?" 
 
 He took a time to answer. He stared 
 down into the green water slipping past, as 
 though seeking there some floating image 
 of a dim, beautiful face, as though listening 
 for some sigh, some cadence, from the old 
 lost world, from Tir-fo-Tuinne, the Land-un- 
 der-wave, the drowned sleeping world with 
 the moving walls of green and the moving 
 roof of blue. 
 
 *' I do not know," he said at last. " I do 
 hot remember. There are many songs, many 
 tales. But I've heard this: that there will 
 
 70
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 be seven lovelinesses of beauty in a wom- 
 an's beauty . . . the beauty of Malveen, the 
 daughter of Oisin ; the beauty of Deirathray, 
 the love of Finn; the beauty of Yssul of the 
 North ; the beauty of Emer, the wife of Cuch- 
 ulain ; the beauty of Gwannole, the Queen of 
 the Saxons ; the beauty of the Greek woman, 
 for whom all men strove and died ; the beauty 
 of the woman who came out of the south." 
 And after he had spoken I thought that in 
 the first of these is the beauty of sorrowful 
 things; and in the second, the beauty of great 
 love; and in the third, the beauty of wildness; 
 and in the fourth, the beauty of faith; and in 
 the fifth, the beauty lit at the torches of 
 death ; and in the sixth, the beauty that fires 
 men to take up spears and die for a name ; 
 and in the seventh, the beauty of the poets 
 that take up harp and sorrow and the wan- 
 dering road. 
 
 Once before, elsewhere, I had asked this 
 question, and had a different answer, though 
 it held three names of those names now said. 
 " Well, now," said my informant, an old wom- 
 an of Arisaig, " and who, they, but the Sweet 
 Love of the Sons of Usneach (I'sna), and the 
 wife of the Hero of Madness, and the fair 
 Woman of (ireece." .She knew all about 
 Deirdre, or Dearshul or Darshool, the be- 
 
 71
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 loved of Finn, and the bride of the eldest of 
 the Sons of Usna; and all about Enier, the 
 wife of Cuchulain, the hero of the Gael; and 
 of how the white beauty and great love of 
 these women live for ever in song and story, 
 and in the passion of women's hearts and in 
 the shaken minds of men. But she knew 
 nothing of " the fair woman of Greece," nor 
 of that land itself, thinking indeed it was " a 
 great and glorious town, a shining and pros- 
 perous and kingly town, in the southlands of 
 Ispan (Spain)." 
 
 Of some of those of whom my boatman 
 spoke, he knew little. Of Malveen (Malm- 
 hin) he knew only that her name sang like a 
 shell in the cadence of an old iorram, or boat- 
 song, of the Middle Isles: and he had heard 
 the story of Oisin and Malvina in Dr. Clerk's 
 Gaelic variant of Ossimi, told often at this or 
 that ceilidh by the winter-iire. Darshul, or 
 Deirdre, he called Darathray ; the only occa- 
 sion on which I have heard the name of that 
 fair torch of beauty so given. Her story he 
 knew well. " The best of all the tales that 
 are told," he said. Of Yssul he knew noth- 
 ing, but that she was the love of a king's son, 
 and that she and Drostan lie below the foam 
 of a wild sea. Gwannole, the queen of the 
 Saxons, he knew to be Arthur's queen, and 
 
 72
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 he had heard of Mordred, king of the Picts, 
 though not of Lancelot. He knew Helen's 
 name, and had a confused memory of the 
 names of those who loved and died for her, 
 and of the fate of Troy: all got from his 
 mother, who was the daughter of a minister 
 of Inverness. He knew nothing of " the 
 woman who came out of the south." When 
 pressed, he said with a smile, ** Her name 
 will be Ashlyenn " (Aisling, a Dream), " I'm 
 thinking." But later he spoke suddenly. It 
 was when my thoughts had wandered else- 
 where, and when I was watching the cloud- 
 spray circling over the Treshnish Isles, with 
 two winds meeting: and for a moment I could 
 not recover the clue to what lay in his words. 
 
 " Perhaps the woman out of the south 
 would be the woman of the woods, that Mer- 
 lyn loved, and who put him under spells of 
 silence and sleep. She had the wild beauty, 
 they say. She was not a woman of a man 
 and a woman, but the deathless one of the 
 nameless folk and a woodwoman. She is in 
 songs and tales. It may be that woman that 
 had the loveliness, for no man will ever have 
 seen her but will always sing of her." 
 
 I think, however, that this last legendary 
 beauty is older, and more native to the west- 
 ern Gael. I think, though it is only a sur- 
 
 73
 
 Qurois of Beauty 
 
 niise, that if not Niamh, Oisin's beautiful 
 love of the other world, it must be of one to 
 whose surpassing beauty there is allusion in 
 the most ancient Gaelic chronicles, and of 
 whom, doubtless, the wandering bards of 
 Eire and Alba long sang as of the Rose of 
 Beauty. " But the fairest of the women who 
 came into Erin with the sons of Milidh was 
 Eeale, the wife of Luaidh, son of that Ith 
 who had been slain by the Tuath de Danann, 
 and who had lived alone in the western 
 regions of Espan, in an inland valley, until 
 she was wooed by Luaidh, the son of Ith, sur- 
 named Laidceann, for his love of poetry: and 
 men said concerning Feale that she was too 
 beautiful to live." 
 
 In a verse rescued from oblivion by Alas- 
 dair Carmichael of Uist, these and other 
 names of beauty, pagan and mythological and 
 Christian, are strangely blended. 
 
 Is tu gleus na Mnatha Sithe, 
 Is tu beus na Bride bithe, 
 Is tu creud na Moire mine, 
 Is tu gniomh na mnatha Greuig, 
 Is tu sgeimh na h'Eimir aluinn, 
 Is tu mein na Dearshul agha, 
 Is tu meann na Meabha laidir, 
 Is tu taladh Binne-bheul. 
 
 [Thine is the skill of the Fairy Woman, and the vir- 
 tue of St. Briget, and the faith of Mary the Mild, and 
 
 74
 
 Queens of Beauty 
 
 the gracious way of the Greek woman, and the beauty 
 of lovely Enter, and the tenderness of heartsweet Deir- 
 dre, and the courage of Maev the Great Queen (lit., the 
 strong), and the charm of Mouth o' Music] 
 
 The names stir. What a great thing in 
 beauty is this, that after kingdoms are fallen 
 and nations are drifted away like scattered 
 leaves, and even heroic names are gone upon 
 the wind, a memory of loveliness endures, as 
 a light that time cannot touch, as a fragrance 
 that death cannot reach. This is the immor- 
 tality of the poet's dream. It is a great destiny 
 to raise thrones and win dominions and build 
 kingly cities. But cities can be ground into 
 dust, and dominions can be as palaces built 
 upon the sea, and the highest throne can 
 become as the last yellow leaf shaken in the 
 winds of autumn. But great beauty . . . 
 that is a memory for ever. When one of 
 the queens of a troubling loveliness dies, it 
 is only as it were a mortal hour of beauty 
 that is gathered back into the night: all of 
 what is immortal passes into the dreams of 
 men, is the beauty beyond beauty in the 
 perfect song, the inelTable suspense in music. 
 It endures, that immortal memory, that im- 
 mortal dream. It is whispered and told and 
 communicated in every .Spring. It is on 
 every wind of the west. 
 
 75
 
 ORPHEUS AND OISIN 
 
 "They asked me if I had seen a white fawn in my 
 dreams, and whether the trees of the secret valley 
 had advised me to love." — Chateaubriand, Atala. 
 
 A friend wrote to me some time ago to say 
 that he had seen a quaint tale in old Scots 
 called " Orpheo and Heurodys." I imagine 
 this to be the reprint in Laing's Remains of 
 Ancient Scottish Poetry. But, also, he asked 
 if I had come upon any Gaelic variant of the 
 tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. I had not, 
 nor have I. True, I have heard that a tale of 
 one Heurodys has been told, now here, now 
 there. But I have not met any who has 
 heard it told. That a variant of the story of 
 Orpheus and Eurydice survives, however, 
 seems fairly certain. But one would suspect 
 a modern derivation, if it were too pat and 
 retained too strong a savour of the original. 
 There can be an erring on the other side also, 
 however. The late ferrymaster at lona once 
 told an English lady who was seeking for 
 folklore (and made a book of her strange 
 
 76
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 gleanings, for she had a singular method of 
 gathering, in that she would tell a tale and 
 then ask if the listener had ever heard of its 
 like) that he had a tale that would interest 
 her; for, he said, though it was not of a king's 
 son in the ancient days who went to hell to 
 seek his love, his story was of one Christina 
 Ross, who believed she was loved by the 
 prince of darkness, and one day, sure enough, 
 she was seen no more. At that, her lover, 
 Rory M'Killop, the piper from Mull, disap- 
 peared too. But months on months later he 
 came again, and said he had been in Gehenna: 
 and that he saw Christina and told her to fol- 
 low his piping and all would be well, but if 
 she stopped to take sup or bite, or called to 
 him that he should once look back, it would 
 be o'er the hills an' far away he would be, and 
 she forlorn for evermore. And the M'Killop 
 had played well, as he himself averred: none 
 ever better. But Kirsty Ross had stopped 
 to pull a fine red apple from a branch, and. 
 forgetting, had called to him, so that he had 
 looked back — and the next moment there 
 was a great gulf between them, he on the 
 edge of the world again, and she there for 
 ever, with a heap o' dust in her hand. 
 
 Anrl when I asked him afterwards why he 
 had told such a farrago of nonsense, for I 
 
 77
 
 Orpltcus and Oisin 
 
 knew he had but given tongue to the mo- 
 ment's whim, he said, " What harm in that 
 now? ... for sure the lady had her story as 
 she wanted, and as for the truth, well, didn't 
 Rory M'Killop of Heiskir go off with Kirsty 
 Ross, and come back a year later, saying he 
 had been in the Americas, and his wife dead 
 now, God rest her." 
 
 But I have wondered often if the ancient 
 Gaelic tale of Oisin and Niamh — the later-life 
 tale of the Son of Fionn and his otherworld 
 love, in the days of his broken years and 
 gathered sorrows — has not in it the heart of 
 the old Greek story. Rather, it may have in 
 it, not an echo, but a like strain of the primi- 
 tive mythopoeic imagination: as the feather- 
 wrack on the rocky shores of Ithaka and that 
 gathered on Ultima Thule are one and the 
 same. 
 
 For Oisin, too, went to the otherworld to 
 gather love, and to bring back his youth; but 
 even as Orpheus had to relinquish Eurydice 
 and youth and love, because he looked to 
 take away with him what Aidoneus had al- 
 ready gathered to be his own, so Oisin, the 
 Orpheus of the Gael, had to come away from 
 the place of defeated dreams, and see again 
 the hardness and bitterness of the hither- 
 world, with age and death as the grey fruit 
 
 78
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 on the tree of life. And if the end of the one 
 is hidden — for some say he was slain by the 
 jealous gods, who love not that any soul 
 should whisper the secret of their mysteries, 
 and some that he was destroyed by the in- 
 furiated bacchanals, and some that he wan- 
 dered lonely till his sorrow came over him 
 like snow, so that he lay down beneath it and 
 slept and was no more seen of men — so too 
 is hidden the end of the other. For Oisin 
 did not dwell evermore in the«pleasant land 
 whither his youth had gone and he to seek 
 it, but came back to find the world grown 
 old, and all he had loved below the turf, and 
 the taunts of the monks of Patrick in his ears, 
 and the bell of Christ ringing in the glens and 
 upon the leas. Nor does any know of his 
 death, though the Gaels of the North believe 
 that he looked his last across the grey seas 
 from Drumadoon in Arran, where that Ava- 
 lon of the Gael lies between the waters of 
 Argyll and the green Atlantic wave. 
 
 It may well be that the old Greek tale of 
 Orpheus seeking Eurydicc in the kingdom 
 of things ended and gathered, and the old 
 Gaelic tale of Oisin and Niamh, and the 
 mediaeval tale of Ponce da Leon, and the 
 folk-tale (told me again, for in one form or 
 another I have heard it often, a year-back on 
 
 79
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 green Lismore) of the shepherd of the isles 
 who loved a soulless, smiling woman of the 
 otherworld and followed his fay into the dark- 
 ness of the earth below a leafless thorn, and 
 was lost to the world for months, till he was 
 seen one May-day walking among the yellow 
 broom crowned with hawthorn and with a 
 rowan branch in his hand, smiling and dumb, 
 and with eyes cold as cold blue water — it may 
 well be that these legendary tales are but the 
 ever-changing mortal utterance of what is 
 unchanging, the varying accent of the un- 
 varying desire of the soul, to recapture that 
 which has gone away upon the wind, or to 
 take from the brows of the wind of what is to 
 come the secret coronals of strange blossom 
 wet still with immortal dews. It may well 
 be that each is but an expression of the need 
 for youth, which is the passion of life, and 
 the instinct of the imagination to breathe it- 
 self into a passionate moment of emotion, and 
 the impulse of all the emotions and all the 
 passions. 
 
 Orpheus loved, and Eurydice was gathered 
 untimely as a flower in its beauty; but are we 
 not all lovers as Orpheus' was, loving what is 
 gone from us for ever, and seeking it vainly 
 in the solitudes and wilderness of the mind, 
 and crying to Eurydice to come again? And 
 
 80
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 are we not all foolish as Orpheus was, hop- 
 ing by the agony of love and the ecstasy of 
 will to win back Eurydice; and do we not 
 all fail, as Orpheus failed, because we forsake 
 the way of the otherworld for the way of 
 this world? 
 
 Many of us, do we not love Niamh, and 
 come again from enchantment, and find all 
 things grown old, the apples of Avalon be- 
 come sere without and full of dust within? 
 Many of us, do we not follow a fay who has 
 stolen our joy, to go crowned a brief while 
 with illusions, or to hold in nerveless hands 
 the disenchanted wand of the imagination? 
 Many of us, are we not continually adventur- 
 ing upon a quest as futile as that of Ponce 
 da Leon, who, for the sake of a dream, was 
 blind to the other founts of youth that were 
 within his reach, and so forsook all that he 
 might cross the world to find what was in his 
 own mind? 
 
 Whether the story of Oisin, the Gaelic 
 Orpheus, be a wanderer from archaic myth- 
 ology, or arose clanless among the Gaelic 
 hills — from moonseed, as is said of the tufted 
 canna that floats its fairy snow-beards on the 
 moorland air — matters little. The tale, at 
 least, has a beauty that is certainly its own. 
 Oisin, also, was the son of one who loved a 
 
 8i
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 woman of the deathless folk; for as the 
 Thracian king CEagnis loved Calliope, of 
 the divine race, so Fionn, the Agamemnon 
 of the Ci^c], loved one of the Hidden People 
 — a daughter of the people of the mounds, as 
 we would say, of the Sidhe. Each became 
 the arch-poet of his race: both were taught 
 and inspired by divine genius, the Thracian 
 by Apollo, the Gael by Angus of the Sun- 
 locks — Angus Og, the Balder of the west. 
 
 The dwellers in the underworld and all the 
 great kings and lords in Hades knew the en- 
 chantment of the lute of Orpheus ; and when 
 Oisin went to the otherworld with Niamh, 
 the sleeping kings and the spellbound heroes 
 and all the secret clans of Midir were thrilled 
 with wonder, and rejoiced with proud laugh- 
 ter. The one went out with the Argonauts, 
 and crossed the foam of the Symplegades, 
 and beheld war as a pageant: the other went 
 with the clans of the Fianna, and crossed 
 the wild waters of the Moyle, and at Moytura 
 saw great tides of spears and swords flashing 
 upon a sea of red, and beheld nations meet 
 and dwindle and perish, so that when the sun 
 set It was as though it dragged away the 
 land in great cloths of crimson, dripping like 
 a veil over the untraversed sea and all the 
 battle-worn shores of the west. 
 
 82
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 Both loved with great, unforgetting love, 
 and in the end knew weariness and death: 
 and the one, it is said, died in a Thracian 
 valley, calling upon his lost love in the un- 
 derworld; and the other, it is said, died by 
 Drumadoon in the isle of Arran of Argyll, 
 old and blind, with his hand in the hand of 
 Malveen, but on his lips this sigh to his long 
 lost, forbidden love ... Niamh, thy kisses 
 were sweet as the blue joyous zvine of the wave 
 to the Sea-zuind. 
 
 Some of the oral legends have it that the 
 mother of Oisin was a mortal, bewitched by a 
 woman of the Sidhe: others, that she was 
 herself Fionn's leannan-shee, or fairy-love 
 . . . and I have heard her called Niamh, 
 Moan, Liban, and other sweet perilous names. 
 
 But the common legend ^ is that Fionn 
 wearied of his white love, and wedded a 
 daughter of a great lord of the Ultonians. 
 Then " the other " put the spell of the Fath- 
 fith on her, so that she was changed to a 
 hinrl of the hill. 
 
 ' So well summarized, in particular, by Mr. Alas- 
 dair Carmichael — and an idea of how difficult a 
 summary sometimes is may be gained from the fact 
 that the late Mr. Campbell of Tirce had gathered 
 and sent to Mr. Carmichael no fewer than fourteen 
 variants of the First Song of Oisin, the Song to his 
 Hind-.Mothcr 
 
 83
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 When her hour was come, she swam the 
 deep water of Loch-nan-'ceall that is near 
 Arisaig in West Argyll, to the little isle in 
 it that is called Sanndraigh. 
 
 And there her child and Fionn's child was 
 born. When the swoon of the birthing was 
 past, she forgot, and that of her which was a 
 hind licked the brow of her young. Then she 
 remembered, and licked no more; but, look- 
 ing, saw that though the enchantment lay 
 upon her still, the spell was broken for her 
 little son. But hair like a fawn's hair grew 
 upon the brow she had licked: and that is 
 why the youngest and fairest of Fionn's sons 
 was given the name of Oisin, the Fawn. 
 
 The child was taken to his father's Dun, 
 and the hind leapt away through the bracken, 
 and swam the loch, and took to the hills — for 
 the fear of Bran and Luath and Breacleit, 
 Fionn's great hounds, was upon her. 
 
 Oisin and his mother did not meet again 
 for years upon years. One day, when pass- 
 ing from boyhood to youth, he went with the 
 hunters to the hill of the mountain-deer, but 
 because of a mist he strayed and found him- 
 self at last alone and in a solitary place, a 
 green glen set among leaning blue hills, with 
 water running from a place of high piled 
 rocks. He saw a hind pasturing there, more 
 
 84
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 graceful and beautiful than any deer he had 
 ever seen : so great was its beauty that he 
 looked at it as a girl who had never seen an 
 image in water might look at her mirrored 
 face in a pool. Then the spirit of the hunts- 
 man stirred within him, and he lifted his 
 spear. The hind looked at him, with sad 
 wistful eyes, brown as hill-water, and slowly 
 he lowered the spear. 
 
 " Thrust me not with thy spear, Oisin," 
 said the hind, " for I am thy mother that bore 
 thee on the isle Sanndraigh in Loch-nan- 
 'ceall. Alone I see thee, and hungry and 
 weary. Come back with me now to my 
 home, fawn of my heart." 
 
 They went slowly, side by side, across the 
 green grass to a great rock that in slope was 
 the height of nine men, and was smooth as 
 the blade of a sword. The wife of Fionn 
 breathed upon it, and a hollow was come, and 
 when they had gone in there was no hollow 
 but only a great rock with a slope that was 
 in size the height of nine men and was as 
 smooth as the blade of a sword. 
 
 Then, to his exceeding joy, Oisin saw that 
 his mother was spellbound no more, but was 
 a woman, and lovely and young. When they 
 had kissed long with great love, she gave him 
 food to eat and sweet hcathcr-alc to drink, 
 
 85
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 and then sang; song^s of a music sweeter than 
 any he had ever heard. 
 
 For three days it was thus with them, with 
 the sleep of peace at night, where was no 
 night, and the waking of joy at morn, where 
 was no morn, but where Time lay asleep, as 
 the murmur of the unresting sea in the 
 curved iiollows of a shell. 
 
 Then Oisin remembered Fionn and the 
 hunters, and said he would go out to see 
 them, and set their sorrow at rest. But be- 
 fore he went out of that spellbound place he 
 made a song for his mother, the first of the 
 songs of Oisin, that would be a sian to guard 
 her from the hounds and spears of Fionn and 
 his hunters. Then once more the hollow 
 opened in the smooth cliff of the great rock, 
 and he was in the glen again among the blue 
 hills, and saw a kestrel flying at a great 
 height as though scorning the spread green- 
 ness of the land and the spread greyness of 
 the wrinkled sea. And when Oisin was come 
 again to the DiJn of Fionn, there was great 
 wonder as well as great joy, for it was not 
 three hours as it seemed, nor j'et three days, 
 as he thought, but three years, that he had 
 been in the secret place of the rocks, and 
 known the food and drink and music of en- 
 chantment. 
 
 86
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 In truth, this tale, as the tale of the other 
 Orpheus, is but an ancient and familiar strain 
 which is the burthen or refrain of unnum- 
 bered songs of the spirit, in every race, in 
 every age: as in every literature, in every 
 age, one may hear the same sigh as in the old 
 Scots song: 
 
 "For I'm wearied wi' hunting, 
 An' fain would lie doon." 
 
 These old myth-covering tales — whether we 
 call them Greek or Aryan or what else — are 
 as the grass that will grow in any land : and 
 the grass of the Vale of Tempe or on the 
 slope of Helicon does not differ from the 
 grass in green Aghadoe or that on the scarps 
 of Hecla by the Hebrid seas. It w€is but 
 the other day I told an eager listener a tale 
 of one Faruane (Fear-naine, a " green man ") 
 who lived " in the old ancient days " in a 
 great oak, and had so lived for generations — 
 for a honeycomb of ages, as the phrase runs 
 — and did nothing but watch the clouds sail 
 above the branches and the shadows glide 
 between the tree-boles, and live on sun- 
 light and dew. Then one day, as he was 
 walking lightly on the moss, he saw another 
 world come into the old untroubled wood, 
 
 87
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 and that " world " was a woman. She was 
 young as Nianih the undying, and beautiful 
 as Emer the fair, and bewitching as Liban of 
 the spells; and Faruane grew weary of his 
 calm immortal dream, and longed unwittingly 
 for sorrow and death, for he did not know 
 these companions of the soul, nor even that 
 he longed, nor could he know that a soul was 
 other than a perishable thing of the earth as 
 he himself was. So he moved softly in the 
 sun-warmed dusk of the branches, and came 
 upon the girl (whose name was Moan) among 
 the fern where she stood like a fawn with 
 wide eyes. He was too beautiful for her to 
 fear, and too beautiful for her not to love, 
 and though Moan knew that to give herself 
 in love to a wood-spirit was to live three 
 years in a dream and then die in body and to 
 go away in soul, she put from her all desire 
 of the things she knew and let Faruane kiss 
 her on the lips and take her hand and lead 
 her into the green glades, to be forgotten, 
 beyond the murmuring forest, save in a song 
 that lived like a breath of remembered pas- 
 sion in the gloamings of a thousand years. 
 
 But for three years Faruane and Moan 
 knew the Spring rapture and the Summer 
 joy and the Autumn peace and the Winter 
 sleep of the children of earth. She remem- 
 
 88
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 bered nothing, for her soul was filled with 
 beauty; and she desired nothing, for her 
 mind was hushed with dreams and honied 
 with content. 
 
 But when she died, which was as a child 
 falling asleep in a shadowy place of moss and 
 rustling leaves, Faruane faded from the light, 
 and his death was as a sunbeam passing from 
 a green branch; for he had seen her soul 
 stoop and kiss him and go away to its own 
 place, where he could not follow. But they 
 had daughters, and these lived to the fulness 
 of the green hour, which is calm and unaging 
 through many generations of our fevered 
 mortal day. They in turn bore children to 
 other sons of the greenness, the semblance of 
 Moan but in all else of the seed of Faruane; 
 so that they are like the offspring of the clan 
 of men, but fear them and love them not, and 
 may not dwell with them nor near them, nor 
 wed with them. But they love the shadows 
 of leaves, and the sun ripens them as fruit, 
 and they are forgotten, and have no dreams 
 but the dream that is their life. 
 
 And what, then, is this fantasy of a dream- 
 ing mind in the west but kin to the sweet 
 fantasy of a dreaming mind in Hellas of old 
 — though the island poet, or singer of Arcady 
 with a silver flute, making beauty in the hot 
 
 89
 
 Orpheus and Oisin 
 
 noon by a plane-shadowed fount, as a child 
 makes a coronal of daisies and wild thyme, 
 called Moan Merope, and sung of her wood- 
 lover as Dryas ? I'^or both knew of the shy 
 green god of the oak, and had seen the off- 
 spring of him and the mortal woman of his 
 love, the fawn-eyed, withdrawing Dryads of 
 the haunted trees. 
 
 It is in tiiis sense that the things of the 
 imagination do not die, but change with the 
 changing hours — as the wild parsley and the 
 hyacinth come into the woods at the first 
 flute-notes of April, and were as young last 
 year, or will be under the yet unfallen dews, 
 as they were a thousand years ago, in Arcad- 
 ian valleys or in the glens of the Gael. 
 
 90
 
 THE AWAKENING OF ANGUS OG 
 
 One noon, among the hills, Angus Og lay 
 in sleep. It was a fair place where he lay, 
 with the heather about him and the bracken 
 with its September gold in it. On the 
 mountain-slope there was not a juniper tall 
 enough, not a rock big enough, to give poise 
 to a raven: all of gold bracken and purple 
 heather it was, with swards of the paler ling. 
 The one outstanding object was a mountain 
 ash. Midway it grew, and leaned so that 
 when the sun was in the east above Ben 
 Monach, the light streamed through the 
 feather-foliage upon the tarn just beneath: 
 so leaned, that when the sun was on the sea- 
 verge of Ben Mheadhonach in the west, the 
 glow, lifting upward over leagues of yellow 
 bracken, turned the rowan-feathers to the 
 colour of brass, and the rowan-berries into 
 bronze. 
 
 The tarn was no more than a boulder-set 
 hollow. It was fed by a spring that had 
 slipped through the closing granite in a dim 
 far-off age, and had never ceased to put its 
 
 91
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 cool lips round the little rocky basin of that 
 heather-pool. At the south end the ling fell 
 over its marge in a curling wave: under the 
 mountain-ash there was a drift of moss and 
 fragrant loneroid, as the Gaels call the bog- 
 myrtle. 
 
 Here it was, through the tides of noon, 
 that Angus Og slept. The god was a flower 
 there in the sunflood. His hair lay upon the 
 green loneroid, yellow as fallen daffodils in 
 the grass. Above him was the unfathomable 
 sea of blue. Not a cloudlet drifted there, 
 nor the wandering shadow of an eagle soar- 
 ing from a mountain-eyrie or ascending in 
 wide gyres of flight from invisible lowlands. 
 
 Around him there was the same deep 
 peace. Not a breath stirred the rowan- 
 leaves, or the feathery shadows these cast 
 upon his white limbs: not a breath frayed 
 the spires of the heather on the ridges 
 of Ben Monach: not a breath slid along the 
 aerial pathways to where, on Ben Mhead- 
 honach, the sea-wind had fallen in a garth of 
 tansies and moon-daisies, and swooned there 
 is the sun-haze, moveless as a lapsed wave. 
 
 Yet there were eyes to see, for Orchil 
 lifted her gaze from where she dreamed her 
 triune dream beneath the heather. The god- 
 dess ceased from her weaving at the looms 
 
 92
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 of life and death, and looked broodingly at 
 Angus Og — Angus, the fair god, the ever- 
 young, the lord of love, of music, of song. 
 
 "Is it time that he slept indeed?" she 
 murmured, after a long while, wherein she 
 felt the sudden blood redden her lips and the 
 pulse in her quiet veins leap like a caged 
 bird. 
 
 But while she still pondered this thing, 
 three old Druids came over the shoulder of 
 the hill, and advanced slowly to where the 
 Yellow-haired One lay adream. These, how- 
 ever, she knew to be no mortals, but three 
 of the ancient gods. 
 
 When they came upon Angus Og they 
 sought to wake him, but Orchil had breathed 
 a breath across a granite rock and blown the 
 deep immemorial age of it upon him, so that 
 even the speech of the elder gods was no 
 more in his ears than a gnat's idle rumour. 
 
 " Awake," said Keithoir, and his voice was 
 as the sigh of pine-forests when the winds 
 surge from the pole. 
 
 "Awake," said Manannan, and his voice 
 was as the hollow booming of the sea. 
 
 " Awake," said Hesus, and his voice was 
 as the rush of the green world through space, 
 or as the leaping of the sun. 
 
 But Angus Og stirred not, and dreamed 
 
 93
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 only that a mighty eagle soared out of the 
 infinite, and scattered planets and stars as 
 the dust of its pinions: and that as these 
 planets fell they expanded into vast oceans 
 whereon a myriad million waves leaped and 
 danced in the sunlight, singing a laughing 
 song: and that as the stars descended in a 
 silver rain they spread into innumerable for- 
 ests, wherein went harping the four winds of 
 the world, and amidst which the white doves 
 that were his kisses flitted through the gold 
 and shadow. 
 
 " He will awake no more," murmured 
 Keithoir, and the god of the green world 
 moved sorrowfully apart, and played upon a 
 reed the passing sweet song that is to this 
 day in the breath of the wind in the grass, or 
 its rustle in the leaves, or its sigh in the lap- 
 ping of reedy waters. 
 
 " He will awake no more," murmured Man- 
 annan, and the god of the dividing seas 
 moved sorrowfully upon his way; and on the 
 hill-side there was a floating echo as of the 
 ocean-music in a shell, mournful with an- 
 cient mournfulness and the sorrow-song of 
 age upon age. The sound of it is in the ears 
 of the dead, where they move through the 
 glooms of silence: and it haunts the timeworn 
 shores of the dying world. 
 
 94
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 " He will awake no more," murmured 
 Hesus; and the unseen god, whose pulse is 
 beneath the deepest sea and whose breath is 
 the frosty light of the stars, moved out of the 
 shadow into the light, and was at one with it, 
 so that no eyes beheld the radiance which 
 flowered icily in the firmament and was a 
 flame betwixt the earth and the sun, which 
 was a glory amid the cloudy veils about the 
 west and a gleam where quiet dews sustained 
 the green spires of the grass. And as the 
 light lifted and moved, like a vast tide, there 
 was a rumour as of a starry procession 
 sweeping through space to the clashing cym- 
 bals of dead moons, to the trumpetings of 
 volcanic worlds, and to the clarions of a thou- 
 sand suns. But Angus Og had the deep im- 
 memorial age of the granite upon him, and 
 he slept as the dead sleep. 
 
 Orchil smiled. " They are old, old, the 
 ancient gods," she whispered: "they are so 
 old, they cannot see eternity at rest. For 
 Angus Og is the god of Youth, and he only 
 is eternal and unchanging." 
 
 Then, before she turned once more to her 
 looms of life and death, she lifted ht-r eyes 
 till her gaze pierced the brown earth and rose 
 above the green world and was a trouble 
 amid the quietudes of the sky. Thereat the 
 
 95
 
 The Awakening of .Ingus Og 
 
 icy stars pave forth snow, and Angus Og 
 was wrapped in a white shroud that was not 
 as that which meUs in the flame of noon. 
 Moreover, Orchil took one of the shadows of 
 obhvion from her mystic loom, and put it as 
 a band around Ben Monach where Angus 
 Og lay under the mountain-ash by the tarn. 
 
 A thousand years passed, and when for the 
 thousandth time the wet green smell of the 
 larches drifted out of Winter into Spring, 
 Orchil lifted her eyes from where she spun 
 at her looms of life and death. For, over the 
 shoulder of the hill, came three old Druids, 
 advancing slowly to where the Yellow-haired 
 One lay adream beneath the snow. 
 
 " Awake, Angus," cried Keithoir. 
 
 " Awake, Angus," cried Manannan. 
 
 " Awake, Angus," cried Hesus. 
 
 " Awake, awake," they cried, " for the 
 world has suddenly grown chill and old." 
 
 They had the grey grief upon them, when 
 they stood there, face to face with Silence. 
 
 Then Orchil put down the shuttle of mys- 
 tery wherewith she wove the threads of her 
 looms, and spoke. 
 
 " O ye ancient gods, answer me this. 
 Keithoir, if death were to come to thee, what 
 would happen? " 
 
 96
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 " The green world would wither as a dry 
 leaf, and as a dead leaf be blown idly be- 
 fore the wind that knows not whither it 
 bloweth." 
 
 " Manannan, if death were to come to thee, 
 what would happen?" 
 
 "The deep seas would run dry, O Orchil: 
 there would be sand falling in the place of 
 the dews, and at last the world would reel 
 and fall into the abyss." 
 
 " Hesus, if death were to come to thee, 
 what would happen?" 
 
 " There would be no pulse at the heart of 
 earth, O Orchil, no lift of any star against 
 any sun. There would be a darkness and a 
 silence." 
 
 Then Orchil laughed. 
 
 " And yet," she said, " when Angus Og 
 had the snow-sleep of a thousand years, none 
 knew it ! For a thousand years the pulse of 
 his heart of love has been the rhythmic beat 
 of the world. For a thousand years the 
 breath of his nostrils has been as the coming 
 of Spring in the human heart. For a thou- 
 sand years the breath of his life has been 
 warm against the lips of lovers. For a thou- 
 sand years the memory of these has been 
 sweet against oblivion. Nay, not one hath 
 dreamed of the deep sleep of Angus C)g." 
 
 97
 
 The .kcahcniiKj of Angus Og 
 
 "Who is he?" cried Keithoir. "Is he 
 older than I, who saw the green earth born? " 
 
 "Who is he?" cried Manannan. "Is he 
 older than I, who saw the first waters come 
 forth out of the void?" 
 
 " Who is he ? " cried Hesus. " Is he older 
 than I, who saw the first comet wander from 
 the starry fold; who saw the moon when it 
 was a flaming sun, and the sun when it was a 
 sevenfold intolerable flame?" 
 
 "He is older!" said Orchil. "He is the 
 soul of the gods." 
 
 And with that she blew a frith across the 
 palm of her hand, and took away the deep 
 immemorial age of the granite that was upon 
 the Fair God. 
 
 " Awake, eternal Spring! " she cried. And 
 Angus awoke, and laughed with joy; and at 
 his laughing the whole green earth w^as veiled 
 in a snow of blossom. 
 
 "Arise, eternal Youth!" she cried. And 
 Angus arose and smiled; and at his smiling 
 the old brown world was clad in dewy green, 
 and everywhere the beauty of the world was 
 sweet against the eyes of young and old, and 
 everywhere the pulse of love leaped in beat- 
 ing hearts. 
 
 "Go forth, eternal Hope!" she cried. 
 And Angus Og passed away on the sunflood, 
 
 98
 
 The Awakening of Angus Og 
 
 weaving rainbows as he went, that were fair 
 upon the hills of age and light within the 
 valleys of sorrow, and were everywhere a 
 wild, glad joy. 
 
 . • • • • 
 
 And that is why, when Orchil weaves 
 dumbly in the dark: and Keithoir is blind, 
 and dreams among remote hills and by un- 
 frequented shores: and Manannan lies heavy 
 with deep sleep, with the oceans of the world 
 like moving shadows above him: and Hesus 
 is grown white and hoar with the frost of 
 waning stars and weary with the burden of 
 new worlds: that is why Angus Og, the 
 youthful god, is more ancient than they, and 
 is for ever young. Their period is set. Ob- 
 livion is upon the march against their im- 
 memorial time. But in the heart of Angus 
 Og blooms the Rose of Youth, whose beauty 
 is everlasting. Yea, Time is the name of 
 that rose, and Eternity the beauty and fra- 
 grance thereof. 
 
 99
 
 CHILDREN OF WATER
 
 "0,hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon." - 
 Archilochus of Paros.
 
 Children of Water 
 
 "Ri traghad 
 's ri lionadh . . . 
 Mar a bha 
 Mar a tha 
 Mar a bhitheas 
 Gu brath 
 Ri tragadh 
 'S ri lionadh." 
 (Ebbing and flowing ... as it was, as it is, as it 
 shall be evermore — the ebb and the flow.) 
 
 Students of Gaelic mythology will remem- 
 ber that Tuan — who, under the grey cloud 
 and by the whispering rushes of the west, 
 gave out the same ancient wisdom as Pythag- 
 oras gave by Ionian Kroton, or as Emped- 
 ocles gave by Sicilian Acragas — remembered 
 his many transformations. He had been, he 
 said, an eagle and a stag and a salmon in 
 deep waters, and had known other changes. 
 In like manner the Sicilian sophist remem- 
 bered that he had been " a youth and a 
 maiden and a busii and a bird and a gleam- 
 ing fish in the sea"; and the greatest of 
 Greek mages declared that again and again 
 
 103
 
 Children of Water 
 
 he had lived in a changed body, as old rai- 
 ment discarded or new raiment donned. 
 
 But I am not now concerned with this 
 problem, that, like a wind at twilight, has 
 troubled with furtive shadows the waters of 
 many minds. As with a greater problem, it 
 may be folly to believe it, but a worse folly 
 to hold it incredible. And, too, in the end, 
 when we are tired of the tide-play of the 
 mind and sink into the depths and silences and 
 think from there, what are the thousand 
 words that say no against the one word that 
 says yes? I recall from childhood a story of 
 a man who, for the gain of a great wisdom, 
 sold to the Prince of Pride the whole sub- 
 stance and reach of his mortal period, retain- 
 ing only a single minute out of all this incal- 
 culable treasure. He lived to the stipulated 
 hour, and at the end of his hundredth year 
 knew all that the wisdom of man has gath- 
 ered out of the silence in which he moves, 
 shadow of an eddy of wind between the two 
 vast Alps of Time and Death. And on the 
 shore of the last minute of the last hour of 
 the hundredth year — when he had sighed, and 
 said there was no more to know, and that 
 the last dream had been dreamed — he remem- 
 bered his one minute he had kept unbartered. 
 So he took it, and held it before his eyes, as 
 
 104
 
 Children of Water 
 
 we hold a crystal lens : and in that minute he 
 saw backwards a thousand years, and beheld 
 the long trail of his wandering lives ; and saw 
 forward, and beheld the ways and the cross- 
 ways, the pillar of dust and the leaning ban- 
 ner of mist; and saw downward, and beheld 
 many empires in the caverns of old seas, and 
 below these, outworn ages, and below these, 
 space and stars ; and saw upward, and be- 
 held human wisdom like dew, a thin vapour, 
 vanishing, and then a congregation of mighty 
 spirits and dominions, princes of the ele- 
 ments, overlords of destiny, throneless and 
 throned gods, and then a majesty of light, and 
 then seven heavens like seven stairs, and then 
 a myriad blaze of world-apart wings and an 
 illimitable swinging of uncountable suns, and 
 knew, then, that his wisdom had but crossed 
 the first marches of infinitude, had but reached 
 the leaning horizon of eternity. In the hun- 
 dred years he had learned all that the pride of 
 the mind could teach, and it was as nothing: 
 in the one minute of his soul he had seen be- 
 hind and beyond, beneath and above, and in 
 knowing the nothingness of knowledge had 
 entered the inheritance of wisdom. 
 
 I think, rather, of another interpretation of 
 the old wisdom of these dreamers of time and 
 change. Are they not prophets of that rest- 
 
 105
 
 Children of Water 
 
 less spirit which is the heritage of many trou- 
 bled souls, that instinct for spiritual wander- 
 ing, tliat deep hunger for experience, even 
 if it be bitter, the longing for things known 
 to be unattainable, the remembrance which 
 strives for re-birth, the insatiable thirst for 
 the beauty of mirage, the brooding discontent 
 with or fiery rebellion against the tyranny 
 of accident and circumstance? To these, it 
 is not enough that one life be the guerdon 
 of birth : not even that many lives slip from 
 level to level : not even that the accident of 
 sex be as varied as the accident of race or the 
 accident of conditions. They would know 
 flight, as the seamew or the osprey: they 
 would know the waterways, as the creatures 
 of the wave : they would know the wind, as 
 the leaf on the bough knows it, as the grass 
 knows it, as the grey thistle in a stony place: 
 they would know, even, the rapture of the 
 upbuilded bow along the bastions of storm, or 
 where the arch leans in moist rose and green 
 and purple over still streams and inland val- 
 leys — would know, even, the elemental pas- 
 sions of wind and rain and of the unloosened 
 fires. There is no limit to this troubled de- 
 sire. It is the madness, perhaps, of many 
 minds dwelling habitually, and from genera- 
 tion to generation, among things hard to en- 
 
 io6
 
 Children of Water 
 
 dure, in the grey countries of rain and wind : 
 it is the madness, also, of some in whose 
 hearts is not and never can be any peace, the 
 sons and daughters of longing, the children of 
 thirst. 
 
 For in truth there is a restlessness unlike 
 any other restlessness in the vagrant spirit of 
 man: a disquietude that is of the soul as well 
 as of the body, the tossed spray of forgotten 
 and primitive memories. And yet, perhaps, 
 all this obscure tumult in the dark is only the 
 dream of those unquiet minds who are the 
 children of water. 
 
 Long ago, when Manannan, the god of 
 wind and sea, offspring of Lir, the Oceanus 
 of the Gael, lay once by weedy shores, he 
 heard a man and a woman talking. The 
 woman was a woman of the sea, and some 
 say that she was a seal : but that is no matter, 
 for it was in the time when the divine race 
 and the human race and the soulless race and 
 the dumb races that are near to man were all 
 one race. And Manannan heard the man say : 
 " I will give you love and home and peace." 
 The sea-woman listened to that, and said: 
 *' And I will bring you the homelessness of 
 the sea, and the j)eace of the restless wave, 
 and love like the wandering wind." At that 
 the man chided her, and said she could be no 
 
 107
 
 Children uf Water 
 
 woman, though she had his love. She laughed, 
 and slid into green water. Then Manannan 
 took the shape of a youth, and appeared to 
 the man. *' You are a strange love for a sea- 
 woman," he said : " and why do you go put- 
 ting your earth-heart to her sea-heart?" The 
 man baid he did not know, but that he had no 
 pleasure in looking at w^omen who were all 
 the same. At that Manannan laughed a low 
 laugh. " Go back," he said, " and take one 
 you'll meet singing on the heather. She's 
 white and fair. But because of your lost love 
 in the water, I'll give you a gift." And with 
 that Manannan took a wave of the sea and 
 threw it into the man's heart. He went back, 
 and wedded, and, when his hour came, he 
 died. But he, and the children he had, and 
 all the unnumbered clan that came of them, 
 knew by day and by night a love that was 
 tameless and changeable as the wandering 
 wind, and a longing that was unquiet as the 
 restless wave, and the homelessness of the 
 sea. And that is why they are called the 
 Sliochd-na-mara, the clan of the waters, or 
 the Treud-na-thonn, the tribe of the sea- 
 wave. 
 
 And of that clan are some who have turned 
 their longing after the wind and wave of the 
 mind — the wind that would overtake the 
 
 1 08
 
 Children of Water 
 
 waves of thought and dream, and gather them 
 and Hft them into clouds of beauty drifting in 
 the blue glens of the sky. 
 
 How are these ever to be satisfied, children 
 of water? 
 
 109
 
 CUILIDH MHOIRE 
 
 EviTTTTov, evTToXov, €vdd\aa(rov. 
 
 —Sophocles. 
 
 Within a hundred years ago many of the 
 islefolk, and not only in tlie more remote 
 places, openly or furtively practised what are 
 called pagan rites. Many of these dwelt with 
 water, more particularly with the water of the 
 sea : for to the people in the west the sea is 
 an ever present power to be feared, to be pro- 
 pitiated, to be beguiled if possible, to be re- 
 garded as a hard foster-mother, perhaps: 
 hardly to be loved. I have never heard any 
 definition of the sea more impressive than that 
 of a fisherman of the isle of Ulva, whom I 
 knew. " She is like a woman of the old tales 
 whose beauty is dreadful," he said, " and who 
 breaks your heart at last whether she smiles 
 or frowns. But she doesn't care about that, 
 or whether you are hurt or not. It's because 
 she has no heart, being all a wild water." 
 
 I have read often of the great love of the 
 
 no
 
 Cuilidh Mhoire 
 
 islesmen for the sea. They love it in a sense 
 of course, as the people of the land love up- 
 lands and wild moors, and the movements of 
 clouds over stony braes or above long pastures 
 by low shores and estuaries. Nor are they 
 happy away from it. How could they be, 
 since the wave is in their hearts. Men and 
 women who are born to the noise of the sea, 
 whose cradles have rocked to the surge or 
 croon of the tides, who have looked on the 
 deep every day in every season of every year, 
 could not but feel towards it as a shepherd 
 feels towards the barest hills, as a forester 
 feels for the most sombre woods, as the seed- 
 sower and the harrower feel for monotonous 
 brown lands which swell upward till they bear 
 the rounded white clouds like vast phantom 
 flowers. In this sense they love it, and truly. 
 Some love it for itself, and its beauty. A few 
 love it with passion, feel its spell irresistible, 
 magical. " A wild mare, a mocking beautiful 
 woman, and the blue sea in foam, for the joy 
 of these I would give the world and time," 
 says a Gaelic poet. But it is not of the ex- 
 ceptions I speak : it is of the many. These do 
 not love what they have so much cause to 
 dread ; what holds so many little fortunes in 
 so great and loose a clasp ; what shuts off 
 from so many desires ; what has so common 
 
 III
 
 Cuilidh M hoi re 
 
 a voice of melancholy ; what makes an ob- 
 vious destiny take the measure of fatality, an 
 implacable doom. For them, when the sea 
 is not a higlnvay, it is a place of food, the 
 Cuilidh Mhoire or Treasury of Mary, as the 
 Catholic islesmen of the Southern Hebrides 
 call the sustenance-giving waters. When 
 neither, it is most likely to be a grave, the 
 cold drifting hearths of the dead. 
 
 As to those I speak of, the people in many 
 parts were good Christians for most days, and 
 then one day other selves hidden under taught 
 faiths and later symbols would stand dis- 
 closed. Above all, when certain days of tra- 
 ditional sanctity recurred, it was customary to 
 perform rites of a druidic or pagan remem- 
 brance, in the face even of priests of a Faith 
 that has ever turned stern eyes on all rites of 
 the eager spirit of man save its own. And 
 what the people were then, in the many, they 
 still are in the few ; though now for the most 
 part only where the Great Disenchantment 
 has not yet wholly usurped the fading domi- 
 nion of the Great Enchantment. 
 
 It was the custom, then, and still is in some 
 isles, for mothers to wet brow or finger of 
 their new-born in the flow of the tide at the 
 end of the third week of the child's life. The 
 twenty-first day, if a Sunday, was held to be 
 
 112
 
 Cuilidh Mlioire 
 
 the most fortunate, and a Thursday next to 
 it: but a Friday was always to be avoided, 
 and a Saturday was held in some fear, unless 
 the child was dark in hair and eyes and colour. 
 It was above all needful to see that this wave- 
 baptism happened when the tide was at the 
 flow. If it were done at the ebb, woe to that 
 child and that mother : soon or late the " bap- 
 tized " would be called, to sink in deep gulfs 
 and be homeless and no more seen — and, in 
 the west, for the dead to have no green grave 
 for sleep-covering is a nakedness of sorrow 
 ill to endure for those left to mourn. 
 
 I remember, when I was a child, being taken 
 to have tea in the cottage of one Giorsal Mac- 
 leod, in Armadale of Sleat, who had lost both 
 husband and son through this sea-hallowing 
 rite having been done at the ebb. Her hus- 
 band was a young man, and had never spoken 
 to her of the fear of his mother, who through 
 a mis judgment in a time of weakness and 
 fever had " waved " him after the turn of 
 the ebb. But one day when Annra Macleod 
 came in to find Giorsal crying because unwit- 
 tingly she had done a like thing, he laughed 
 at her folly, and said that for himself he cared 
 no whit one way or the rither whether the 
 child were dipped in this hour or in that. 
 But before the month was out, and on a calm 
 
 "3
 
 CuiUdh Mlioire 
 
 night and just as the herring had risen, 
 Annra's feet tangled in the nets, which fell 
 back with him, and he sank into the strong 
 ebb, and was sucked away like a fading sha- 
 dow. And seven years from that day little 
 Seoras, the boy, when fishing for piocach in 
 the haven, stumbled from the coble's heavy 
 bow and into the swift-slipping greenness. 
 He was good at the swimming, and could eas- 
 ily have saved himself on so calm a day and 
 with the coble not a fathom-reach off: but he 
 was an ebb-child, and his fate was on him, and 
 he was called out to deep water and death. 
 His mother saw this. And when she spoke 
 of her sorrow she used invariably the words, 
 "A Dhia (O God), 'twas a long-laid death 
 for my cold darling: 'twas I that did it with 
 that dip in the ebb, I not knowing the harm 
 and the spell, A cuislin mo ghraidh, A m'ul- 
 aidli 's m'agh! (O pulse-let of my love, O my 
 treasure and joy !) " 
 
 In those days I speak of, the people used 
 to have many sea-rites, and, almost in all the 
 isles, on La' Chaluim-Chille (St. Columba's 
 Day) in particular. Offerings of honey-ale 
 or mead, fluid porridge, kale-soup, precious 
 bread even, were given to the god of the sea. 
 As the darkness of Wednesday night gave 
 way to dawn on Maundy Thursday, as Mr. 
 
 114
 
 Cuilidh Mhoirc 
 
 Carmichael relates in his beautiful Cannina 
 Gadelica, the man deputed by the islefolk 
 would walk into the sea up to his waist, and 
 then, while he poured out the offering, would 
 chant 
 
 A Dhe na mara 
 Cuir todhar 's an tarruinn 
 Chon tachair an talaimh 
 Chon bailcidh dhuinn biaidh. 
 
 " O god of the sea, 
 Put weed in the drawing wave 
 To enrich the isle-soil, 
 To shower on us food." 
 
 " Then those behind the offerer took up the 
 chant and wafted it along the seashore on the 
 midnight air, the darkness and the rolling of 
 the waves making the scene weird and im- 
 pressive." 
 
 That I have not seen ; and now I fear the 
 god of the sea has few worshippers, and 
 knows no scattered communes of bowed chant- 
 ers at midnight. 
 
 But this, though also I have not seen, I 
 know of at first hand. A man and his three 
 sons, on an island which I will speak of only 
 as south and east of the Minch, went secretly 
 on the eve of St. Columba's Day a year ago, 
 and took a pail of milk from the byres, and a 
 
 115
 
 Cuilidli Mhoire 
 
 jug of running water of a well-spring, and a 
 small loaf of bread from the oven, and a red 
 faggot from the fire held in a cleft stick. The 
 youngest son threw the fire into the sea, cry- 
 ing, " Here's fire for you ! " And the other 
 sons poured on the black flood the surf-white 
 milk and the rain-grey water, crying, " Here's 
 clean water for you ! " and " Here's the kind- 
 ly milk for you ! " And the father threw the 
 loaf of bread on the wave, and cried " Peace 
 to your hunger ! " 
 
 That was all, and they did it secretly, and 
 the sons (it is said) half to please their father. 
 Only one or two neighbours knew of it, and 
 they silent before the minister ; but somehow 
 it came to the man's ears, and like most of 
 his kind he was angry at a thing beyond him 
 and his understanding, and spoke in contempt 
 to one wiser than himself (I do not doubt), 
 and threatened him with a public exhorting 
 
 from the pulpit, so that Mr. M sullenly 
 
 promised no more to do the thing his fore- 
 bears had done for generation upon genera- 
 tion. 
 
 " After all, the minister was right," said 
 some one to me, who had heard the tale : " for 
 Mr. M was only holding by a supersti- 
 tion." 
 
 I did not make the obvious retort, but said 
 
 u6
 
 Cuilidh Mhoire 
 
 simply that it was better to hold by old things 
 of beauty and reverence than to put a blight 
 on them. 
 
 I do not say the minister was wholly wrong. 
 He spoke according to his lights. Doubt- 
 less he had in remembrance some such pas- 
 sage as that in Deuteronomy where the ban 
 is put upon any one who will suffer his son or 
 his daughter to go through fire, or upon any 
 that draw omen from the cry of fowls, or 
 upon the interpreter of signs. And compelled 
 by that stubborn thraldom to the explicit word 
 which has been at once the stern strength and 
 the spiritual failure of all the Calvinistic de- 
 nominations (in our religion-harried Scotland 
 at least), he spoke in numbed sympathy and 
 twilight knowledge. 
 
 Since, I have tried to learn if Mr. M 
 
 had knowledge of the ancient meanings of 
 that sea-rite, and if other words, or chant, or 
 urnuigh-mhara or sea-prayer, had been used 
 by his elders. But, as yet, I have not learned. 
 I have wondered often if this broken and all 
 but silent rite were a survival of a custom be- 
 fore ever St. Colum was heard of. The bread 
 offering and that of the milk are easy of un- 
 derstanding. But why should one give fresh 
 water from an earth-spring to that salt, un- 
 stable wilderness; why offer to it a flame of 
 
 117
 
 Cuilidh Mhoire 
 
 fire, to it whose pale crescents of light or 
 moving green lawns beneath swaying cata- 
 racts are but the glittering robe over a cold 
 heart, than which no other is so still ever- 
 lastingly in an ancient and changeless cold? 
 
 ii8
 
 SEA-MAGIC 
 
 " Manan mil air sloigh ..." 
 
 In one of the remotest islands of the Heb- 
 rides I landed on a late afternoon in October 
 a year ago. There was no one on the island 
 except an old man, who was shepherd for the 
 fourscore sheep which ate the sweet sea-grass 
 from Beltane till Samhain : ^ one sheep for 
 each year of his life, he told me, " forby one, 
 and that will be right between them an' me 
 come Candlemas next." He gave me water 
 and oatcake, and offered to make me tea, 
 which I would not have. I gave him the mes- 
 sages I had brought from the distant mainland 
 of the Lews, and other things ; and some small 
 gifts of my own to supplement the few needs 
 and fewer luxuries of the old islander. Murdo 
 Maclan was grateful, with the brief and sim- 
 ple gladness of a child. By mistake a little 
 mouth-organ, one of those small untuneful in- 
 struments which children delight in and can 
 
 ' "Beltane till Samhain": ist May till Summerend 
 (31st October). 
 
 119
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 buy for a few pence, was in my package, 
 along with a " poke " of carvies, those Uttle 
 white sweets for buttered bread dear to both 
 young and old — though even they, like all 
 genuine products of the west, great and small, 
 are falling away in disuse ! The two had been 
 intended by me for a small lass, the grand- 
 child of a crofter of Loch Roag in the wester- 
 side of the Lews ; but when the yacht put in 
 at the weedy haven, where scart and gillie- 
 breed and tern screamed at the break of si- 
 lence, I heard that little Morag had " taken 
 a longing to be gone," and after a brief ailing 
 had in truth returned whence she had come. 
 
 And for the moment neither snuff nor to- 
 bacco, neither woollen comforter nor knitted 
 hose, could hold Murdo as did that packet of 
 carvies (for the paper had loosened, and the 
 sugary contents had swarmed like white ants) 
 and still more that sixpenny mouth-organ. I 
 saw what the old man eagerly desired, but was 
 too courteous and well-bred even to hint : and 
 when I gave him the two things of his longing 
 my pleasure was not less than his. I asked 
 him why he wanted the cruit-bheul, which 
 was the nearest I could put the Gaelic for the 
 foreign toy, and he said simply that it was be- 
 cause he was so much alone, and often at 
 nights heard a music he would rather not be 
 
 1 20
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 hearing. " What would that be ? " I asked. 
 After some hesitation he answered that a 
 woman often came out of the sea and said 
 strange foreign words at the back of his door, 
 and these, he added, in a whinnying voice hke 
 that of a foal ; came, white as foam ; and went 
 away grey as rain. And then, he added, " she 
 would go to that stroked rock yonder, and put 
 songs against me, till my heart shook like a 
 tallow-flaucht in the wind." 
 
 Was there any other music? I asked. Yes, 
 he said. When the wind was in the west, and 
 rose quickly, coming across the sea, he had 
 heard a hundred feet running through the wet 
 grass and making the clover breathe a breath. 
 " When it's a long way ofT I hear the snatch 
 of an air, that I think I know and yet can 
 never put name to. Then it's near, an there's 
 names called on the wind, an' whishts an' all. 
 Then they sing an' laugh. I've seen the sheep 
 standing — their forelegs on the slit rocks that 
 crop up here like stony weeds — staring, and 
 listening. Then after a bit they'd go on at the 
 grass again. But Luath, my dog, he'd sit close 
 to me, with his eyes big, an' growling low. 
 Then I wouldn't be hearing anything: no more 
 at all. Rut, whiles, somebody would follow 
 me home, piping, and till the very door, and 
 then go off laughing. Once, a three-week 
 
 121
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 back or so, I came home in a thin noiseless 
 rain, and heard a woman-voice singing by the 
 fire-flaucht, and stole up soft to the house- 
 side; but she heard the beat of my pulse and 
 went out at the door, not looking once behind 
 her. She was tall and white, with red hair, and 
 though I didn't see her face I know it was like 
 a rock in rain, with tears streaming on it. She 
 was a woman till she was at the shore there, 
 then she threw her arms into the wind an' was 
 a gull, an' flew away in the lowness of a 
 cloud. 
 
 While I was on the island the wind had 
 veered with that suddenness known to all who 
 sail these seas. A wet eddy swirled up from 
 the south-east, and the west greyed, and rain 
 fell. In a few minutes clouds shaped them- 
 selves out of mists I had not seen and out of 
 travelling vapours and the salt rising breaths 
 of the sea. A long wind moved from east to 
 west, high, but with its sough falling to me 
 like a wood-echo where I was. Then a cloudy 
 rain let loose a chill air, and sighed with a 
 moan in it: in a moment or two after, great 
 sluices were opened, and the water came down 
 with a noise like the tide coursing the lynns 
 of narrow sea-lochs. 
 
 To go back in that falling flood would be 
 to be half-drowned, and was needless too: so 
 
 122
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 I was the more glad, with the howling wind 
 and sudden gloom of darkness and thick rain, 
 to go in to Murdo's cabin, for it was no more 
 than that, and sit by the comfortable glow of 
 the peats, while the old man, happy in that 
 doing, made tea for me. 
 
 He was smiling and busy, when I saw his 
 face cloud. 
 
 " Will you be hearing that? " he said look- 
 ing round. 
 
 " What was it? " I answered, for I thought 
 I had heard the long scream of the gannet 
 against the waves of the wind high above us. 
 
 Having no answer, I asked Murdo if it was 
 the bird he meant. " Ay, it might be a bird. 
 Sometimes it's a bird, sometimes it's a seal, 
 sometimes it's a creature of the sea pulling it- 
 self up the shore an' makin' a hoarse raughlin 
 like a boat being dragged over pebbles. But 
 when it comes in at the door there it is al- 
 ways the same, a tall man, with the great 
 beauty on him, his hands hidden in the white 
 cloak he wears, a bright, cold, curling flame 
 under the soles of his feet, and a crest like a 
 bird's on his head." 
 
 I looked instinctively at the door, but no 
 one stood there. 
 
 "Was the crest of feathers, Murdo?" I 
 asked, remembering an old tale of a mes- 
 
 123
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 senger of the Hidden People who is known 
 by the crest of cuckoo-feathers that he 
 wears. 
 
 " No," he said, " it wasn't. It was more 
 Uke white canna blowing in the wind, but with 
 a blueness in it." 
 
 " And what does he say to you ? " 
 " His say is the say of good Gaelic, but with 
 old words in it that I have forgotten. The 
 mother of my mother had great wisdom, and 
 I've heard her using the same when she was 
 out speaking in the moonlight to them that 
 were talking to her." 
 
 " What does he tell you, Murdo?" 
 " Sure, seldom he has anything to say. He 
 ju.st looks in the fire a long time, an' then goes 
 away smiling." 
 
 " And who did you think it was? " 
 "Well, I thought it might be Mr. Mac- 
 alister, him as was drowned on St. Bride's 
 day, the minister over at Uiseader of Harris ; 
 I've heard he was a tall, fine man, an' a 
 scholar, an' of great goodness an' fineness. 
 And so I asked him, the second time he came, 
 if may be he would be Mr. Macalister. He 
 said no, an' laughed the bit of a laugh, and 
 then said that good man's bones were now 
 lying in a great pool with three arches to it, 
 deep in the sea about seven swims of a seal 
 
 124
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 from Eilean Mhealastaidh, the island that lies 
 under the shadow of Griomaval on the main- 
 land of the Lews.^ 
 
 " An' at that," added Murdo, " I asked him 
 how he would be knowing that." 
 
 " * How do you know you are a man, and 
 that the name on you is the name you have ? ' 
 he said. An' at that I laughed, and said it 
 was more than he could say, for he did not 
 seem to have the way of a man an' he kept 
 his name in his pocket." 
 
 " With that he touched me an' I fell into 
 an aisling.^ And though I saw the red peats 
 before me, I knew I was out on the sea, and 
 was a wave herded by the wind an' lifted an' 
 shaken by the tide — an' a great skua flyin' 
 over saw my name floating like a dead fish an* 
 sank to it an' swallowed it an' flew away. An' 
 when I sat up, I was here on this stool before 
 the peats, an' no one beside me. But the door 
 was open, an' though there was no rain the 
 flagstone was wet, an' there was a heavy wet- 
 ness in the room, an' it was salt. It was like 
 a spilt wave, it was." 
 
 " ' Seven swims of a seal." A seal is supposed to 
 swim a mile on one side without effort, without twist ; 
 and then to change to the other side and swim in 
 the same way the next mile; and so on. 
 
 ' An aisling: i.e. a swoon with remembrance. 
 
 125
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 I was silent for a time, listening to the 
 howling of the wind and the stumbling rush 
 of the rain. Then I spoke. 
 
 " But tell me, Murdo, how you know this 
 was not all a dream ? " 
 
 " Because of what I saw when he touched 
 me." 
 
 "And what was that?" 
 
 " I have the fear of it still," he said simply. 
 '* His arms were like water, and I saw the 
 sea-weed floating among the bones in his hand. 
 And so I knew him to be a morar-mhara,^ a 
 lord of the sea." 
 
 "And did you see him after that?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " And did he say anything to you then ? " 
 
 " Yes. He said to me after he had sat a 
 long time staring in the fire : ' Murdo, what 
 age have you ? ' An' I told him. I said I 
 would have eighty years come Candlemas. 
 He said, * You've got a clean heart : an' you'll 
 have three times eighty years of youth an' joy 
 before you have your long sleep. An' that is 
 a true word. It will be when the wild geese 
 fly north again.' An' then he rose and went 
 away. There was a mist on the sea, an' creep- 
 in' up the rocks. I watched him go into it, an' 
 
 * "Morar" (or Morair), a lord, as Morair Gilleas- 
 buig Mhic 'Illeathain" (Lord Archibald Maclean). 
 
 126
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 I heard him hurhng great stones an' dash- 
 ing them. ' These are the kingdoms of the 
 world,' I heard him crying in the mist. No, 
 I have not been seeing him any more at all : 
 not once since that day. An' that's all, Bdn- 
 Morar." 
 
 That was many months ago. There is no 
 one on the island now : no sheep even, for 
 the pastures are changed. When the wild 
 geese flew north this year, the soul of 
 Murdo Maclan went with them. Or if he 
 did not go with them, he went where Ma- 
 nan promised him he should go. For who 
 can doubt that it was Manan, in the body 
 or vision, he the living prince of the waters, 
 the son of the most ancient god, who, 
 crested as with snow-white canna with a 
 blueness in it, and foot-circt with cold curl- 
 ing flame — the uplifted wave and the wan- 
 dering sea-fire — appeared to the old islander? 
 And if it were he, be sure the promise 
 is now joy and peace to him to whom it 
 was made. 
 
 Murdo must have soothed his last hours 
 of weakness with the cruit-bheid, the little 
 mouth-organ, for it was by the side of his 
 pillow. In these childish things have we our 
 delight, even those few of us who, simple of 
 heart and poor in all things save faith and 
 
 127
 
 Sea-Magic 
 
 wonder, can. like Murdo Maclan, make a 
 brief happiness out of a little formless music 
 with our passing breath, and contentedly put 
 it away at last for the deep music of immortal 
 things. 
 
 128
 
 FARA-GHAOL 
 
 "The sea's never so full that it can't drown 
 
 sorrow." 
 
 Gaelic saying. 
 
 " ' Heart of rock!' cried the sea to the land: 
 'Fara-ghaol (false love)!' cried the land to 
 the sea." 
 
 Fragment of a Gaelic "iorram." 
 
 "Gur truagh nach mi 's mo leanu a bha 
 A muigh fo sgath nan geug O ! " 
 
 •• Would that I and my baby were 
 Under the shade of the tree, O! " 
 
 A Ui'st lullaby. 
 
 At a running- water, that comes out at a 
 place called Strath-na-mara, near the sea-gates 
 of Loch Suibhne, there is a pool called the 
 Pool of the Changeling. None ever goes that 
 way from choice, for it is not only the crying 
 of the curlew that is heard there, or the 
 querulous wailing lapwing. 
 
 It was here that one night, in a September 
 of many storms, a woman stood staring at 
 sea. The screaming seamews wheeled and 
 sank and circled overhead, and the solanders 
 
 129
 
 Fara-Ghaol 
 
 rose with heavy wing and hoarse cries, 
 and the black scarts screeched to the star- 
 tled guillemots or to the foam-white terns 
 blown before the wind like froth. The wom- 
 an looked neither at the sea fowl nor at the 
 burning glens of scarlet flame which stretched 
 dishevelled among the ruined lands of the 
 sunset. 
 
 Between the black flurries of the wind, 
 striking the sea like flails, came momentary 
 pauses or long silences. In one of these the 
 woman raised her arms, she the while un- 
 heeding the cold tide-wash about her feet, 
 where she stood insecurely on the wet slip- 
 pery tangle. 
 
 Seven years ago this woman had taken the 
 one child she had, that she did not believe to 
 be her own but a changeling, and had put it 
 on the shore at the extreme edge of the tide- 
 reach, and there had left it for the space of 
 an hour. When she came back, the child she 
 had left with a numbness on its face and with 
 the curse of dumbness, was laughing wild, 
 and when she came near, it put out its arms 
 and gave the cry of the young of birds. She 
 lifted the leanav in her arms and stared into 
 its eyes, but there was no longer the weary 
 blankness, and the little one yearned with the 
 petulant laughing and idle whimpering of the 
 
 130
 
 Fara-Ghaol 
 
 children of other mothers. And that mother 
 there gave a cry of joy, and with a singing 
 heart went home. 
 
 It was the seventh year after that finding 
 by the sea, that one day, when a cold wind 
 was blowing from the west, the child Morag 
 came in by the peat-fire, where her mother 
 was boiling the porridge, and looked at her 
 without speaking. The mother turned at that, 
 and looked at Morag. Her heart sank like a 
 pool-lily at shadow, when she saw that Morag 
 had woven a wreath of brown tangled sea- 
 weed into her hair. But that was nothing 
 to the bite in her breast when the girl be- 
 gan singing a song that had not a word in 
 it she had ever heard on her own or other 
 lips, but was wild as the sound of the tide 
 calling in dark nights of cloud and wind, or 
 as the sudden coming of waves over a quiet 
 sea in the silence of the black hours of 
 sleep. 
 
 "What is it, Morag-mo-run ? " she asked, 
 her voice like a reed in the wind. 
 
 " It's time," says Morag, with a change in 
 her eyes, and her face shining with a gleam 
 on it. 
 
 "Time for what, Morag?" 
 
 " For me to be going back to the place I 
 came from." 
 
 131
 
 Fara-Ghaol 
 
 " And where will that be? " 
 
 " Where would it be but to the place you 
 took me out of, and called across?" 
 
 The mother gave a cry and a sob. " Sure, 
 now, Morag-a-ghraidh, you will be my own 
 lass and no other? " 
 
 " Whist, woman," answered the girl ; " don't 
 you hear the laughing in the burn, and the 
 hoarse voice out in the sea?" 
 
 " That I do not, O Morag-mo-chree, and 
 sure it's black sorrow to you and to me to be 
 hearing that hoarse voice and that thin laugh- 
 mg. 
 
 • " Well, sorrow or no sorrow, I'm off now, 
 poor woman. And it's good-bye and a good- 
 bye to you I'll be saying to you, poor woman. 
 Sure it's a sorrow to me to leave you in grief, 
 but if you'll go down to the edge of the water, 
 at the place you took me from, where the 
 runnin' water falls into the sea-pool, you'll 
 be having there against your breast in no time 
 the child of your own that I never was and 
 never could be." 
 
 " And why that, and why that, O Morag, 
 lennavan-mo ? " 
 
 " Peace on your sorrow, woman, and good- 
 bye to you now " ; and with that the sea- 
 changeling went laughing out at the door, 
 singing a wave-song so wild and strange the 
 
 132
 
 Fara-Ghaol 
 
 mother's woe was turned to a fear that rose 
 hke chill water in her heart. 
 
 When she dared follow — and why she did 
 not go at once she did not know — she saw at 
 first no sight of Morag or any other on the 
 lonely shore. In vain she called, with a great 
 sorrowing cry. But as, later, she stood with 
 her feet in the sea, she was silent of a sudden, 
 and was still as a rock, with her ragged dress 
 about her like draggled seaweed. She had 
 heard a thin crying. It was the voice of a 
 breast-child, and not of a grown lass like 
 Morag. 
 
 When a grey heron toiled sullenly from a 
 hollow among the rocks she went to the place. 
 She was still now, with a frozen sorrow. She 
 knew what she was going to find. But she 
 did not guess till she lifted the little frail 
 child she had left upon the shore seven years 
 back, that the secret people of the sea or those 
 who call across running water could have the 
 hardness and coldness to give her again tlie 
 unsmiling dumb thing she had mothered with 
 so much bitterness of heart. 
 
 Morag she never saw again, nor did any 
 other see her, except Padruig Macrae, the in- 
 nocent, who on a New Year's eve, that was a 
 Friday, said that as he was whistling to a seal 
 down by the Pool at Strath-na-mara he heard
 
 Fara-Ghaol 
 
 some one laughing at him ; and when he looked 
 to see who it was he saw it was no other than 
 Morag — and he had called to her, he said, and 
 she called back to him, " Come away, Pad- 
 ruig dear," and then had swum off like a seal, 
 crying the heavy tears of sorrow. 
 
 And as for the child she had found again 
 on the place she had left her own silent breast- 
 babe seven years back, it never gave a cry or 
 made any sound whatever, but stared with 
 round, strange eyes only, and withered away 
 in three days, and was hidden by her in a 
 sand-hole at the root of a stunted thorn that 
 grew there. 
 
 At every going down of the sun thereafter, 
 the mother of the changeling went to the 
 edge of the sea, and stood among the wet tan- 
 gle of the wrack, and put out her supplicat- 
 ing hands, and never spoke word nor uttered 
 cry. 
 
 But on this night of September, while the 
 gleaming seafowl were flying through the 
 burning glens of scarlet flame in the wide pur- 
 ple wildness of the sky, with the wind fall- 
 ing and wailing and wailing and falling, the 
 woman went over to the running water beyond 
 the sea-pool, and put her skirt over her head 
 and stepped into the pool, and, hooded thus 
 and thus patient, waited till the tide came in. 
 
 134
 
 SORROW ON THE WIND 
 
 "The parable of Pythagoras is dark, but true; 
 Cor ne edito . . . Eat not thy heart." — Bacon, 
 Essay, xxvii. 
 
 "There's sorrow on the wind, my grief, there's 
 sorrow on the wind!" — Song. 
 
 I give here, in narrative form, a story of 
 two, one of whom I knew ; and some will 
 know " Father Angus," from whom also I 
 heard it. Rury Macarthur died over a year 
 ago, but not in his own place. He had gone 
 away after Maev left, and settled behind the 
 mainland coast, on an inland-lying farm where 
 the cry of the seamew never came and where 
 even from the last ridges of the upland the 
 grey line of the sea never wavered on the 
 horizon. " It was the wet poor land and the 
 loneliness out yonder that brought him here," 
 the neighbours said. But I, who knew him, 
 think that there was in his mind another rea- 
 son also. It is for that I credit the singular 
 story of a herd-lad, who said his master could 
 never abide the crying o' peewits, and that he 
 
 135
 
 Sorrow on the IVind 
 
 had time upon time seen him Hft an arm and 
 shake it at the score or more wheehng lap- 
 wings, saying at them swift, hoarse words in 
 GaeHc ; but that once, when a single peewit 
 kept drifting and wailing above him as he 
 walked up Netherton Brae, the tears were 
 coming out of his eyes and down his face, like 
 an old woman crying silently in the gloaming. 
 
 " Why will you not give up the girl, Rury ? " 
 asked Father Angus M'lan, as he and Rury 
 Macarthur walked along the grey machar, in 
 the fading hours of a chill July day which had 
 been all noise of wind and thin crying lash of 
 rain and the endless wailing of mew and tern, 
 with the desolate and lonely sruch of the tide- 
 lifted or tide-left wrack and the dull wave 
 beating. 
 
 " Why will you not give up the girl? She 
 has no heart, they say : and it would only be 
 sorrow you'd be having, if you took her to 
 your hearthside." 
 
 Rury Macarthur made no answer, but 
 walked on, his grey eyes staring out across the 
 long thistled greyness of the sandy machar, 
 and upon the dull grey and wan green of the 
 tumbling sea, that sometimes seemed like a 
 flood coming swift across a narrow down- 
 borne ridge, and sometimes was like an idle 
 
 136
 
 Sorrow on the Wind 
 
 and formless mist being furtively rolled back 
 and mysteriously gathered by obscure with- 
 drawing hands. 
 
 " I'm not denying she has the fine looks, 
 Rury : indeed an' it's true that she has the 
 song and music of beauty. There is no other 
 girl in Barra like Maev, just as I don't know 
 one there or in any of the home-isles that has 
 the old name either. But she doesn't want 
 marriage, you say : nor to leave her grand- 
 mother, who is old and blind : and for this 
 and for that, an' I know not what all." 
 
 " She doesn't wish the thought of going 
 away from the sea," said Rury dully. " It 
 isn't the grandmother, no nor yet marriage. I 
 would have old Janet with no thought but 
 gladness: and Maev, if she hasn't the hawk's- 
 hunger for me, hasn't her thought on any 
 other. It's not that, Father Angus. It's the 
 sea-water. It's because I have my croft away 
 up yonder in the hollow of the great strath. 
 There's nought but leaning heads of hills, 
 north, south, east, and west: an' moorland an' 
 bog slojjing up against them. You will not 
 have sight of the sea from any place on Tynav- 
 hona ; no, not if you go up above the sum- 
 mer shielings, but at one place only, and that 
 will be at the Cave of the Wailing Woman on 
 the south-east shoulder of Sliav-Gorm. And
 
 Sorrow on the ]]^ind 
 
 Maev will not come to that loneliness of Ty- 
 navhona : no, tliat she will not." 
 
 "Loneliness? Why the girl lives at the 
 very heart of it . . . not a croft near, in the 
 wildiiess of this machar of the west! Lone- 
 liness at Tynavhona ! Why there are five or 
 seven crofts within sight of you, and Donald 
 Maclellan's big farm, and not a mile from 
 your door is the clachan of the Kern, it that 
 would be calling itself a haile but for the fear 
 the crows would fly with the big news to the 
 Morair's factor ! " 
 
 " Well and that may be, an' is so. Father 
 Angus. But it's loneliness for Maev. She 
 has the wave of the sea in her heart. Ay, 
 that's it. She has a wave in her heart. She 
 hears the tides as you hear the church-bell of 
 Our Lady of the Sea. You wouldn't be 
 without the good sound of the bells, Father 
 Angus: and if you were in a place where 
 there would not be the holy bells, no, not 
 once, you would be listening to them in your 
 sleep, and at this hour and at that, you never 
 knowing when or how, but something in you 
 suddenly saying Whisht. An' if any day you 
 heard them in the glen, or on the moor, or on 
 the slope of the hill, or by the byres maybe, ay, 
 or in your room with book and oil-lamp beside 
 you, would you not start an' be on your feet 
 
 138
 
 Sorrozv on the Wind 
 
 with the beating heart in you, and your eyes 
 like a stoat's in the dark, smelling the wind? 
 Ay, you would have the restlessness, you 
 would, and the fever : and then, or if not then, 
 soon, ay, soon or late, you would rise and go 
 away. You would follow the call of the bell. 
 Ay, Father Angus, an' that is a true word. 
 And what that call of the bell would be 
 to you, the sound of the water an' the whis- 
 perin' of the waste and all that's in the sea 
 for good and evil {peace to it, the good sea; 
 I'd say no evil of it, or of any ivhose place 
 it is) — ay, all that and more, is the sea-call 
 to Maev." 
 
 " It's all a dream, Rury. The girl's a bit 
 fey with youth an' loneliness." 
 
 " Dream or no dream. Father Angus, its a 
 daylong sorrow for me. I asked her to come 
 up to Tynavhona an' I would give her all I 
 could an' be asking no more than she cared to 
 give. There's no need for her to work at 
 what she has not the liking for. There's Mo- 
 rag an' Sine an' IMary to do all that's needed. 
 ' You've a peewit's heart,' I said to her, ' and 
 I don't want to be lyin' beside you at night, 
 listening to the wind and fearing that if I 
 sleep you'll be up and away on wild wings.' 
 She laughed at that. ' It's not a peewit's heart 
 I have,' she said, ' but the heart of a tern. 
 
 U9
 
 Sorroiv on the Wind 
 
 You might blow a breath and Fd drift to your 
 feet hke flyin' bog-cotton, with a sigh an' a 
 cry: an' if it's another wind or breath that 
 blows, then I drift away like bog-cotton too, 
 an' with a sigh an' a cry, an' it's to the shore 
 I go, to the shore in the dark, where there's 
 nothing but blackness and noise of water an' 
 whiteness of foam. An' there you cannot 
 come, Rury, no, not for all your lovingness. 
 No, no, the peewit to the moor, and the tern 
 to the saltness and wildness of the water. 
 Give me a peewit's heart, an' I'll come to 
 Sliav-Gorn, I'll come to your hidden moors ! ' 
 An' I pleaded an' argued. Father Angus, but 
 no word more than that could I get. . . . 
 ' Give me a peewit's heart, an' then I'll come 
 to your hidden moors.' " 
 
 " Well, and have you not asked again ? The 
 girl's thought may have changed. You know 
 the way the herring have: for a score years, 
 it may be, they will come from the wildness of 
 the sea round one headland, and in the same 
 week of the same month : and then all of a 
 sudden, when the boats are dappling the 
 haven, they sink fathoms deep, and take a 
 veer like a scythe going through green grass, 
 and are gone like a shadow, and will not be 
 seen again for weeks maybe, for months per- 
 haps, perhaps not for years on years. It's 
 
 140
 
 Sorrow on the Wind 
 
 their way. And there's women as incalculable 
 as that." 
 
 " Yes, Father Angus, an' for sure I have, 
 an' again an' again too. And it was only three 
 days ago that I went to her, for the last time. 
 I said it was for the last time, and she said 
 that was well, for she could never have any 
 word more to put upon that thing between us. 
 Old Janet is passing swift, she said, and when 
 that is come which cannot be long coming, 
 then she will go away. She has the thought 
 of the lonely islet in her mind, I know: the 
 little bit of rock and grass out yonder that's 
 called Eilean Caorach. She said once she 
 would be glad to be there alone for a time. 
 And then, when she goes away to the great 
 towns, the mainland towns or the English 
 towns or in the Americas — for go she will, 
 and be lost and broken like a wounded sea- 
 mew, and sink and be sucked down like that 
 seamew, oh yes, I know that well, as a man 
 hears death whispering a long time before the 
 cry and the silence — when Maev will go 
 away to these towns, and with the man she 
 loves then, or dreams she loves, or with one 
 who will master her and have her se- 
 cret anger, then all that's in and around 
 Eilean Caorach, and all about Ardnatoon 
 where she now is, will be in her heart, like 
 
 141
 
 Sorroii' 0)1 the H'ind 
 
 moonlight in a pool of water. For her heart's 
 of water." 
 
 "What were her words, Rury?" asked 
 Father Angus quietly. 
 
 *' They would be like this," Rury answered, 
 after a pause. "They would be like this: 
 ' Put your trouble away, Riiaridh a gradach. 
 Give it to the peewits up at Tynavhona, but 
 don't be hearing them calling my name for 
 ever and ever. I loved you, I thought, but I 
 have not that thought on me, now. But it 
 would not matter — no, it would not matter. 
 You told me I had a wave of the sea in my 
 heart. Fm not knowing that, nor why, nor 
 the meaning to it. But it may be. I can't 
 love you, for you have a heart like a moun- 
 tain. It would always be there : I could never 
 get out of sight of it. There would be no 
 going this way and that way. It is a good 
 mountain — but, oh yes, I have the wave in my 
 heart. I cannot be staying ever in one place, 
 Rury. No, that I cannot. I could not be liv- 
 ing month-in month-out at Tynavhona. Where 
 would I be for the sea? There is no water 
 up there. But you would have gladness to be 
 living, here, anywhere — yes, yes, I know that. 
 caraid dileos, but there's no change in you. 
 There's no wave of the sea in your heart. 
 You have not the understanding of all this, 
 
 142
 
 Sorrow on the Wind 
 
 Rury? No, nor is it with me any better. But 
 I cannot be living here any more. In the time 
 of the sorrow that's coming it's to Port-na- 
 long I'll go, to sail away, and I shall not be 
 back again : no, never here. It is no sorrow 
 I am wishing you : peace be with you. For- 
 get.' And that was all." 
 
 " Well, Rury, I have the true sorrow for 
 you. It's a hard thing to be in the fowler's 
 snare, as the saying is. What old tale is there 
 that is not full of the sighing an' sorrow of 
 vain love and wild beauty that's like a flame 
 leaping in the wind an' falling away to ashes 
 and black grief? " 
 
 " Ay, it is a hard thing, Father Angus." 
 
 The two walked on awhile, in silence. The 
 grey hour grew dusky with thick shadow, 
 though there was no night there in Barra, at 
 that season : only, in times of gloom and 
 storm, a coming of dull shadow into the half- 
 night and half-day. 
 
 A guillemot flew with rapid whirling scream 
 overhead. The harsh cries of scarts came 
 from the weed-covered rocks at the sea's 
 edge. Terns drifted past like flying foam, with 
 a wail that fluttered behind their flight as a 
 blown feather idly whirled in the wake of the 
 wind. I'^rom the peat bog beyond the machar, 
 they could hear cries and sounds that might 
 
 M3
 
 Sorroiv on the Wind 
 
 be the drumming of snipe or the harsh screech 
 of the solander or the melancholy flute of the 
 binne-bheul, but were not quite as these arc, 
 coming as they did out of a gloom full of 
 menace and the obscure furtive ways of un- 
 trodden morass. 
 
 Father Angus sighed as he thought of the 
 smallness of the little island-world that was 
 all in all to him and his. How vast and grey 
 and illimitable seemed the long machar, how 
 vaster and sadder and more illimitable the sea 
 beyond, how vast and shadowy the inland hills. 
 The lifting of a Hand, nay but the least 
 breath of the Unknowable, and these hills 
 would be as blown dust, and the machar as a 
 handfull of ground sand, and the great sea no 
 more than a cup of water spilt and thrown 
 upon the wind. How futile all human long- 
 ing, all passion of the heart, all travail of the 
 spirit, beside this terrible reality of wind and 
 vastness, of wind baying like a hound in a 
 wilderness — a wilderness where the hound's 
 voice would fall away at last, and the hound's 
 shadow fade, and infinitude and eternity be 
 beyond and above and behind and beneath. 
 
 But in Rury's heart there was only a dumb 
 revolt against the blind forces. He did not 
 know them, nor what they did, and even in 
 his secret mind he did not put his hatred upon 
 
 144
 
 Sorrow on the Wind 
 
 them. That would be to bring swift evil upon 
 him. They hear, the everlasting ones. They 
 hear a whisper in the dark : the wise will 
 keep even thought of them screened from the 
 proud, unrelenting eyes. But in his heart he 
 hated them. It was they who put a wave of 
 the sea between him and all his hopes. If 
 Maev were a woman as other women — per- 
 haps, even, he thought, if he could love as 
 other men — But no, it was their will that 
 some should be children of water, and no love 
 and no hope and no supplications would avail, 
 no, not till the whole world was drowned in 
 the sea, or till the sea was gathered to the 
 leaning lips of the sky, as the sun sucks the 
 midsummer dew. 
 
 The night-wind rose out of the west. In 
 the vastness of shadowy gloom over sea and 
 land it moved like a lamenting voice, a crea- 
 ture blind and without form, homeless, seek- 
 ing what is not to be found ; crying sometimes, 
 as a lance slanting on the wind, an ancient 
 sorrow ; deepening sometimes in an immense, 
 gathering, multitudinous sound, as though the 
 tides of night broke against the shores of the 
 stars. 
 
 145
 
 THE LYNN OF DREAMS 
 
 "Men shall die who have an ear for harmo- 
 nies. . . ." — Boinn of the Sidhe (in The Black Linn 
 of Fraech). 
 
 "Ah, son of water, daughter of fire, how can ye 
 twain be one?" — The Little Book of the Great En- 
 chantment. 
 
 "And lest that evil Destiny which puts dust upon 
 dreams, and silence upon sweet airs, and still songs, 
 and makes the hand idle, and the mind an ebbing 
 leaf, and the spirit as foam upon the sea, should 
 take from this dreamer what he had won, the god 
 of enchantment and illusion gave the man a broken 
 heart, and a mind filled with the sighing of weari- 
 ness." — The Ancient Beauty. 
 
 There was a man — let us call him John o' 
 Dreams — who loved words as the many love 
 the common things of desire, and as the few 
 love the beautiful things of the arts. He was 
 known in that world, at once so narrow and 
 so wide, where the love of perfected utterance 
 in prose or verse is become an ideal. What 
 he wrote was read with eagerness: for those 
 who turned to his books knew they would find 
 
 146
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 there not only his own thought, which was 
 deep, and his own imagination, which had 
 a far-wandering wing, but a verbal music 
 that was his own ; a subtle use of the 
 underplay of world-life, the colour, mean- 
 ing, romance, association, suggestiveness, sha- 
 dowy hints of words; the incommunicable 
 charm. 
 
 He loved his art, and he had much to say, 
 and above all longed to capture into rhythm 
 and cadence the floating music that haunted 
 him, and the wonder of life that was his con- 
 tinual dream. But he had a fatal curiosity. 
 Year by year this had grown upon him. He 
 desired to know the well-springs : he desired 
 the well-spring of all literature. At first he 
 sought closely into the art of the rarest mas- 
 ters, now in verse, now in prose : the masters 
 of the dim past, working in the pale gold of 
 antique Greek or the ivory of Catullus, or 
 playing on silver flutes like the obscure sing- 
 ers of the Anthology ; or the masters of a later 
 time moulding molten brass like Dante and 
 Milton, or achieving a supreme alchemy like 
 Shakespeare, or shaping agate and porphyry 
 like Leopardi, or white cornelian like Landor, 
 or chrysoprasc and green jade like Leconte de 
 Lisle and Walter Pater. But nowhere in these 
 did he find the final secret he sought. No, nor 
 
 147
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 in any other; nor in any language inhabited 
 by beauty — neither in the Hmpid excellence 
 of French, since Villon quickened it with a 
 mocking sweetness till Verlaine thrilled it with 
 a sound like a lost air in still woods, so subtle, 
 so evanishing, so little of the world about us, 
 so much of the other world on whose leaning 
 brows are mystery and shadow: nor in the 
 sweet and stately passage of the tongue of 
 Florentine and Roman : nor in the deep, trou- 
 bled tongues of the North, from Weimar to 
 Christiania : nor in the speech, accompanied 
 by clarions and chants, of the spellbound 
 lands of Spain : nor in the great language, 
 like " a mighty army marching with ban- 
 ners," of the English nations. 
 
 Then he turned to his own shaped and co- 
 loured utterance, and looked into that ; and 
 into his own mind so far as he could see on 
 this side its pinnacles and sudden gulfs ; and 
 into his own soul so far as he could sink into 
 these depths. But neither in those still depths, 
 nor in that wide cold region of shade and 
 shine, nor even in that shaped thought and 
 coloured utterance out of which came the 
 beautiful phantoms of his imagination, could 
 he find the silver cord, the thin invisible line 
 that only the soul knows, when it leaves its 
 mortality, as fragrance leaves a rose at dusk. 
 
 148
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 Then a great sadness fell on him, and he 
 wrote no more. 
 
 For long he had been in touch with that 
 otherworld of which he had so often written; 
 and now he dwelled more and more in that 
 company of the imagination and of remem- 
 brance. 
 
 Dark, pathless glens await the troubled 
 thought of those who cross the dim border- 
 lands. To dwell overlong, there ; to listen 
 overlong, there ; overlong to speak with those, 
 or to see those whose bright, cold laughter is 
 to us so sad (we know not why), and whose 
 tranquil songs are to us so passing forlorn 
 and wild ; overlong to commune with them by 
 the open gate, at the wild wood or near the 
 green mound or by the grey wave ; is to sow 
 the moonseed of a fatal melancholy, wherein 
 when it is grown and its poppy-heads stir in a 
 drowsy wind, the mind that wanders there 
 calls upon oblivion as a lost child calling upon 
 God. 
 
 But, in that intercourse, that happens some- 
 times which cannot otherwise happen. 
 
 And so it was that one day while he of 
 whom I write lay dreaming by a pool, set by 
 a river that ran through a wood of wind and 
 shadow, a stranger appeared by his side. He 
 knew from whom this woodfarcr came, for 
 
 149
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 his eyes were cold and glad and no shadow 
 fell on the bracken. Perhaps he knew — it 
 may well be, he knew — more than this : for 
 the cry of the plover was overheard, and the 
 deceitful drumming of snipe was near, and 
 these are two witnesses of him, Dalua, the 
 Master of Illusions, the Fool of Faery — the 
 dark brother of Angus Og and of Airill Ail 
 na'n Og, beautiful lords of life and youth. 
 
 So when the stranger spoke, and said he 
 would lead to the Lynn of Dreams, and re- 
 veal to him there the souls of words in their 
 immortal shape and colour, and how the flow 
 of a secret tide continually moves them into 
 fugitive semblances of mortal colour and mor- 
 tal shape, the man dreaming by the waterside 
 gladly rose, and the two went together, under 
 the shadow of old trees, to the Lynn of 
 Dream. 
 
 When come to that place, where timeless 
 rocks shelved to a deep water, green as a leaf, 
 the mortal and the immortal stooped. 
 
 And there the dreamer of whom I write 
 saw hi? heart's desire bending like a hind of 
 the hill and quenching her thirst. For there 
 he saw the images of beautiful words, as he 
 knew them in their mortal shape and colour, 
 clothe themselves in drifting thought, and 
 often become the thought whose raiment they 
 
 150
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 seemed — or stand, like reeds in shadow, and 
 let the drifting thought take them and wear 
 them as crowns, or diadems, or crested 
 phimes. 
 
 And looking deeper he saw the souls of 
 words, in their immortal shape and colour. 
 These would not come from the violet hollows 
 where they moved in their undying dance of 
 joy, nor could the supplication of yearning 
 thoughts reach them. 
 
 He saw, too, the flow of the secret tide that 
 continually moved these children of joy into 
 semblance of mortal beauty, images known in 
 happy hours or seen in dreams, but often such 
 as he had never known either in waking 
 dream or in sleeping trance. These he saw 
 ceaselessly woven and unwoven and rewoven. 
 The clusters of many Pleiades made a maze 
 in that living darkness. His soul cried aloud 
 for joy. 
 
 When, startled by the wail of a plover at 
 his ear, he looked round, he saw that he was 
 by the riverside again. The stranger stood 
 beside him. 
 
 " What have I seen ? " lie stammered. 
 
 " I gave you a cup to drink, and you drank. 
 It is the Cup of which Tristran drank when 
 he loved Yseult beyond the ache of mortal 
 love: the Cup of Wisdom, that gives madness 
 
 151
 
 The Lynn of Dreams 
 
 and deatli before it gives knowledge and 
 life." 
 
 The man was alone then, for the Master of 
 Illusions had gone : Herdsman of thoughts and 
 dreams that wander upon the Hills of Time. 
 
 But on the morrow, that led many unchang- 
 ing morrows, the dreamer of whom I have 
 spoken knew that the learning of the secret he 
 had won was in truth the knowledge that is 
 immortal knowledge, and therefore cannot be 
 uttered by mortal tongue or shaped by mortal 
 thought or coloured by mortal art. 
 
 He paid the eric for that wisdon. It is the 
 law. 
 
 When again he strove to put beauty into the 
 shimmering, elusive veil of words, he knew 
 with bitter pain that he had lost even the 
 artistry that had once been his. After too 
 deep wisdom he stumbled in the shallows of 
 his own poor troubled knowledge. 
 
 For a time he struggled, as a swimmer 
 borne from the shore. 
 
 It was all gone : the master-touch, the secret 
 art, the craft. He became an obscure stam- 
 merer. At the last he was dumb. And then 
 his heart broke, and he died. 
 
 But had not the Master of Illusions shown 
 him his heart's desire, and made it his? 
 
 152
 
 MAYA 
 
 "Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep — 
 what are they and whence?" — Coleridge, Anima 
 Poeta. 
 
 Less has been written of the psychology of 
 waking dreams than of the psychology of the 
 dreams of sleep. Surely they are more won- 
 derful, and less lawless, if that can be without 
 law which is invariable in disorder. I do not 
 mean the dreams which one controls, as the 
 wind herds the clouds which rise from the sea- 
 horizons : but the dreams which come un- 
 awares, as, when one is lying on the grass and 
 idly thinking, there may appear in the passing 
 of a moment the shadow of a hawk hovering 
 unseen. They are not less irresponsible and 
 unaccountable: they come, reinless and wild, 
 across unknown plains, and one hardly hears 
 the trampling of their feet or sees the flash- 
 ing of tameless eyes before the imagination is 
 carried away by them. In a twinkling, the 
 world that was is no more, and the world that 
 now is has neither frontiers nor height nor 
 
 153
 
 Maya 
 
 depth, and the dancing stars may be under- 
 foot, and from the zenith to the horizons may 
 lean the greenness of the domed sea, and 
 clouds be steadfast as the ancient hills, and 
 dreams and passion and emotions be the 
 winged creatures who move through gulfs of 
 light and shadow. 
 
 Sometimes it happens that, in sleep, dreams 
 have a rhythmical order, a beauty as of sculp- 
 ture. It is rare : for when the phantoms of 
 the silent house are not wild or fantastic or 
 futile, they move commonly as to a music 
 unheard of us, and are radiant or sombre as 
 though an unseen painter touched them with 
 miraculous dyes. But, once perhaps, the 
 dreamer may rejoice in a subtle and beautiful 
 spiritual architecture: and look upon some 
 completed vision of whose advent he has had 
 no premonition, of whose mysterious processes 
 he has no gleam, and whose going will be as 
 lordly as its coming, without touch of ruin or 
 of faded beauty. 
 
 Who builds these perfected dreams? What 
 wings, in the impenetrable shadow wherein 
 one has sunk, have lifted them to the verge 
 where the unsleeping soul can perceive, and, 
 perceiving, perhaps understand? 
 
 These are not the distempered images of 
 broken remembrance : they are not the foam 
 
 154
 
 Maya 
 
 idly fretting the profound suspense of the 
 deep. Nor is the mind consciously at work, 
 building, or shaping, or controlling. As the 
 shadow comes, they come : but as the shadow 
 of some shape of beauty thrown in moonlight 
 in some enchanted garden, a garden wherein 
 one has never been, a shape upon which none 
 has ever looked, a thing of life, complete and 
 wonderful. Strange imaginations arise, as 
 birds winged with flame and with heads like 
 flowers : the unknown is become familiar. 
 When not an image is made by that subtle 
 artificer within ; when not a thought steals out 
 to whisper or to shape ; when the mind is as 
 a hushed child in the cradle, hearing a new 
 and deep music and unknowing the sea, lis- 
 tening to a lullaby beyond the mother-song and 
 unknowing the wind . . . who, then, fashions 
 those palaces upon the sea, those walls of 
 green ice among the rose-garths of June, those 
 phantoms of bright flame sleeping in peace 
 among dry grass or moving under ancient trees 
 of the unfailing branch and the unfading leaf? 
 
 Surely in these is a mystery beyond that of 
 the unquiet brain in a body ill at ease, or be- 
 yond that of the mind when like a sleuth- 
 hound it slips out on the trail of old dreams 
 and fleeing imaginations? 
 
 When first I began to notice these lamps 
 
 155
 
 Mciya 
 
 of beauty hung in unexpected paths, whether 
 in the twiUghts of bodily sleep or when the 
 mind was in that trance of the spirit akin to 
 the slumber of the body, I strove to under- 
 stand, to trace, to go up to the hidden altars 
 and look on the forbidden ecstasy. But, soon, 
 an inward wisdom withheld me. And so for 
 years I have known what has been my whim 
 to call by a name : The Secret Garden, the 
 White Company, and Music. 
 
 Of what I have seen there, and what music 
 heard, and by whom I have been met and with 
 whom gone, it is not my purpose to speak. 
 Dreamland is the last fantasy of the un- 
 loosened imagination, or its valley of Avalon, 
 or the via sacra for the spirit, accordingly as 
 one finds it, or with what dower one goes to 
 it. The ways are hidden to all save to those 
 who themselves find. " Thou canst not travel 
 on the Path till thou hast become the Path 
 itself." 
 
 If these unaccountable waking and un- 
 sought dreams bore any immediate or later 
 relation to the things held by the mind, or re- 
 cently held, or foreseen, one would the more 
 readily believe that the inner mind was work- 
 ing slowly and in its own way at what the 
 outer intelligence had not reached or had 
 ignored. But sometimes they have no recog- 
 
 156
 
 Maya 
 
 nisable bearing. Sometimes, indeed, they are 
 as fragmentary as the phantasmagoria of 
 sleep. A friend told me this : — " Speaking to 
 a friend on ordinary matters, suddenly I saw 
 him quite clearly walking swiftly along a 
 shore-road unknown to me, a road northern 
 in feature and yet in detail as unfamiliar to 
 me as though set in an unvisited land. He was 
 wild and unkempt, but walked with uplifted 
 head and swiftly. His head and right shoulder 
 were meshed in a net, which trailed behind 
 him. His left arm gleamed as though it were 
 of silver, or mailed like a salmon. His left 
 hand was a flame of fire that was as though 
 entranced, for it neither hurt the unconscious 
 walker nor burned anything with which it 
 came in contact. The vision came and went 
 more swiftly than I have taken time to tell of 
 it, and had no bearing, so far as I know, then 
 or later, on anything concerning either him or 
 myself. A few days later, certainly, he told 
 me that he had been thinking some time be- 
 fore of the symbolism of Nuada of the De- 
 dannan, Nuada of the Silver Hand, a Gaelic 
 divinity of uncertain attributes, but whom 
 some take to be a Celtic Hejihaistos. Whether 
 this is any clue I cannot say : or why, since it 
 came, it could not come with more obvious 
 bearing, in a less obscure symbolism. And
 
 Maya 
 
 why, too, should the large round stones on the 
 shore, the peculiar wind-waved line of old 
 yews, the stranded fishing-coble, and other 
 details be so extraordinarily vivid — so vivid 
 that though 1 know I have never seen this 
 headland I could not possibly mistake it were 
 I some day to come upon its like." 
 
 Dreams or visions such as this, are, I fancy, 
 of a kind that have not necessarily any signifi- 
 cance. There are curlews of the imagination 
 that suddenly go crying through waste places 
 in the mind. 
 
 Of another, I think differently. " In the 
 middle of a commonplace action of daily life 
 suddenly I saw a woodland glade in twilight. 
 A man lay before a fire, but when I looked 
 closer I saw that what I thought was fire was 
 a mass of continually revolving leaves, though 
 no leaf was blown from the maze, which was 
 like an ever whirling yet never advancing 
 wheel in that forest silence. He took up a 
 reed-pipe or something of the kind. He 
 played, and I saw the stars hang on the 
 branches of the trees. He played, and I saw 
 the great boles of the oaks become like amber 
 filled with moonlight. He played, and then 
 suddenly I realised that it was a still music, 
 and had its life for me only in the symbol 
 of colour. Flowers and plants and tree- 
 
 158
 
 Maya 
 
 growths of shape and hue such as I had never 
 seen, and have never imagined, arose in the 
 glade, which was now luminous as a vast 
 shell behind which burned torches of honey- 
 coloured fiame. 
 
 " These changed continually, as the red 
 foliage of fire continually renews itself. Then 
 the player rose, and was a changing flame, 
 and was gone. Another player was in the 
 glade, where all was moveless shadows and old 
 darkness. * It is I, now, who am God,' he 
 said. Then he in turn was like a shadow of 
 a reed in the wind, that a moment is, and is 
 not. And I looked, and in the heart of the 
 darkness saw a white light continually revol- 
 ving: and in the silence was a voice . . . 
 ' And I— I am Life.' " 
 
 Here, obviously, clear or not, there is the 
 symbolic imagination at work. 1 do not think 
 an interpreter of dreams need seek here for 
 other than spiritual significance. It is, surely, 
 an efifort of the soul to create in symbolic 
 vision a concept of spiritual insight such as 
 the mind cannot adequately realise within its 
 restricted terms, or what is beyond the reach 
 of words. For these, though children of air 
 and fire, have mortal evasive wings, and hands 
 of impalpable dew, and feet wandering and 
 uncertain as the eddying leaf. 
 
 159
 
 Maya 
 
 It is less easy to interpret or accept either 
 the rounded and complete dream of sleep — 
 that all too rare visitor in the night of the 
 body — or the waking dream that comes not 
 less mysteriously, unsought, clanless among 
 the tribes of the day's thoughts, an exile from 
 a forbidden land, a prince who will not be com- 
 manded in his going or coming, who knows 
 not any law of ours but only his own law. 
 
 It is to write of one such vision that I took 
 up my pen and have written these things. It 
 was a dream in sleep, but so potent an image, 
 that, with both body and mind alert in startled 
 wakefulness, I saw it not less clearly, not less 
 vividly, not less overwhelmingly near and 
 present. Its strangeness was in its living near- 
 ness in vision, and perhaps neither in aspect 
 nor relation may appeal to others. Perhaps, 
 even, it will seem no more than a luminous 
 phantasy, void of significance. But, to me, it 
 appeared, later, as an eflfort on the part of the 
 spirit to complete in symbol what I had failed 
 to do in words, while I have been writing these 
 foregoing pages on the children of water — 
 of those in whose hearts is the unresting wave, 
 and whom the tides of happy life Hft and 
 leave, and whose longing is idle as foam, and 
 whose dreams are as measureless as all the 
 waters of the world. 
 
 i6o
 
 Maya 
 
 I saw, suddenly, greenness come out of the 
 sea, and then the sea pass like a dewdrop in 
 the heat of the sun. A vast figure stood on 
 the bare understrand of ocean, and leaned on 
 his right arm along a mountain-brow so high 
 that it seemed to me Himalaya or the extreme 
 Cordillera. As he leaned, I could not see the 
 face, for the titan stared beyond the rim of 
 the world. But he leaned negligently, as 
 though idly watching, idly waiting. There was 
 nothing of him but was green water, fluent as 
 the homeless wave yet held in unwavering col- 
 umnar suspense. Not a limb but was moulded 
 in strength and beauty, not a muscle of man's 
 mortal body but was there : yet the white coral 
 of the depths gleamed through the titanic feet 
 sculptured as in green jade, and the floating 
 brown weed of the perpetual tide cast a wa- 
 vering shadow among the sculptured green 
 ridges and valleys of that titanic head. But 
 it was not an image I saw : it was not an image 
 of life, but life. There was not an ocean with- 
 held in that bended arm, in that lifted shoul- 
 der, which could not have yielded in flying 
 wave and soaring billow, or heaved with a 
 slow mighty breath sustaining navies and ar- 
 gosies as drifting shells. When thought stirred 
 behind the inisccn brows, tides moved within 
 these columnar deeps : and I do not doubt that 
 
 i6i
 
 Maya 
 
 the vast heart was a maelstrom where the in- 
 rush and outrush of tempestuous surges 
 made a throb that shook the coasts of worlds 
 beyond our own. 
 
 Looking on the greatness of this upbuilded 
 sea, this titanic statue of silence and water, I 
 thought I beheld the most ancient of the gods : 
 the most ancient of the gods, the greatest of 
 the gods. 
 
 Suddenly I heard breaths of music, and a 
 sound as of a multitude of swift feet around 
 me and beyond. I turned. There was no 
 one. But a low voice, that ran through me 
 like fire, spoke. 
 
 " Look, child of water, at your god." 
 
 Again I heard breaths of music rise, like 
 thin spirals of smoke, but I did not see whence 
 they came. 
 
 While the music breathed, I saw the Titan 
 stand back from the rim of the world. His 
 face slowly turned. But a whiteness as of 
 foam was against my eyes, and a sudden in- 
 tolerable fear bowed my head. When I 
 looked again I saw only an illimitable sea that 
 reached from my feet, green as grass: and on 
 the west of the world the unloosened rains and 
 dews hung like a veil. 
 
 The unseen one beside me stooped, and 
 lifted a wave, and threw it into my heart. 
 
 162
 
 Maya 
 
 Then I knew that I was made of the kin- 
 ship of Manan, and should never know peace, 
 but should have the homeless wave for my 
 heart's brother, and the salt sea as my cup to 
 drink, and the wilderness of waters as the 
 symbol of all vain ungovernable longings and 
 desires. 
 
 And I woke, still looking out of time into 
 eternity, and saw a titan figure of living green 
 water sculptured like jade, with feet set in the 
 bed of ancient oceans ; leaning, with averted 
 face, on a mountain-brow, vast as Andes, vast 
 as Himalaya. 
 
 163
 
 FOR THE BEAUTY OF 
 AN IDEA
 
 "The first necessity for peoples, as for man, is to 
 die." — Chateaubriand, M^moires, pt. xi. bk. iv. 
 
 "In the life of cities nothing preserves like early 
 overthrow, nothing destroys like continuous life." — 
 Freeman, Essay on Argos. 
 
 "When a man has attained those things which are 
 necessary to life, there is another alternative than to 
 attain the superfluities; he may adventure on life now." 
 — Thoreau.
 
 For the Beauty of an 
 
 Idea 
 
 I 
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 The short essay, entitled " Celtic," which 
 forms the second of the three parts of this 
 study in the spiritual history of the Gael, ap- 
 peared first in The Contemporary Revieiv, 
 and a few months later in the volume en- 
 titled The Divine Adventure: lona: and other 
 Studies in Spiritual History, and was a signal 
 for divided comment. But for the moment I 
 would recur only to the aspect it wore for 
 many in that country for whose more eager 
 spirits it was above all intended — Ireland being 
 to-day not only the true home of lost causes 
 and a nursery of the heroic powers and influ- 
 ences that go out to conquer and die, but of 
 the passionate and evil powers and influences 
 which seek to confjuer and are slow to die. 
 
 Although in Ireland, then, this essay to- 
 wards a worthy peace, where peace may be, 
 
 167
 
 Prehide 
 
 and towards a compromise, in nothing ignoble, 
 for the sake of union in a noble destiny, was 
 welcomed by many — there were others, and 
 among them one or two of those deservedly 
 held in honour, who execrated the attempt.^ 
 
 ' As it has been "authoritatively" stated that no 
 Irish journal has endorsed these views, one out of 
 six or seven of the leading Irish journals represen- 
 tative of all degrees of opinion, which have more or 
 less "endorsed" the views here set forth, may be 
 selected. In the reprinting of so personal a note the 
 author trusts to be absolved of any other intent than 
 to refute in what seems the simplest and most direct 
 way a statement calculated to mislead: 
 
 "It seems an unexpected utterance from Miss 
 Macleod. Yet, in point of fact, it only shows the 
 awakening of the same philosophic spirit which we 
 have observed in other parts of this book and in 
 other regions of her thought. Miss Macleod has 
 noticed the narrow separatism of sentiment which 
 has sometimes marked the Celtic literary revival, 
 and sees that it can only keep the Celtic spirit in a 
 hopeless and sterile conflict with fact and truth. . . . 
 In her own words : — 
 
 "The Celtic element in our national life has a vital 
 and great part to play. We have a most noble 
 ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to 
 perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what has 
 gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance 
 with scorn, or dulness with contempt, or past 
 wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to 
 pray, so to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, 
 what is left of the Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, 
 
 i68
 
 Prelude 
 
 I have no ill-will to those who, no doubt in 
 part through a hurried habit of mind, sought 
 by somewhat intemperate means to discredit 
 the plea. I believe — I would say I know, so 
 sure am I — these had at heart the thought of 
 Ireland, that passion which is indeed the fore- 
 most lamp of the Gael, the passion of nation- 
 ality ; and having this thought and this pas- 
 sion, considered little or for the time ignored 
 the " sweet reasonableness," the courtesy cher- 
 ished by minds less sick with hope deferred, 
 less desperate with defeated dreams. But in 
 controversy nothing else was revealed than 
 that enthusiasm can sometimes lead to con- 
 fused thought and hasty speech, and (it may 
 well be ) that the writer of " Celtic " had failed 
 
 may permeate the greater race of which we are a 
 
 vital part, so that with this Celtic emotion, Celtic 
 
 love of beauty, and Celtic spirituality a nation 
 
 greater than any the world has seen may issue, a 
 
 nation refined and strengthened by the wise relin- 
 
 quishings and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, 
 
 united in a common fatherland, and in singleness of 
 
 pride and faith." 
 
 ****** 
 
 These are great, wise, and courageous words. . . , 
 
 When the Irish Celt begins to heed them he will 
 
 cease to be the type of self- torturing futility which, 
 
 with all his gifts, he so largely is at the present day." 
 
 — (From an article, "A Celtic Thinker," in the 
 
 Dublin Express.) 
 
 169
 
 Prelude 
 
 to be lucid or adequate on that fundamental 
 factor in Gaelic union, that essential element 
 in the continued life and development of the 
 Gael — the proud preservation of nationality. 
 I can imagine no worse thing for Ireland than 
 that, in exchange for a dull peace and a poor 
 prosperity, it should sink to the vassalage of 
 a large English shire. In the wise words of 
 Thoreau, the cost of a thing is the amount of 
 what may be called life which is required to be 
 exchanged for it, immediately or in the long 
 run. 
 
 The aim of this essay was to help towards a 
 workable reconciliation : not between " invet- 
 erate and irreconcilable foes" (which is but 
 the rhetoric of those fevered with an epileptic 
 nationalism), but a reconciliation such as may 
 be persuaded between two persons, each with 
 divergent individual aims and ideals, yet able 
 to unite with decency and courtesy in a league 
 for the common good, the commonweal. It 
 seemed, and seems, to the writer that com- 
 monsense (there is no Celtic word for it) 
 makes clear that an absolute irreconcilability 
 is simply a cul-de-sac, down which baffled 
 dreams and hopes and faiths come at last 
 upon a blank wall. Strength is built out of 
 forfeiture as well as of steadfastness, and the 
 man or woman, cause or race wins, which on 
 
 170
 
 Prelude 
 
 occasion can relinquish or forbear. Merely 
 to be irreconcilable is to prefer the blank wall 
 to the open road. 
 
 But when that is said, it does not follow 
 that there are no subjects, no ideals, no aims 
 which stand apart from this debatable ground 
 of reconciliation. On the contrary, I believed, 
 and believe, that there are subjects, ideals, 
 and aims whose continuity lies only in an un- 
 swerving steadfastness. Nay, further, with 
 the author of The Hearts of Men, I would 
 say with all my faith, " the people that cannot 
 fight shall die." On any such people the 
 shadow of the end is already come. All signs 
 and portents will have borne testimony. Be- 
 fore a nation dies, the soul of that nation is 
 dead ; and before the death of the soul of the 
 nation its gods perish : God perishes. For 
 God, who is eternal in the Spirit, is, in the 
 image and in the symbol, as in " omnipotence " 
 as we conceive it, mortal. Unto every nation 
 of man God dies when in the soul of the na- 
 tion the altars are cold. There are the altars 
 of divine faith, and the altars of spiritual 
 ideals, and the altars of the commonweal. Be- 
 ware the waning of these fires. 
 
 The keynote of " Celtic " is in the sentence, 
 " We have of late heard so much of Celtic 
 beauty and Celtic emotion that we would do 
 
 171
 
 Prelude 
 
 well to stand in more surety as to what we 
 mean and what we do not mean." 
 
 But I generalised too vaguely, I find, in this 
 merely indicative, merely suggestive paper, 
 when I wrote, " What is a Celtic Writer? . . . 
 It is obvious that if one would write English 
 literature, one must write in English and in 
 the English tradition." 
 
 Of course I meant nothing so narrow in 
 claim, so foreign to my conviction, as that one 
 must " be English." There is no " must," in 
 the Academic sense, in literature : the most 
 vivid and original literature has in truth ever 
 been an ignoring or overriding of this strong 
 word of the weak. 
 
 Only I can see how some — I am glad to 
 know the few, not the many — misread this 
 sentence. For that, I welcome this opportu- 
 nity of the open word. There is no need here 
 to recur to the literal meaning of the designa- 
 tion, a " Celtic writer." I would merely add 
 a further word of warning as to the some- 
 times apt epithet and definitive but often ill- 
 considered use of racial terms in speaking of 
 what are individual qualities and idiosyncrasies 
 rather than the habit of mind or general char- 
 acteristic of a people. Swedenborg, Blake, 
 and Maurice Maeterlinck do not stand for 
 Scandinavian, and English, and Flemish mys- 
 
 172
 
 Prelude 
 
 ticism, nor is any of these a mystic by vir- 
 tue of being a Fleming, an Englishman, or a 
 Scandinavian. I recall the considered judg- 
 ment of an acute French critic, M. Angellier, 
 in his essay on Burns: " The idea of race is 
 fluctuating, ill-established, open to dispute 
 . . . you cannot obtain a conception of the 
 soul of a portion of humanity by merely sup- 
 plementing certain ethnological labels with a 
 few vague adjectives." 
 
 To consider those only, then, who write in 
 English, I would add to my statement that if 
 one would write English literature one must 
 write in English and in the English tradition, 
 the rider that the English language is not the 
 exclusive property of that section of our com- 
 plex race which is distinctively English, the 
 English nation — any more than it is the ex- 
 clusive property of the Scots, who speak it ; or 
 of the Australians ; or of the Canadians ; or of 
 the vast and numerically superior American 
 nation. The language is common to all : all 
 share in the heritage shaped by the genius, 
 moulded by the life and thought, and trans- 
 mitted by the living spirit of the common es- 
 sential stock — now as likely to be revealed in 
 Massachusetts as in Yorkshire, in Toronto as 
 in Edinburgh, in Sydney or Melbourne or 
 Washington, as in Dublin, Manchester, or 
 
 ^73
 
 Prelude 
 
 London. An American writes in his native 
 language when he writes in English : so does 
 a Scot, now : so does a Canadian, an Austral- 
 ian, a New Zealander. Therefore the litera- 
 ture of the Australians, the Scots, the Irish, 
 the Americans, must be in English. It is the 
 language that determines, but the thought be- 
 hind the language may come from any of the 
 several founts of nationality, to reveal, in that 
 language, its signature of the colour and form 
 of distinctive life. It is not the language that 
 compels genius, but genius that compels the 
 language. 
 
 Again, literature has laws as inevitable as 
 the laws which mould and determine the des- 
 tiny of nations. These can be evaded by de- 
 cay and death : they cannot be overridden. 
 Every literature has its tradition of excellence 
 — that is, the sum of what within its own 
 limits can be achieved in beauty and power 
 and aptitude. This tradition of excellence is 
 what we call the central stream. Of course, if 
 one prefer the tributary, the backwater, the 
 offshoot, there is no reason why one should 
 not be well content with the chosen course. 
 To many it seems, for many it is, the better 
 way ; as the backwater for the kingfisher, the 
 offshoot or tributary for the solitary heron. 
 But one must not choose the backwater and 
 
 174
 
 Prelude 
 
 declare that it is the main stream, or have the 
 Httle tributary say that though it travels on 
 the great flow it is not part of the river. 
 
 That is what I meant when I said that if one 
 would write English literature one must write 
 in English and in the English tradition. To 
 say that was not to bid the Gael cease to be 
 Gaelic, any more than it would imply that the 
 American should cease to be American. On 
 the contrary, I do most strenuously believe 
 that the sole life of value in literature is in 
 the preservation of the distinct racial genius, 
 temper, colour, and contour. If the poetry 
 of two of the foremost Irish poets of to-day 
 did not conform to the laws and traditions 
 of English poetry — since Mr. Yeats and Mr. 
 George Russell write in their native language, 
 English, the language to which they were born 
 and in which alone they can express them- 
 selves — it might be very interesting " Celtic " 
 or any other experimental verse, but it would 
 not be English poetry. The beauty they 
 breathe into their instrument is of themselves ; 
 is individual certainly, and, in one case at 
 least, in spirit and atmosphere is more dis- 
 tinctively Gaelic than English. Rut the in- 
 strument is English : and to summon beauty 
 through it, and to give the phantom a body 
 and spirit of excellence, one must follow in the 
 
 175
 
 Prelude 
 
 footsteps of the master-musicians, recognising 
 the same essential hmitations, observing the 
 same fundamental needs, fulfilling the like 
 rigorous obligations of mastery. 
 
 Since we have to write in English, we must 
 accept the burthen and responsibility. If a 
 Cretan write in the Cretan dialect, he can be 
 estimated by those who know Cretan ; but if 
 he is ambitious to have his irregular meas- 
 ures and corrupt speech called Greek poetry, 
 he must write in Greek and conform in what 
 is essential to the Greek tradition, to the 
 laws and limitations of the Greek genius. 
 The Englishman, the Scot, the Irishman, the 
 American, each, if he would write Eng- 
 lish literature, has of necessity to do like- 
 wise. 
 
 In a very true sense, therefore, there can 
 be an Irish literature, a Scottish literature, an 
 Anglo-Gaelic literature, as well as an English 
 literature ; but in the wider sense it is all 
 English literature — with, as may be, an Irish 
 spirit and Irish ideals and Irish colour, or 
 with a Highland spirit and Highland ideals 
 and Highland colour, or with a Welsh spirit 
 and Welsh ideals and Welsh colour — as Mr. 
 Thomas Hardy's writings are English litera- 
 ture, with an English spirit and English ideals 
 and an English colour. 
 
 176
 
 Prelude 
 
 It is the desire and faith of the Irish nation 
 to mould anew a literature as distinctively its 
 own as the English nation has a literature that 
 is distinctively its own : and to do this, in Ire- 
 land or the like in Scotland, is possible only 
 by the cultivation, the persistent preservation 
 of the national spirit, of the national idiosyn- 
 crasy, the national ideals. I would see our 
 peoples reconciled, where reconciliation is just 
 and therefore wise ; believing that in such re- 
 conciliation lie the elements of strength and 
 advance, of noble growth and conquering in- 
 fluence : but I would not have reconciliation at 
 any price, and would rather we should dwell 
 isolate and hostile than purchase peace at the 
 cost of relinr|uishment of certain things more 
 precious than all prosperities and triumphs. 
 The law of love is the nobler way, but there 
 is also a divine law of hate. I do not advo- 
 cate, and have never advocated, a reconcilia- 
 tion on any terms. I am not English, and 
 have not the English mind or the English tem- 
 per, and in many things do not share the 
 English ideals; and to possess these would 
 mean to relinquish my own heritage. But 
 why should I be irreconcilably hostile to that 
 mind and that temper and those ideals? Why 
 shoulfl I not flo my utmost to understand, 
 sympathise, fall into line with them so far as 
 
 177
 
 Prelude 
 
 may be, since wc have all a common bond 
 and a common destiny? 
 
 To that mind and that temper and those 
 ideals do we not owe some of the noblest 
 achievements of the human race, some of the 
 lordliest conquests over the instincts and forces 
 of barbarism, some of the loveliest and most 
 deathless things of the spirit and the imagina- 
 tion? 
 
 Let us beware of kneading husks with 
 Maya's dew, and so — as in the ancient gnome 
 attributed to Krishna — create but food for 
 the black doves of decay and death. 
 
 As for the Gaelic remnant (and none can 
 pretend that this means Scotland and Ireland, 
 but only a portion of Scotland and only a di- 
 vided Ireland) I am ever but the more con- 
 vinced that the dream of an outward inde- 
 pendence is a perilous illusion — not because it 
 is impracticable, for that alone is a fascina- 
 tion to us, but because it does not, cannot alas, 
 reveal those dominant elements which alone 
 can control dreams become actualities. An- 
 other and greater independence is within our 
 reach, is ours, to preserve and ennoble. 
 
 Strange reversals, strange fulfilments may 
 lie on the lap of the gods, but we have no 
 knowledge of these, and hear neither the high 
 laughter nor the far voices. But we front a 
 
 178
 
 Prelude 
 
 possible because a spiritual greater destiny 
 than the height of imperial fortunes, and 
 have that which may send our voices further 
 than the trumpets of east and west. Through 
 ages of slow westering, till now we face the 
 sundown seas, we have learned in continual 
 vicissitude that there are secret ways whereon 
 armies cannot march. And this has been 
 given to us, a more ardent longing, a more 
 rapt passion in the things of outward beauty 
 and in the things of spiritual beauty. Nor it 
 seems to me is there any sadness, or only the 
 serene sadness of a great day's end, that, to 
 others, we reveal in our best the genius of a 
 race whose farewell is in a tragic lighting of 
 torches of beauty around its grave. 
 
 179
 
 CELTIC
 
 "Search first at home: a fitting glory hast thou got 
 there." — Pindar. 
 
 Oed.: "And where are the young men, thy brothers, 
 at our needf" 
 
 Ismene: "They are . . . where they are: 'tis their 
 dark hour." 
 
 Sophocles: Oedipus at Kolonos.
 
 II 
 
 CELTIC 
 
 "Yea, point thine arrow at a noble spirit, and thou 
 shalt not miss." — Sophocles: Aias. 
 
 A writer might well be proud to be identi- 
 fied with a movement that is primarily spir- 
 itual and eager, a movement of quickened ar- 
 tistic life. I, for one, care less to be identified 
 with any literary movement avowedly parti- 
 san. That is not the deliberate view of litera- 
 ture, which carries with it the heat and con- 
 fused passions of the many. It is not the 
 deliberate view, which confers passions that 
 are fugitive upon that troubled Beauty which 
 knows only a continual excellence. It is not 
 the deliberate view, which would impose the 
 penury of distracted dreams and desires upon 
 those who go up to the treasure house and to 
 white palaces. 
 
 But I am somewhat tired of an epithet that, 
 in a certain association, is become jejune, 
 through use and misuse. It has grown fa- 
 
 183
 
 Celtic 
 
 miliar wrongly ; is often a term of praise or 
 disdain, in each inept ; is applied without mod- 
 eration ; and so now is sometimes unwelcome 
 even when there is none other so apt and 
 right. 
 
 The " Celtic Movement," in the first place, 
 is not, as so often confusedly stated, an arbi- 
 trary efifort to reconstruct the past ; though it 
 is, in part, an elTort to discover the past. For 
 myself (as one imputed to this " movement ") 
 I would say that I do not seek merely to re- 
 produce ancient Celtic presentments of tragic 
 beauty and tragic fate, but do seek in nature 
 and in life, and in the swimming thought of 
 timeless imagination, for the kind of beauty 
 that the old Celtic poets discovered and ut- 
 tered. There were poets and mythmakers in 
 those days ; and to-day we may be sure that a 
 new Mythus is being woven, though we may 
 no longer regard with the old wonder, or in 
 the old wonder imaginatively shape and co- 
 lour the forces of Nature and her silent and 
 secret processes ; for the mythopoeic faculty is 
 not only a primitive instinct but a spiritual 
 need. 
 
 I do not suppose our Celtic ancestors — for 
 all their high civiHsation and development, so 
 much beyond what obtained among the Anglo- 
 Saxon or Teutonic peoples at the same date — 
 
 184
 
 Celtic 
 
 theorised about their narrative art ; but from 
 what We know of their Hterature, from the 
 most ancient bardic chants to the sgeul of to- 
 day, we cannot fail to see that the instinctive 
 ideal was to represent beautiful life. It is an 
 ideal that has lain below the spiritual passion 
 of all great art in every period. Phidias knew 
 it when he culled a white beauty from the 
 many Athenian youth, and Leonardo when he 
 discerned the inexplicable in woman's beauty 
 and painted Mona Lisa, and Palestrina when 
 from the sound in the pines and the voice of 
 the wind in solitudes and the songs of la- 
 bourers at sundow^n he wove a solemn music 
 for cathedral aisles. With instinct, the old 
 Celtic poets and romancists knew it : there are 
 no Breton ballads nor Cymric mabinogion nor 
 Gaelic sgeulan which deal ignobly with petty 
 life. All the evil passions may obtain there, 
 but they move against a spiritual background 
 of pathetic wonder, of tragic beauty and 
 tragic fate. 
 
 The ideal of art should be to represent 
 beautiful life. If we want a vision of life that 
 is not beautiful, we can have it otherwise: a 
 multitude can depict the ignoble ; the lens can 
 replicate the usual. 
 
 It should be needless to add that our vision 
 of the beautiful must be deep and wide and 
 
 185
 
 Celtic 
 
 virile, as well as high and ideal. When we 
 say that art should represent beautiful life, we 
 do not say that it should represent only the 
 beautiful in life, which would be to ignore 
 the roots and the soil and the vivid sap, and 
 account the blossom only. The vision of beau- 
 tiful life is the vision of life seen not in im- 
 possible but in possible relief : of harmonious 
 unity in design as well as in colour. To say 
 that art should represent beautiful life is 
 merely to give formal expression to the one 
 passionate instinct in every poet and painter 
 and musician, in every artist. There is no 
 " art " saved by a moral purpose, though all 
 true art is subtly informed of the spirit; but 
 I know none, with pen or brush, with chisel 
 or score, which, ignobly depicting the ignoble, 
 survives in excellence. 
 
 In this, one cannot well go astray. Nor do 
 I seek an unreal Ideal. In the kingdom of 
 the imagination, says Calvert, one of our for- 
 gotten mystics, the ideal must ever be faithful 
 to the general laws of nature — elsewhere add- 
 ing a truth as immanent : " Man is not alone : 
 the Angel of the Presence of the Infinite is 
 with him." I do not, with Blake, look upon 
 our world as though it were at best a basis for 
 transcendental vision, while in itself " a hin- 
 drance and a mistake,' but rather, as a wiser 
 
 i86
 
 Celtic 
 
 has said, to an Earth spiritualised, not a 
 Heaven naturahsed. With Calvert, too, I 
 w^ould say : " I have a fondness for the earth, 
 and rather a Phrygian w^ay of regarding it, 
 despite a deeper yearning to see its glades re- 
 ceding into the Gardens of Heaven." 
 
 There is cause for deep regret when any 
 word, that has peculiar associations of beauty 
 or interest, or in which some distinction ob- 
 tains, is lightly bandied. Its merit is then in 
 convenience of signal rather than in its own 
 significance. It is easy to recall some of 
 these unfortunates ; as our Scottish word 
 " gloaming," that is so beautiful, and is now, 
 alas, to be used rarely and with heed ; as 
 *' haunting," with its implicit kinship with all 
 mysteries of shadow, and its present low 
 estate ; as " melody," that has an outworn air, 
 though it has three secrets of beauty ; as 
 others, that one or two use with inevitable- 
 ness, and a small number deftly, till the 
 journal has it, and it is come into desuetude. 
 
 We have qi late heard so much of Celtic 
 beauty and Celtic emotion that we would do 
 well to stand in more surety as to what we 
 mean and what we do not mean. 
 
 I do not myself know any beauty that is of 
 art to excel that bequeathed to us by Greece. 
 
 187
 
 Celtic 
 
 The marble has outlasted broken dynasties 
 and lost empires : the word is to-day f-resh as 
 with dews of dawn. Rut through the heart I 
 travel into another land. Through the heart 
 I go to lost gardens, to mossed fountains, to 
 groves where is no white beauty of still 
 statue, but only the beauty of an old forgot- 
 ten day remembered with quickened pulse and 
 desired with I know not what of longing and 
 weariness. 
 
 Is it remembrance, I wonder often, that 
 makes many of us of the Celtic peoples turn 
 to our own past with a longing so great, a 
 love perfected through forgotten tribulations 
 and familiar desires of the things we know 
 to be impossible but so fair? Or do we 
 but desire in memory what all primitive 
 races had, and confuse our dreams with 
 those which have no peace because they are 
 immortal ? 
 
 If one can think with surety but a little way 
 back into the past, one can divine through 
 both the heart and the mind. I do not think 
 that our broken people had no other memories 
 and traditions than other peoples had. I be- 
 lieve they stood more near to ancient forgot- 
 ten founts of wisdom than others stood: I be- 
 lieve that they are the offspring of a race who 
 were in a more fraternal communion with the 
 
 1 88
 
 Celtic 
 
 secret powers of the world. I think their an- 
 cient writings show it, their ancient legends, 
 their subtle and spiritual mythology. I believe 
 that, in the East, they lit the primitive genius 
 of their race at unknown and mysterious fires ; 
 that, in the ages, they have not wholly for- 
 gotten the ancestral secret ; that, in the West, 
 they may yet turn from the grey wave that 
 they see, and the grey wave of time that they 
 do not see, and again, upon new altars, com- 
 mit that primeval fire. 
 
 But to believe is one thing, to convince is 
 another. Those of us who believe thus have 
 no warrant to show. It may well be that we 
 do but create an image made after the desire 
 and faith of the heart. 
 
 It is not the occasion to speak of what I do 
 believe the peculiar and excelling beauty of 
 the Celtic genius and Celtic literature to be; 
 how deep its well-springs, how full of strange 
 new beauty to us who come upon it that is so 
 old and remote. What I have just written 
 will disclose that wherever else I may desire 
 to worship, there is one beauty that has to me 
 the light of home upon it ; that there is one 
 beauty from which, above all others now, I 
 hope for a new revelation ; that there is a 
 love, there is a passion, there is a romance, 
 which to me calls more suddenly and search- 
 
 189
 
 Celtic 
 
 ingly than any other ancient love or ancient 
 passion or ancient romance. 
 
 But having said this, I am the more free to 
 speak what I have in view. Let me say at once, 
 then, that I am not a great behever in " move- 
 ments," and still less in "renascences"; to 
 be more exact, I hold myself in a suspicion 
 towards these terms ; for often, in the one, 
 what we look for is not implicit, and in the 
 other, we are apt rather to find the ex- 
 crescent and the deciduous. 
 
 So far as I understand the " Celtic Move- 
 ment," it is a natural outcome, the natural ex- 
 pression of a freshly inspired spiritual and 
 artistic energy. That this expression is co- 
 loured by racial temperament is its distinction ; 
 that it is controlled to novel usage is its op- 
 portunity. When we look for its source we 
 find it in the usufruct of an ancient and beau- 
 tiful treasure of national tradition. One may 
 the more aptly speak thus collectively of a 
 mythology and a literature, and a vast and 
 wonderful legendary folklore, since to us now, 
 it is in great part hidden behind veils of an 
 all but forgotten tongue, and of a system of 
 life and customs, ideals and thought, that no 
 longer obtains. 
 
 I am unable, however, to see that it has 
 sustenance in continuity of revolt. A new 
 
 190
 
 Celtic 
 
 movement need not be a revolt, but rather a 
 sortie to carry a fresh position. If a move- 
 ment has any inherent force, it will not de- 
 stroy itself in forlorn hopes, but, where the 
 need is vital, will fall into line, and so achieve 
 where alone the desired success can be 
 achieved. 
 
 There is no racial road to beauty, nor to 
 any excellence. Genius, which leads thither, 
 beckons neither to tribe nor clan, neither to 
 school nor movement, but only to one soul 
 here and to another there; so that the Ice- 
 lander hears and speaks in Saga, and the 
 brown Malay hears and carves delicately in 
 ivory ; and the men in Europe, from the Serb 
 and the Finn to the Basque and the Breton, 
 hear, and each in his kind answers ; and what 
 the Englishman says in song and romance and 
 the deep utterance of his complex life, his 
 mountain-kindred say in mabinogi or sgeul. 
 
 Even in those characteristics which distin- 
 guish Celtic literature — intimate natural vis- 
 ion ; a swift emotion that is sometimes a spir- 
 itual ecstasy, but sometimes is also a mere 
 intoxication of the senses; a peculiar sensi- 
 tiveness to the beauty of what is remote and 
 solitary ; a rapt pleasure in what is ancient 
 and in the contemplation of what holds an 
 indwelling melancholy ; a visionary passion 
 
 191
 
 Celtic 
 
 for beauty, which is of the immortal things, 
 beyond the temporal beauty of what is mutable 
 and mortal — even in these characteristics it 
 does not stand alone, and perhaps not pre- 
 eminent. There is a beauty in the Homeric 
 hymns that I do not find in the most beautiful 
 of Celtic chants; none could cull from the 
 gardens of the Gael what in the Greek an- 
 thology has been gathered out of time to be 
 everlasting ; perhaps only the love and passion 
 of the stories of the Celtic mythology surpass 
 the love and passion of the stories of the 
 Hellenic mythology. The romance that of old 
 flowered among the Gaelic hills flowered also 
 in English meads, by Danish shores, along 
 Teutonic woods and plains. I think Catullus 
 sang more excellently than Baile Honeymouth, 
 and that Theocritus loved nature not less than 
 Oisin, and that the ancient makers of the 
 Kalevala were as much children of the wind 
 and wave and the intimate natural world as 
 were the makers of the ancient heroic chron- 
 icles of the Gael. 
 
 There is no law set upon beauty. It has no 
 geography. It is the domain of the spirit. 
 And if, of those who enter there, peradven- 
 ture any comes again, he is welcome for what 
 he brings ; nor do we demand if he be dark or 
 fair, Latin or Teuton or Celt, or say of him 
 
 192
 
 Celtic 
 
 that his tidings are lovelier or the less lovely 
 because he was born in the shadow of Gaelic 
 hills or nurtured by Celtic shores. 
 
 It is well that each should learn the mother- 
 song of his land at the cradle-place of his 
 birth. It is well that the people of the isles 
 should love the isles above all else, and the 
 people of the mountains love the mountains 
 above all else, and the people of the plains 
 love the plains above all else. But it is not 
 well that because of the whistling of the wind 
 in the heather one should imagine that no- 
 where else does the wind suddenly stir the 
 reeds and the grasses in its incalculable hour. 
 
 When I hear that a new writer is of the 
 Celtic school, I am left in some uncertainty, 
 for I know of many Anglo-Celtic writers but 
 of no " school," or wiiat present elements 
 would form a school. What is a Celtic wri- 
 ter? If the word has any exact acceptance, it 
 must denote an Irish or a Scottish Gael, a 
 Cymric or Breton Celt, who writes in the 
 language of his race. It is obvious that 
 if one would write English literature, one 
 must write in English and in the English 
 tradition. 
 
 When I hear, therefore, of this or that 
 writer as a Celtic writer, I wonder if the term 
 is not apt to be misleading. An English 
 
 193
 
 Celtic 
 
 writer is meant, who in person happens to be 
 an Irish Gael, or Highland, or Welsh. 
 
 I have already suggested what other mis- 
 use of the word obtains: Celtic emotion, Cel- 
 tic love of nature, Celtic visionariness. That, 
 as admitted, there is in the Celtic peoples an 
 emotionalism peculiar in kind and certainly in 
 intensity, is not to be denied ; that a love of 
 nature is characteristic is true, but differing 
 only, if at all, in certain intimacies of ap- 
 proach ; that visionariness is relatively so com- 
 mon as to be typical, is obvious. But there 
 is English emotion, English love of nature, 
 English visionariness, as there is Dutch, or 
 French, or German, or Russian, or Hindu. 
 There is no exclusive national heritage in these 
 things, save in the accident of racial physiog- 
 nomy, of the supreme felicity of contour and 
 colour. At a hundred yards a forest is seen 
 to consist of ash and lime, of elms, beeches, 
 oaks, horn-beams; but a mile away it is, sim- 
 ply, a forest. 
 
 I do not know any Celtic visionary so rapt 
 and absolute as the Londoner William Blake, 
 or the Scandinavian Swedenborg, or the Flem- 
 ish Ruysbroek ; or any Celtic poet of nature 
 to surpass the Englishman Keats; nor do I 
 think even religious ecstasy is more seen in 
 Ireland than in Italy. 
 
 194
 
 Celtic 
 
 Nothing but harm is done by a protestation 
 that cannot persuade dehberate acceptance. 
 
 When I hear that " only a Celt " could have 
 written this or that passage of emotion or 
 description, I am become impatient of these 
 parrot-cries, for I remember that if all Celtic 
 literature were to disappear, the world would 
 not be so impoverished as by the loss of Eng- 
 lish literature, or French literature, or that of 
 Rome or of Greece. 
 
 But above all else it is time that a prevalent 
 pseudo-nationalism should be dissuaded. I 
 am proud to be a Highlander, but I would not 
 side with those who would " set the heather 
 on fire." If I were Irish, I would be proud, 
 but I would not lower my pride by marrying 
 it to a ceaseless ill-will, an irreconcilable hate, 
 for there can be a nobler pride in unvan- 
 quished acquiescence than in futile revolt. I 
 would be proud if I were Welsh, but I would 
 not refuse to learn English, or to mix with 
 English as equals. And proud as I might be to 
 be Highland, or Scottish, or Irish, or Welsh, 
 or English, I would be more proud to be Brit- 
 ish — for, there at last, we have a bond to unite 
 us all, and to give us space for every ideal, 
 whether commimal or individual, whether na- 
 tional or spiritual. 
 
 As for literature, there is, for us all, only 
 
 195
 
 Celtic 
 
 English literature. All else is provincial or 
 dialetic. 
 
 But gladly I, for one, am willing to be 
 designated Celtic, if the word signify no 
 more than that one is an English writer who 
 by birth, inheritance, and temperament has 
 an outlook not distinctively English, with 
 some memories and traditions and ideals 
 not shared in by one's countrymen of the 
 South, with a racial instinct that informs 
 what one writes, and, for the rest, a com- 
 mon heritage. 
 
 The Celtic element in our national life has 
 a vital and great part to play. We have a 
 most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And 
 that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to 
 win back what is gone away upon the wind, 
 not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dulness 
 with contempt, or past wrongs with present 
 hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, 
 so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is 
 left of the Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, 
 may permeate the greater race of which we 
 are a vital part, so that with this Celtic emo- 
 tion, Celtic love of beauty, and Celtic spirit- 
 uality a nation greater than any the world 
 has seen may issue, a nation refined and 
 strengthened by the wise relinquishings and 
 steadfast ideal of Celt and Saxon, united in a 
 
 196
 
 Celtic 
 
 common fatherland, and in singleness of pride 
 and faith. 
 
 As I have said, I am not concerned here 
 with what I think the Celtic genius has done 
 for the world, and for English literature in 
 particular, and, above all, for us of to-day and 
 to-morrow ; nor can I dwell upon what of 
 beautiful and mysterious and wonderful it 
 discloses, or upon its bitter-sweet charm. But 
 of a truth, the inward sense and significance 
 of the " Celtic Movement " is, as has been 
 well said by Mr. Yeats, in the opening of a 
 fountain of legends, and, as scholars aver, a 
 more abundant fountain than any in Europe, 
 the great fountain of Gaelic legends. " None 
 can measure of how great importance it may 
 be to coming times, for every new fountain of 
 legends is a new intoxication for the imagina- 
 tion of the world. It comes at a time when 
 the imagination of the world is as ready, as it 
 was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and 
 of the Grail, for a new intoxication. The arts 
 have become religious, and must, as religious 
 thought has always done, utter themselves 
 through legends ; and the Gaelic legends have 
 so much of a new beauty that they may well 
 give the opening century its most memorable 
 symbols." 
 
 Perhaps the most significant sentence in 
 
 197
 
 Celtic 
 
 M. Renan's remarkable study of the Poetry 
 of the Celtic Races is that where he speaks of 
 the Celtic race as having worn itself out in 
 mistaking dreams for realities. I am not cer- 
 tain that this is true, but it holds so great a 
 part of the truth that it should make us think 
 upon how we stand. 
 
 I think our people have most truly loved 
 their land, and their country, and their songs, 
 and their ancient traditions, and that the word 
 of bitterest savour is that sad word exile. But 
 it is also true that in that love we love 
 vaguely another land, a rainbow-land, and 
 that our most desired country is not the real 
 Ireland, the real Scotland, the real Brittany, 
 but the vague Land of Youth, the shadowy 
 Land of Heart's Desire. And it is also true, 
 that deep in the songs we love above all other 
 songs is a lamentation for what is gone away 
 from the world, rather than merely from us as 
 a people, or a sighing of longing for what the 
 heart desires but no mortal destiny requites. 
 And true, too, that no tradition from of old 
 is so compelling as the compelling tradition 
 that is from within ; and that the long sorrow 
 of our exile is in part because we ourselves 
 have driven from us that company of hopes 
 and dreams which were once realities, but are 
 now among beautiful idle words. 
 
 198
 
 Celtic 
 
 In a word, we dwell overmuch among de- 
 sired illusions: beautiful, when, like the rain- 
 bow, they are the spiritual reflection of cer- 
 tainties ; but worthless as the rainbow-gold 
 with which the Shee deceive the unwary, when 
 what is the phantom of a spiritual desire is 
 taken to be the reality of material fact. 
 
 And I think that we should be on guard 
 against any abuse of, that we should consider 
 this other side of, our dreams and ideals, 
 wherein awaits weakness as well as abides 
 strength. It is not ill to dream, in a day when 
 there are too few who will withdraw from a 
 continual business, a day when there are fewer 
 dreams. But we shall not greatly gain if we 
 dream only of beautiful abstractions, and not 
 also of actual or imaginative realities and pos- 
 sibilities. In a Highland cottage I heard some 
 time ago a man singing a lament for " Tear- 
 lach Og Aluinn," Bonnie Prince Charlie ; and 
 when he ceased tears were on the face of each 
 that was there, and in his own throat a sob. 
 I asked him, later, was his heart really so 
 full of the Prionnsa Ban, but he told me that 
 it was not him he was thinking of, but of all 
 the dead men and women of Scotland who 
 had died for his sake, and of Scotland itself, 
 and of the old days that could not come again. 
 I did not ask what old days, for I knew that 
 
 199
 
 Celtic 
 
 in his heart he lamented his own dead hopes 
 and dreams, and that the prince was but the 
 image of his lost youth, and that the world 
 was old and grey because of his own weari- 
 ness and his own grief. 
 
 Sometimes I fear that we who as a people 
 do so habitually companion ourselves with 
 dreams may fall into that abyss where the 
 realities are become shadows, and shadows 
 alone live and move. And then I remember 
 that dreamers and visionaries are few ; that 
 we are no such people ; that no such people 
 has ever been ; and that of all idle weaving 
 of sand and foam none is more idle than this, 
 the strange instinctive dread of the multitude, 
 that the few whose minds and imaginations 
 dwell among noble memories and immortal 
 desires shall supersede the many who are con- 
 tent with lesser memories and ignoble desires. 
 
 200
 
 THE GAELIC HEART
 
 'Beloved and most beautiful, who wearest 
 The shadow of that soul by which I live." 
 
 ' ' Prometheus Unbound. ' '
 
 Ill 
 
 THE GAELIC HEART 
 
 One day, on lona, I met an old woman who 
 had been gathering driftwood in the haven 
 called Port-na-Churaich — the haven of the 
 coracle, for it was there St. Colum landed on 
 the day Christ's hand steered the helm to the 
 Holy Isle. She was weary with her burthen, 
 and had rested on a ledge of granite, and 
 there had fallen asleep. I stood a long time 
 looking at her. I had not seen her for some 
 years, not since the death of her daughter in 
 the Sleat of Skye : but it was not at the way- 
 worn sadness of the old figure I was looking, 
 though that was in my thoughts. I was think- 
 ing of what I had heard of her. Long ago a 
 poet of the isles had put song upon song on 
 her, as the saying is : and one known to all of 
 us had made an oran-ghaoil about her which 
 is still sung from the Rhinns of I slay to The 
 Seven Hunters. When I was a child I had 
 heard often of the beauty of Mary Macarthur. 
 But sorrow, which had long lain as upon a 
 
 203
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 rock on the hills, looking at her, had come 
 suddenly in the twilight, when all was well, 
 and took her heart in fierce swift hands, and 
 wrung it. and it was as tide-wrack left by the 
 ebb on dry sand. She was old, and her beauty 
 was gone away from her like a rainbow lifted 
 from a wilderness, long before the last of her 
 partings came to her in Sleat of Skye. 
 
 She too had been known for her songs. 
 They were pastoral and sweet, or of the sea 
 and wild and lamenting. One, telling of the 
 small, shaggy, long-horned kye coming with 
 a young herd-girl over the braes in mist and 
 crowding upon a loosened cliflf, and so falling 
 into the surge of the tides a thousand feet be- 
 low, is well known among the few who re- 
 member such things in the old tongue that is 
 being so swiftly forgotten : another, of the 
 sea-bulls, is a favourite iorrani of the boat- 
 men of the middle isles: and Eachan Mac- 
 Dougall, the blind poet of Skye, used to sing 
 to women in the twilight, over the kindly tea 
 or sup of milk and porridge, her seven strange 
 sad songs that are called " A Day in My 
 Heart." It was these only I recalled now. 
 They tell the lives of many women. There is 
 the dawn-song of wonder and joy, the morn- 
 ing-song of the proud heart, the noon-song of 
 the sleeping passions and sleeping thoughts, 
 
 204
 
 Tlic Gaelic Heart 
 
 the afternoon song of longing and blind an- 
 ger and pain, the gloaming song of regret and 
 tears and silence, the nightfall song of revolt 
 and the heart aflame, and the midnight song 
 that is not sung, but is smothered in ashes, or 
 drowned in deep water, or burned in the 
 fierceness of fire. In Eachan-Dall's poem, he 
 says her beauty is the beauty of the morning 
 star in June, when it is a white fire in a rose 
 of flame. He says her grace is the grace of 
 the larch in an April wind, of a reed in shaken 
 waters, of a wave tost like a white flower in 
 the blue hair of the sea, of a fawn moving 
 through bracken in the green dusk of old 
 trees. He says men will remember her beauty 
 till they are old ; and their sons shall remem- 
 ber it ; and their son's sons. He says, " Surely 
 in this fair woman's heart is great joy and 
 pride, for she will be beautiful and glad all 
 the days of her life." And I recall the last of 
 her songs, " Flame on the Wind." I cannot 
 give it aright in English, for its long mourn- 
 ful cadences, lifted on tides of passionate vain 
 regret and old grief, need the language of the 
 old world that has in it so much of the sound 
 of wind in trees and the lamentation of wind 
 and the sighing of waters. I thought of it as 
 I looked at old Mary Macarthur, and of the 
 ending of one verse: 
 
 205
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 O burning soul, 
 Can hills of ice assuage this burning fire? 
 
 And then I remembered one of her love-songs, 
 she who had known so much love, and had 
 thrown treasures down barren rocks into the 
 cold seas, and had made a flaming universe 
 and eternity out of the pale hour of a wintry 
 noon. 
 
 It is dark here, my Love, my Pulse, my Heart, my 
 
 Flame : 
 Dark the night, dark with wind and cloud, the wind 
 
 without aim 
 Baffled and blind, the cloud low, broken, dragging, 
 
 lame. 
 And a stir in the darkness at the end of the room 
 
 sighing my name, whispering my name! 
 
 Is that the sea calling, or the hounds of the sea, or 
 the wind's hounds? 
 ****** 
 
 Great is that dark noise under the black north wind 
 
 Out on the sea to-night: but still it is — still as the 
 frosts that bind 
 
 The stark inland waters in green depths where ice- 
 bergs grind — 
 
 In this noise of shaking storm in my heart and this 
 blast sweeping my mind ! 
 
 And now nothing of all this left, nothing but 
 a tired old woman, sad-eyed and furrowed, 
 poorly clad, a gatherer of driftwood. Hills of 
 
 206
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 ice had in truth assuaged this burning fire. 
 The noise of shaking storm had ebbed from 
 the troubled heart ; no blast now swept the 
 mind, but only the chill airs of winter froze 
 dreams and all old sweet thoughts, perhaps 
 memories even. Poor old woman, how white 
 and old and withered she looked, so forlorn 
 in her poor frayed clothes, in the sleep of 
 weariness, among the yellowing bracken by 
 the granite rock. Was it all gone, I won- 
 dered : all the dream, the wonder, the flame ? 
 Were they all gone, noons of passionate life, 
 twilights of peace and recaptured hopes, nights 
 uplifted in dreams or shaken with tears and 
 longings ? 
 
 While I was dreaming and wondering, won- 
 dering and dreaming, Old Mary stirred, and 
 opened her eyes. At first sleep was heavy on 
 her, and I saw she was not yet rightly awake. 
 " Do not stir," I said, " and I will sit down 
 here beside you, Mairi nic Rnaridh Donn." 
 At that, and the familiar name, she knew me, 
 and was glad to tears, and welcomed me over 
 and over, as though I had come in some im- 
 possible way out of the irrecoverable past. 
 
 " Yes, I had the tiredness indeed," she 
 added after a little, "but what of that? For 
 I had the good sleep, and a thousand things <if 
 goodness more, for 1 had a dream of dreams. 
 
 207
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 Do I remember it? Yes, for sure, I have it as 
 clear as a cradle. I was lying here, just as I 
 will be now, with this faggot here too, when a 
 woman of beauty came up the path and took 
 the faggot and flung all the sticks an' ends 
 into the sea. * What will you be doing, 
 lady ? ' I said, but not in anger, only in the 
 great wonder. * 'Tis your sorrows I'm throw- 
 ing away,' she said, with a voice as sweet as 
 to send the birds to the branches — chuireadh 
 c na h'coin 'an crannaibh. ' It is glad of that 
 I am,' I said, ' for it is many of them I 
 have.* Then she said: 'You'll have peace, 
 Mary, and great joy, and your songs and 
 your beauty will never die.' So the tears 
 were at me at that, an' I cried : ' It is only an 
 aisling you are ... a dream and a vision ! ' 
 ' No,' she said, ' an' by the same token, Mary. 
 I'll tell you the song that you were singing 
 below your breath down there on the shore: 
 
 " A Dhe na mara 
 Cuir todhar 's an tarruinn 
 Chon tachair an talaimh 
 Chon bailcidh dhuinn biaidh." ' 
 
 And sure, an' in truth, these were the very 
 words I was singing to myself down there on 
 the shore . . . ' O God of the Sea, fill the 
 sea-wave with store of the good weed, to feed 
 
 208
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 the soil that will give us food.' And at that 
 my heart sank with fear and rose with glad- 
 ness, for who could this be but ... an' sure 
 before I could put word to it, she said / am 
 Brig hid. I went on the knees, and cried gach 
 la' agus oidche thoir duinn do sheimh — ' each 
 day and night give us thy peace.' And I was 
 putting another word to it, for her, fair Fos- 
 ter-Mother of Christ, when she looked at me 
 and said : ' I am older than Brighid of the 
 Mantle, Mary, and it is you that should know 
 that. I put songs and music on the wind be- 
 fore ever the bells of the chapels were rung 
 in the West or heard in the East. I am 
 Brighid-nam-Bratta, but I am also Brighid- 
 Muirghin-na-tuinne, and Brighid-sluagh, Brig- 
 hid-nan-sitheach seang, Brighid-Binne-Bheul- 
 Ihuchd-nan-trusganan-uaine, and I am older 
 than Aona and am as old as Luan. And in 
 Tir-na-h'oige my name is Suibhal-bheann ; in 
 Tir-fo-thuinn it is Cu-gorm ; and in Tir-na- 
 h'oise it is Sireadh-thall. And I have been a 
 breath in your heart. And the day has its 
 feet to it that will see me coming into the 
 hearts of men and women like a flame upon 
 dry grass, like a flame of wind in a great 
 wood. For the time of change is at hand, 
 Mairi nic Ruariflh Donn — though not for you, 
 old withered leaf on the dry branch, though 
 
 209
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 for you, too, when you come to us and see all 
 things in the pools of life yonder.' 
 
 " And at that I closed my eyes, and said 
 the line of the old poem that you will be know- 
 ing well, the Laoidh Fhraoch — Bu bhinne na 
 farch-chiuil do ghuth — sweeter thy voice than 
 the sweetest lute. 
 
 " And when I opened them she was not 
 there, but I was an old woman on the brae 
 above Port-na-Churaich, and when I looked 
 again it was you I saw and no other." * 
 
 ' St. Brighid (in Gaelic pronounced sometimes 
 Bride, sometimes Breed), St. Bride of the Isles as 
 she is lovingly called in the Hebrides, has no name 
 so dear to the Gael as "Muime-Chriosd," Christ's 
 Foster-Mother, a name bestowed on her by one of 
 the most beautiful of Celtic legends. In the isles of 
 Gaelic Scotland her most familiar name is Brighid 
 nam Bratta — St. Briget or St. Bride of the Mantle 
 — from her having wrapt the new-born Babe in her 
 Mantle in Mary's hour of weakness. She did not 
 come into the Gaelic heart with the Cross and Mary, 
 but was there long before as Bride, Brighid or Brithid 
 of the Dedannans, those not immortal but for long 
 ages deathfess folk who to the Gael were as the 
 Olympians to the Greekst That earlier Brighid 
 was goddess of poetry and music, one of the three 
 great divinities of love, goddess of women, the 
 keeper of prophecies and dreams, the watcher of the 
 greater destinies, the guardian of the future. I think 
 she was no other than a Celtic Demeter — that De- 
 meter-Desphoena bom of the embrace of Poseidon, 
 
 2IO
 
 TJic Gaelic Heart 
 
 I have thought often of old Mary Macar- 
 thur, and of her dream of holy St. Bride, and 
 of that older Brighid of the West, Mother of 
 Songs and Music — she who breathes in the 
 reed, on the wind, in the hearts of women and 
 in the minds of poets. For I too have my 
 
 who in turn is no other than Lir, the Oceanus of the 
 Gael : and instead of Demeter seeking and lamenting 
 Persephone in the underworld, it is Demeter-Brighid 
 seeking her brother (or, it may be, her son) Manan 
 (Manannan), God of the Sea, son of Oceanus, Lir — ■ 
 and finding him at last in Iceland, etc.— as I write 
 here a little further on. Persephone and Manan are 
 symbols of the same Return of Life. 
 
 The other names are old Gaelic names: Brighid- 
 Muirghin-na-tninne, Brighid - Conception - of - the - 
 Waves; Brighid-Sluagh (or Sloigh), Brighid of the 
 Immortal Host; Brighid-nan-Sitheachseang, Bridget 
 of the Slim Fairy Folk; Brighid-Binne-Bheid-lhuchd- 
 nan-trusganan-uaine, Song-sweet (lit. melodious 
 mouth'd) Brighid of the Tribe of the Green Mantles. 
 She is also called Brighid of the Harp, Brighid of the 
 Sorrowful, Bri,q;hid of Proj^hecy, Brighid of Pure 
 Love, St. Bride of the Lsles, Bride of Joy, and other 
 names. Aona is an occasional and ancient form of 
 Di-Aoin, Friday; and Luan, of Diliiain, Monday. 
 
 Ttr-tta-h'( Hgr fommonly angliriscd as Tirna- 
 nogue) is the Land of (Eternal) Youth; Tir-fo-tliuinn 
 is the Country of the Waves; and Tir-na-h'oise is 
 the Country of Ancient Years. The fairy names 
 Siubhal-blicann, Cu-gorm, and Sircad-tliall respec- 
 tively mean Mountain-traveller, Grey Hound, and 
 Seek- Beyond. 
 
 211
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 dream, my memory of one whom as a child 
 I called Star-Eyes, and whom, later, I called 
 " Banmorair-na-mara," the Lady of the Sea, 
 and whom at last I knew to be no other than 
 the woman that is in the heart of women. I 
 was not more than seven when one day, by 
 a well, near a sea-loch in Argyll, just as I 
 was stooping to drink, my glancing eyes lit on 
 a tall woman standing among a mist of wild- 
 hyacinths under three great sycamores. I 
 stood, looking, as a fawn looks, wide-eyed, 
 unafraid. She did not speak, but she smiled, 
 and because of the love and beauty in her eyes 
 I ran to her. She stooped and lifted blueness 
 out of the flowers as one might lift foam out 
 of a pool, and I thought she threw it over me. 
 When I was found, lying among the hyacinths, 
 dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked eagerly 
 after the lady in white and with hair *' all 
 shiny-gold like buttercups," but when I found 
 I was laughed at, or at last, when I passion- 
 ately persisted, was told I was sun-dazed and 
 had been dreaming, I said no more. But I 
 did not forget. And for many days, for 
 weeks indeed. I stole away to seek or be 
 found by my white love, though she had gone 
 awa^' or did not come again. It was years 
 afterward that I heard a story of a woman of 
 the divine folk, who was called the Lady of 
 
 212
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 the Sea, and was a daughter of Lir, and went 
 lamenting upon the earth because she had lost 
 her brother Manan the Beautiful, but came 
 upon him at last among the hills of Iceland 
 and wooed him with songs and flowers and 
 brought him back again, so that all the world 
 of men rejoiced, and ships sailed the seas in 
 safety and nets were filled with the fruit of 
 the wave. And it was years after that before 
 I knew the deeper wisdom, and wrote of the 
 Shepherdess the words that I now say again 
 — " I believe that we are close upon a great 
 and deep spiritual change ; I believe a new re- 
 demption is even now conceived of the Divine 
 Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a 
 woman, broken in dreams and yet sustained in 
 faith, patient, long-sufifering, looking towards 
 home. I believe that though the Reign of 
 Peace may be yet a long way off, it is draw- 
 ing near ; and that Who shall save us anew 
 shall come divinely as a Woman — but whether 
 through mortal birth, or as an immortal 
 breathing upon our souls, none can yet know. 
 Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that 
 Christ shall come again upon lona ; and of 
 that later prophecy which foretells, now as 
 the Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of 
 God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied 
 through mortal birth — the coming of a new 
 
 213
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 Presence and Power ; and dream that this may 
 be upon lona, so that the Uttle Gaelic island 
 may become as the little Syrian Bethlehem. 
 But more wise is it to dream, not of hallowed 
 ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the 
 soul, wherein She shall appear white and ra- 
 diant. Or that, upon the hills, where we are 
 wandered, the Shepherdess shall call us 
 home." 
 
 Yes, I have thought often of Mary Mac- 
 arthur, that solitary old woman, poor and 
 desolate, once so beautiful: yet loved by 
 Brighid, the genius of our people. Was it 
 not our sorrowful Gaelic world I saw, when 
 I came upon the poor old woman — that pass- 
 ing world of songs and beauty, of poets' 
 dreams and of broken hearts, that even now 
 in forlorn old age is loved again by Brighid 
 the White — Brighid the White, who even yet 
 may use the fading voice to lead the wild 
 trumpets of revelation? 
 
 We have in Ross and the Outer Isles a 
 singular legend, which has a beauty within 
 and without. A young crofter was unhappy 
 in love and not fortunate in the hard way of 
 the hill-life. When bad seasons come on the 
 back of the black wind, the croft-smoke turns 
 
 214
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 from blue to brown, as the saying is : and bad 
 seasons in succession had come to the Strath, 
 and every one of the scattered clansfolk there 
 had suffered, but none so much as Fergus 
 Dhu, who had lost sheep, and crops, and the 
 youth out of his heart. 
 
 One day he went idly across the boggy 
 moor under Cnoc Glas, mooning among the 
 loneroid and black heather where the white 
 tufts of canna were like blown foam of the 
 sea. A single tree grew on that waste, a 
 thorn that on a forgotten Beltane had been 
 withered into a Grey Woman, the Fairy Thorn 
 or The Singing Tree or Tree of Bad Music. 
 At many a winter ceilidh by the peat-glow 
 tales were passed of what had been seen or 
 heard there : but they were all at one in this, 
 that only the happy and fortunate were in 
 peril there, that only the unhappy and un- 
 fortunate might go that way, and, indifferent, 
 see the tall swift woman in grey, or hear the 
 thin music. 
 
 Likely that was why Fergus — Fergus Dhu 
 as he was called, because of his black hair, 
 and black eyes, and the dark hours into which 
 he so often fell — wandered that day along the 
 sodden bracken-covered sheep-ways. When 
 he came to the thorn he saw no grey woman, 
 perhaps because there was no room in his 
 
 215
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 dreaming mind for any but one woman who 
 now would never warm to him but be a kind- 
 ly stranger always ; and heard no thin air, gay 
 or wild, perhaps because the sad lift and fall 
 in his heart was a daylong sound that dulled 
 his ears. But while he was staring idly into 
 the withered thorn he saw a short stem break 
 into little green leaves. He could not believe 
 what his eyes showed him, but when he saw 
 also pink and white blossoms run in and out 
 among the leaves and break into a fall of 
 snow, and felt the sudden sweetness in the 
 air about him, he believed. He went closer, 
 and his wonder grew when he saw that the 
 stem had seven holes in it. He put his hand 
 on the stem, and it came away. There was a 
 hole at each end, and the thorn-reed was like 
 any feadan. So he put it to his mouth, and 
 ran his familiar fingers up and down the 
 holes, for Fergus Dhu was the cunningest 
 player in the Strath. He played till the whole 
 thorn went into a wave of green. He played 
 till a snow of blossom came all over the green 
 of the sea. Although it was November, and 
 wet, and the hill-wind moaned searching the 
 corries, by the thorn it was like a May noon. 
 Fergus looked at the sky, and saw that it was 
 blue: at the long moor, and saw that it was 
 covered with April yellow and with a shim- 
 
 216
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 mer of the wings of little birds. He looked at 
 the grey hills to the east, and they were rose- 
 red and a star was above them: he looked at 
 the grey hills to the west, and they were blue 
 as peat-smoke and a rainbow leaned against 
 them. Then his heart filled with joy, and he 
 said to himself, " I have found my desire." 
 So he played his joy. As he played, the rain- 
 bow leaned away from the grey hills of the 
 west, and took their sadness, and was no 
 more: the star sank behind the grey moun- 
 tains of the east : the long moor faded into 
 the old silence : the white foam and the green 
 wave ebbed from the thorn. 
 
 Fergus looked at the thorn-pipe, and it was 
 only a black cloud-wet feadan with seven 
 mossy holes in it. 
 
 He " went away " in that hour. No one 
 saw him that night, or the next day, or the 
 next: and months and years passed, and no 
 one saw him, and his body was never seen, 
 though his bonnet was found near the with- 
 ered thorn. 
 
 In the seventh year after that a strange 
 thing happened. A new life quickened the 
 thorn. A thousand small green buds shook 
 out little fluttering green leaves, and, from 
 these, white moths of blossom continually 
 rose. Linnets sang on the branches. 
 
 217
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 One day Fergus Dhu came strolling that 
 way. He had no memory of the years that 
 had gone, or with whom he had been, and the 
 sweet fatal accent was out of his ears. But 
 when he saw the thorn he remembered his 
 feadan, and took it from his coat-fold, and 
 played because of his gladness. The tears 
 fell from his eyes when he saw the grey rain 
 come down and blot out the new life from 
 the thorn, so that it was old and withered 
 again : and at the wet hill-wind calling again 
 its old mournful cry, wheeling like a tired 
 hawk above the far lamentation of the sheep. 
 " Why is this ? " he said. " When I saw this 
 lonely place in its sorrow I played it into joy. 
 And now when I come upon it in its beauty, 
 I have played it back into the old sorrow. 
 Grief to my heart, that it is so." 
 
 One man of the Strath saw Fergus Dhu 
 that day, and he spoke of Fergus as a thin 
 worn leaf that one sees through when it hangs 
 in the wind. Certainly no other saw him, nor 
 has seen him since. 
 
 This tale of Fergus, who was fey, and went 
 down the west with strangers, is it not also 
 a symbol, even as Mary Macarthur, old and 
 poor but treasured and loved and cared for by 
 the Genius of our race ... is it not also a 
 
 218
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 symbol of the Gaelic heart, of the Gaelic 
 muse let me say ? For the Gaelic muse seems 
 to me the beautiful and sad and waywardly 
 joyous spirit of whom poor Fergus was but 
 the troubled image. Does she, too, not go to 
 and fro in a land where rainbows bloom and 
 fade above desolate places and where a star 
 hangs above the holy hills of the east, seek- 
 ing her desire : going in sorrow, but, suddenly 
 beholding the world radiant, breaking into 
 songs of joy and laughter : coming again, 
 after an evil time, and finding the grey thorn 
 of the world full of the green leaf, blossom, 
 and undying youth, and, so finding, turning 
 suddenly to tears, and to the old sorrow, and 
 to the longing whose thirst is not to be 
 quenched, to the cry of the curlew for the 
 waste, of the heart going a long way from 
 shadow to shadow? 
 
 One must with this lanthorn of the spirit 
 look into the dark troubled water of the 
 Gaelic heart, too, I think, if one would under- 
 stand. How else can one understand the 
 joy that is so near to sorrow, the sorrow that 
 like a wave of the sea can break in a moment 
 into light and beauty ? I have heard often in 
 effect, " This is no deep heart that in one 
 hour weeps and in the next laughs." But I 
 know a flccper heart that in (jnc hour weeps 
 
 219
 
 The Gaelic Heart 
 
 and in the next laughs, so deep that light 
 dies away within it, and silence and the be- 
 ginning and the end are one: the heart of 
 the sea. And there is another heart that is 
 deep, and weeps one hour and in the next 
 laughs: the heart of Night . . . where Ob- 
 livion smiles, and it is day ; sighs, and the 
 darkness is come. And there is another heart 
 that is deep, and weeps in one hour and in 
 the next laughs : the soul of man : where 
 tears and laughter are the fans that blow 
 the rose-white flame of life. And I am well 
 content that the Gaelic heart, that in one 
 hour weeps and in the next laughs, though 
 it be so sad and worn among smiling nations, 
 is in accord with the great spirits of the 
 world and with immortal things. 
 
 220
 
 ANIMA CELTICA
 
 ". . . lerevedelavievue enbeauti . . ." — Renan. 
 
 "To see things in their beauty is to see them, in their 
 truth:' 
 
 Matthew Arnold.
 
 Anima Celtica 
 
 THE GAEL AND HIS HERITAGE ^ 
 
 "He who moves about happy in dreams, he is the 
 Self, this is the immortal, the fearless." — Khanda x. 
 of the 8th Prapdthka of the Khandogya-U pants hods. 
 
 The last tragedy for broken nations is not 
 the loss of power and distinction, nor even 
 the loss of that independence which is so 
 vital to the commonweal. It is not, perhaps, 
 even the loss of country, though there is no 
 harder thing than to see the smoke of the 
 stranger, or to hear upon the wind the for- 
 lorn business of the going of those who are 
 dispossessed and the coming of those new in 
 possession. The last tragedy, and the sad- 
 dest, is when the treasured language dies 
 slowly out, when winter falls upon the leg- 
 
 ' Reprinted firom The Nineteenth Century, Nov., 
 1900. where it appeared as an article upon "Carmina 
 Gadelica; Hymns and incantations, etc. In 2 vols, 
 large 4to. Orally collected in the Highlands and 
 islands of Scotland, and translated into English by 
 Alexander Carmichael." 
 
 223
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 cndary remembrance of a people. Sometimes 
 a bitter destiny descends suddenly upon a 
 nation, as when Russia all but strangles Fin- 
 land, permitting that broken people, when 
 it gasps for life, to live, but on condition tiiat 
 it relinquishes freedom, language, tradition, 
 hope, pride, and honour. The wrong is not 
 the blind wrong of a barbaric people too sav- 
 age to know the sacredness of pledge and 
 solemn oath, but is the open wrong of a 
 cynical Government, scorning the most sa- 
 cred pledge and the most solemn oath. Then 
 again the destiny that comes upon a crushed 
 nation may be only retributive and regenera- 
 tive, as with Spain. Such nations are bent, 
 not broken : they have no tragic sunset. They 
 have not lost the irrecoverable, and they have 
 hope. Another destiny there is, that which 
 awaits a people which has never been a sov- 
 ereign power, but has had national greatness ; 
 which has never striven to extend its domin- 
 ion, but has seen its own frontiers, liberties, 
 possibilities, and at last even its language and 
 cherished national inheritance of legend and 
 gathered incalculable beauty shrink from age 
 to age, from generation to generation, from 
 decade to decade, from year to year. Such a 
 people is the Gaelic people. When I speak 
 of the Gaelic people of Ireland and Scot- 
 
 224
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 land, I speak, alas! only of the small Gaelic 
 remnant in the Scottish Highlands and in the 
 Isles, and of the remnant in Ireland. This 
 people is unable or unwiUing to accept the 
 bitter solace of absorption in the language, 
 the written thought, the active, omnipresent, 
 and variegated energy of the dominant race. 
 It has to keep silence more and more, and 
 soon it too will be silent. 
 
 It is a strange thing : that a nation can hold 
 within itself an ancient race, standing for the 
 lost, beautiful, mysterious ancient world, can 
 see it fading through its dim twilight, without 
 heed to preserve that which might yet be 
 preserved, without interest even in that which 
 once gone cannot come again. The old 
 Gaelic race is in its twilight indeed ; but now, 
 alas ! it is the hastening twilight after the 
 feast of Samhain, when winter is come at last, 
 out of the hills, down the glens, on the four 
 winds of the world. 
 
 There are some, however, who do care. 
 There are some whose hearts ache to see the 
 last pathetic staiul of a retreating people, and 
 who would gladly do what yet may be done 
 to preserve awhile the beautiful old-world 
 language and the still more beautiful and 
 significant thought and legend and subtle 
 genius enshrined in that language ; who are 
 
 225
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 truly loth to let die and become legendary 
 and literary that which had once so glorious 
 a noon, and has now a sunset beauty, is even 
 yet a living aspect, is still the coloured 
 thought of life and not of the curious imag- 
 ination only. 
 
 Those who think thus and desire thus must 
 ever be grateful to Mr. Alexander Car- 
 michael, who, after so many years of prepara- 
 tion through a long life of loving and sym- 
 pathetic heed for the beautiful things of the 
 past as seen and heard in the Hebrides, but 
 now, alas ! hardly to be seen and rarely to be 
 heard, has given us the invaluable record of 
 his life-work. It is not too much to say that 
 Mr. Carmichael is the last great chronicler of 
 the Gael. Even before the late John Camp- 
 bell of Islay died, having won a European 
 reputation for his collection and translation 
 of Gaelic folklore, he feared that the day was 
 over when much more was to be gleaned. 
 He knew that when Mr. Carmichael left the 
 Hebrides, and went to Edinburgh to prepare 
 the life-work of forty years, he would have 
 no like successor. This not because there 
 are no willing workers now (one of the fore- 
 most of these, John Gregorson Campbell of 
 the island of Tiree, is our latest loss) ; but 
 because it is too late. Even in the Gaelic- 
 
 226
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 speaking Irish west, from Donegal to Clare, 
 the native collector finds more and more dif- 
 ficulty ; for the old are proud, and the middle- 
 aged have forgotten or are silent, and the 
 young do not know and do not care. Dr. 
 Douglas Hyde, the late William Larminie, 
 and others have done what thev could, but 
 the gleaners now have a small aftermath for 
 their gain, because of the narrowing pastures 
 of a once vast and fruitful national heritage. 
 Most of the folk-lore and folk-tales now got 
 in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland are at third- 
 hand, got by the person who tells them from 
 some other, who had them from this man or 
 that woman, but in English, and too often 
 with a perplexing dual light on them as of 
 noon and moonlight, and even at the best 
 without the determining savour and unal- 
 loyed colour and unique accent of the Gaelic 
 original. 
 
 By a singular irony the students of Gaelic 
 literature and Gaelic language are increasing: 
 of ancient Gaelic, indeed, there are many 
 scholars to whom we owe much and shall 
 owe more — Dr. Whiteley Stokes, Dr. Keneo 
 Meyer and Dr. George Henderson among 
 them, in Ireland Dr. Douglas Hyde, Mr. T. 
 W. Rollcston, and others. Soon there will be 
 only a few old peasants and a few learned 
 
 227
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 men (mostly Germans) who will be able to 
 speak in the old language. 
 
 Now that Mr. Carmichael has given us so 
 much of his life-work (let us trust not all, 
 and that he has yet much accumulated lore 
 to give us from remembrance and transla- 
 tion), and that advanced years will prevent 
 him from again relinquishing time and means 
 in his enthusiastic quest, there are few who 
 can take up his work. What is sadder is that 
 there are fewer and fewer among the island- 
 ers and the Highlanders of the remoter dis- 
 tricts of the mainland who can or will repeat 
 the desired old wisdom, beauty, and strange- 
 ness of ancient faiths and customs. The 
 Gaelic-speaking islesman or Highlander has 
 an all but unconquerable reticence now, and 
 will seldom speak of the hidden things that 
 were once common and beautiful with the 
 commonness and beauty of sunlight and 
 wind. Many causes have led to this. When 
 a people is forced by circumstances to speak 
 two tongues the native speech naturally re- 
 mains that of the inward life, the inward re- 
 membrance, the spirit. The English-speaking 
 Gael is apt to be silent and morose in Eng- 
 lish if he does not know it well or is not at 
 ease in its use, and naturally is not found 
 communicative by those who would hear him 
 
 228
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 speak of the things they wish to heer. He 
 is proud and sensitive too, and does not ap- 
 preciate the superior smile and the ill-bred 
 laugh with which his interrogator so fre- 
 quently punctuates his curiosity. When'things 
 sacred to his forefathers, and to him too 
 for that very association as for others, are 
 broached — as when one would ask about the 
 potato blight or the herring failure — it is 
 surely only natural that he should be irre- 
 sponsive, or, if he answer, be evasive, or take 
 refuge in a seeming boorish dulness. But 
 how much greater a gulf exists between 
 these Scottish or English foreigners and those 
 Gaels who practically have no language but 
 their own, so little English have they, and in 
 that isolation are so remote from the con- 
 fusedly coloured verbiage of modern speech, 
 and our modern ways of thought, and, above 
 all, our modern ways of life. It is a gulf that 
 few can realise, except those few who perforce 
 live much with both peoples, and speak read- 
 ily the speech of both, and understand what 
 is in each that here repels and there attracts 
 the other. I have known many instances of 
 Gaelic crofters and fishermen who have not 
 only refused to be drawn into confidence but 
 have wilfully misled their interrogators. I 
 remember on one occasion crossing the 
 
 229
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Sound of Eriskay, between the island of that 
 name and South Uist : when two men were in 
 the ferry, and with them was a man whom 
 they had hired to go with them on their 
 fishing excursion in Uist and Benbecula. 
 They asked many questions of the boatmen, 
 and learned little, the men for one thing 
 having their work to see to, and their daily 
 needs to bear in mind, and not caring for the 
 idle curiosity of strangers. The latter seemed 
 aggrieved, and spoke heedlessly concerning 
 the stupidity of " these Highlanders," and 
 how ignorant they were. A week or two 
 later I met the man who had gone with them 
 to fish. "Well, Pol M'Phail," I said, "and 
 how did you get on with your English 
 friends? Did you tell them what they wanted 
 to know about what we do, and what we 
 think on this and that?" "At first I told 
 them nothing," he said, " and then when 
 they bothered me every hour I told them a 
 little that was nothing at all, and they were 
 pleased ; and at last when they wanted more, 
 and spoke of things I did not wish to speak 
 about, I told them a fathom o' nonsense, 
 and the older man he put a net into my 
 words and took out what he fancied, and 
 told his friend to write them down as he 
 said them over. I laughed at that for sure, 
 
 230
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 for it was all foam and forgetfulness. And 
 on the last night, when he brought out a 
 book with nothing but white paper in it, and 
 said he wanted to take down some things 
 from me, and for me to put my name and 
 place at the end of it, I said then I could not, 
 for being only a Barra man I had no more 
 English, having used all I knew in telling the 
 fine tales I had told. And at that he seemed 
 surprised, and I don't know yet if he has 
 thought it out, and sees that a man can tell 
 tales only with the words he has, and that 
 when these are used up he can tell no more 
 tales." 
 
 I recall this little anecdote as significant. 
 One other, equally significant, will suffice as 
 commentary on what I have said. I was 
 staying with friends who had taken a farmer's 
 house in Glen Usinish, under the shoulder 
 of mighty Hecla, in South Uist, and heard 
 from a crofter of a foreign gentleman who 
 had the Gaelic like the sruthmara (the flow- 
 ing tide), though it was not the Gaelic of the 
 isles ; and this gentleman was asking, asking 
 everywhere, and writing down whenever he 
 could get what he wanted. " No," added the 
 crofter. " it was not old tales or old songs 
 he wanted, like good Father Allan of Eriskay, 
 but if we did this or if we did that, and the 
 
 231
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 why of it, and who did it now, and did we 
 believe in it, and could we give names? So 
 we just all had a heavy silence like mist on 
 us. For we knew that though he had the 
 Gaelic tongue he had not the Gaelic heart. 
 For sure it was not for love and kinship, but 
 just to find out and to speak scornfully to 
 others about our ways, that he asked. So 
 he got little, and what little he got would not 
 be a good catch for any one but an dniitan 
 (a fool)." The next day one of our company 
 uas fishing on Loch Druidibeg, and there 
 met the folklore hunter, who was fishing there 
 also, and learned from him that he had got 
 much unexpected information, though con- 
 fusedly told, and that he found the people 
 strange and quite unlike what he had read 
 about them, with nothing of that peculiar 
 imagination and Celtic beauty of speech and 
 thought of which he had heard so much and 
 found in books both old and new, and that, 
 far from being a spiritual and poetic race, he 
 found the highlander and still more the is- 
 lander dull and prosaic, and with interests 
 wholly commonplace and selfish. In the fol- 
 lowing winter I heard from a friend that this 
 gentleman had lectured on " The Gael as he 
 is to-day " (I give, not the title, but the sub- 
 ject of his lecture), and though I had merely 
 
 232
 
 The Gad and His Heritage 
 
 the vaguest report of it, I can well believe, 
 as my correspondent said, that the lecturer 
 betrayed not only a radical ignorance of the 
 actual manners, customs, and thought, the 
 outward and inward life of the Gael of to- 
 day, but constantly misapprehended and mis- 
 interpreted what little he had been able to 
 gather. We have an old saying that it takes 
 three years to get into a man's mind, and 
 twice three years to get to what is secret in 
 a man's mind, and thrice three years to get 
 a man to speak of the secret things that are 
 in his mind. 
 
 This, then, is one of the obvious reasons 
 why it is so difficult for those of foreign 
 speech and manners and ways of thought and 
 life to reach into the true life of the Gael, by 
 whom, of course, I mean not the Anglicised 
 or Scoticised persons of Highland parentage 
 who live in Glasgow or in Edinburgh, for 
 example, but the remoter Gael who speaks 
 his ancient tongue, and to a great extent 
 lives the life lived by his ancestors for many 
 generations. 
 
 Of the relatively small number capable of 
 this sympathetic understanding and this ade- 
 quate interpretation only for a very few it is 
 possible to do anything even ai)proximating 
 the great service done by Mr. Alcxand'r 
 
 235
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Carmichael. Dr. George Henderson, for in- 
 stance, a Gaelic-speaking Gael and one of 
 the most learned Celtic students living, is 
 fitted for the congenial work ; but his labours 
 in Oxford and elsewhere render a task of the 
 kind practically impossible. Even the great- 
 est enthusiast, and a clansman, cannot get 
 into the life of the people in the sense of 
 intimate comradeship in a few holiday weeks ; 
 and, as all of us who are of the north know, 
 there are interclan or local suspicions and 
 jealousies which, superficial and removable 
 as they commonly are, yet perforce have to 
 be considered. Indeed, I know of only one 
 man who can do for us anything equivalent 
 to the great task which Mr. Alexander Car- 
 michael has now triumphantly brought to the 
 long-desired end. I allude to Father Allan 
 Macdonald, of Eriskay in South Uist, a priest 
 who is not only beloved of his people, and 
 truly a father to them, but is an enthusiast in 
 Gaelic lore and literature, who in his many 
 years' ministration has collected what, if ever 
 translated, will be almost as invaluable a 
 treasure-trove as these " Ortha nan Gaid- 
 heal," the Carmina Gadelica of Mr. Car- 
 michael. 
 
 Incidentally may I be excused the person- 
 ality and say with what eagerness those of us 
 
 234
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 who love and cherish the beautiful oral lit- 
 erature and legendary lore and folk-songs of 
 the Gael wish that there were more priests 
 and ministers like Father Allan Macdonald, 
 and the late Gregorson Campbell of Tiree? 
 I do not think any one who has not lived 
 intimately in the Highlands can realise the 
 extent to which the blight of Calvinism has 
 fallen upon the people, clouding the spirit, 
 stultifying the mind, taking away all joyous- 
 ness and light-hearted gaiety, laying a ban 
 upon music even, upon songs, making 
 laughter as rare as a clansman landlord, caus- 
 ing a sad gloom as common as a ruined croft. 
 And even where matters are no longer so 
 bitter as they were a generation ago, even 
 where to-day a certain half-hearted turning 
 towards a truer conception of human life is 
 evident, it is too late — too late for the 
 recovery of that which is gone away upon 
 the wind. 
 
 But as this is a matter on which (when I 
 have written to a like effect) I have been held 
 unjustifiably prejudiced either from the Gaelic 
 or sectarian standpoint or both, 1 will give 
 without comment an episode incidentally 
 cited by Mr. Carmichael in his Introduction, 
 and give it with the more propriety as it will 
 reveal to many readers tlic splendid native 
 
 235
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 material which has been so piteously per- 
 verted. 
 
 During my quest I went into a house near Ness. 
 The house was clean and comfortable, if plain and 
 unpretending, most things in it being home-made. 
 There were three girls in the house, young, comely, 
 and shy, and four women, middle-aged, handsome, 
 and picturesque in their homespun gowns and high- 
 crowned mutches. Three of the women had been 
 to the moorland pastures with their cattle, and had 
 turned in here to rest on their way home. 
 
 "Hail to the house and the household," said I, 
 greeting the inmates in the salutation of our fathers. 
 "Hail to you, kindly stranger," replied the house- 
 wife. "Come forward and take this seat. If it be 
 not ill-mannered may we ask whence you have come 
 this day? You are tired and travel-stained, and 
 probably hungry?" "I have come from Gress," I 
 said, "round by Tolasta to the south and Tolasta 
 to the north, taking a look at the ruins of the Church 
 of St. Aula at Gress, and at the ruins of the fort of 
 Dunothail, and then across the moorland." "May 
 the Possessor keep you in His own keeping, good 
 man. You left early and have travelled far, and 
 must be hungry." 
 
 With this the woman raised her eyes towards her 
 daughters, standing demurely silent and motionless 
 as Greek statues in the background. In a moment 
 the three fair girls became active and animated. 
 One ran to the stack and brought in an armful of 
 hard, black peats; another ran to the well and 
 brought in a pail of clear spring water, while a third 
 quickly spread a cloth, white as snow, upon the table 
 
 236
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 in the inner room. The three neighbours rose to 
 leave, and I rose to do the same. "Where are you 
 going, good man?" asked the housewife in injured 
 surprise, moving between me and the door. "You 
 must not go till you eat a bit and drink a sip. That 
 indeed would be a reproach to us that we would not 
 soon get over. These slips of lassies and I would 
 not hear the end of it from the men at the sea, were 
 we to allow a wayfarer to go from our door hungry, 
 thirsty, and weary. No! no! you must not go till 
 you eat a bite. Food will be ready presently, and 
 in the meantime you will bathe your feet and dry 
 your stockings, which are wet after coming through 
 the marshes of the moorland." 
 
 Then the woman went down upon her knees, and 
 washed and dried the feet of the stranger as gently 
 and tenderly as a mother would those of her child. 
 "We have no stockings to suit the kilt," said the 
 woman, in a tone of evident regret, "but here's a 
 pair of stockings of the houseman's which he has 
 never had on, and perhaps you would put them on 
 till your own are dry." 
 
 One of the girls had already washed out my stock- 
 ings, and they were presently drying before the 
 bright fire on the middle of the floor. I deprecated 
 all this trouble, but to no purpose. In an incred- 
 ibly short time I was asked to go "ben" and break 
 bread. 
 
 Through the pressure of the housewife and of my- 
 self the other three women had resumed their seats, 
 uneasily, it is true; but immediately before food was 
 announced the three women rose together and qui- 
 etly walked away, no urging detaining them. 
 
 The table was laden with wholesome food suf- 
 ficient for several persons. There were fried her-
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 rings and boiled turbot fresh from the sea, and eggs 
 fresh from the yard. There were fresh butter and 
 salt butter, wheaten scones, barley bannocks, and 
 oat cakes, with excellent tea and cream The wom- 
 an apologised that she had no "aran coinnich" 
 (moss bread — that is, loaf bread) and no biscuits, 
 they being simple crofter people far away from the 
 big town [Stornoway]. 
 
 "This," said I, taking my seat, "looks like the 
 table for a 'reiteach' (betrothal) rather than for 
 one man. Have you betrothals in Lews?" I asked, 
 turning my eyes towards the other room where we 
 had left the three comely maidens. "Oh, indeed, 
 yes, the Lews people are very good at marrying. 
 Foolish young creatures, they often marry before 
 they know their responsibilities or realise their diffi- 
 culties," and her eyes followed mine in the direction 
 of her own young daughters. "I suppose there is 
 much fun and rejoicing at your marriages — music, 
 dancing, singing, and merry-makings of many 
 kinds.''" "Oh, indeed, no; our weddings are now 
 quiet and becoming, not the foolish things they were 
 in my young days. In my memory weddings were 
 great events, with singing and piping, dancing and 
 amusements all night through, and generally for 
 two or three nights in succession. Indeed, the feast 
 of the "bord breid " (kertch table) was almost as 
 great as the feast of the marriage table, all the young 
 men and maidens struggling to get it. On the morn- 
 ing after the marriage the mother of the bride, and, 
 failing her, the mother of the bridegroom, placed 
 the "breid tri chearnach " (three-cornered kertch) 
 on the head of the bride before she rose from her 
 bed. And the mother did this ("an ainm na Tri 
 Beannaichte" (in the name of the Sacred Three), 
 
 238
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 under whose guidance the young wife was to walk. 
 Then the bride arose and the maidens dressed her, 
 and the bards sang songs to her, and recited "ran- 
 nagail mhora" (great rigmaroles), and there was 
 much rejoicing and merry-making all day long and 
 all night through. "Gu dearbh mar a b'e fleagh 
 na bord breid a b'fhearr, cha'ne hearr bu mheasa" 
 (indeed, if the feast of the kertch table was not 
 better it was not a whit worse). 
 
 "There were many sad things done then, for those 
 were the days of foolish doings and foolish people. 
 Perhaps, on the day of the Lord, when they came 
 out of church — indeed, if they went into church — 
 the young men would go to throw the stone, or to 
 toss the caber, or to play shinty, or to run races, or 
 to race horses on the strand, the young maidens 
 looking on the while, ay, and the old men and 
 women." "And have you no music, no singing, no 
 dancing now at your marriages?" "May the Pos- 
 sessor keep you! I see that you are a stranger to 
 Lews, or you would not ask such a question," the 
 woman exclaimed, with grief and surprise in her 
 tone. " It is long since we abandoned those foolish 
 ways in Ness, and, indeed, throughout Lews. In 
 my young days there was hardly a house in Ness 
 in which there was not one or two or three who could 
 play the pipe or the fiddle or the trump. And I 
 have heard it said there were men, and women too, 
 who could play things they called harps, and lyres, 
 and bellow-pipes, but I do not know what those 
 things were. " "And why were those discontinued ? ' ' 
 "A blessed change came over the place and the 
 people," the woman replied in earnestness, "and the 
 good men and the good ministers who arose did away 
 with the songs and the stories, the dancing and the 
 
 239
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 music, the sports and the games, that were pervert- 
 ing the minds and ruining the souls of the people, 
 leading them to folly and stumbling." "But how 
 did the people themselves come to discard their 
 sports and pastimes?" "Oh, the good ministers 
 and the good elders preached against them, and 
 went among the people, and besought them to for- 
 sake their follies and return to wisdom. They made 
 the people break their pipes and fiddles. If there 
 were foolish men here and there who demurred the 
 good minister and the good elders themselves broke 
 and burnt their instruments, saying: 
 
 " ' Is fearr an teine beag a gharas la beag na sithe 
 Na'n teine mor a loisgeas la mor na feirge* 
 
 (Better is the small fire that warms on the little day 
 
 of peace 
 Than the big fire that burns on the great day of 
 
 wrath.) 
 
 The people have forsaken their follies and their 
 Sabbath-breaking, and there is no pipe, no fiddle 
 here now," said the woman, in evident satisfaction. 
 "And what have you now instead of the racing, 
 the stone-throwing, and the caber-tossing, the song, 
 the pipe, and the dance?" "Oh, we have now the 
 blessed Bible preached and explained to us faith- 
 fully and earnestly, if we sinful people would only 
 walk in the right path and use our opportuni- 
 ties." 
 
 "But what have you at your weddings? How do 
 you pass the time?" 
 
 "Oh, the carles are on one side of the house, talk- 
 ing of their crops and their nowt, and mayhap of the 
 
 240
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 days when they were young and when things were 
 different; and the young men are on the other side 
 of the house, talking about boats, and sailing, and 
 militia, and naval reserve, perhaps of their own 
 strength, and of many foolish matters besides." 
 
 "And the girls, what are they doing?" "Oh, 
 they, silly things, are in the 'culaist' (back-house), 
 perhaps trying to croon over some foolish song un- 
 der their breath, perhaps trying to amble through 
 some awkward steps of dancing on the points of 
 their toes; or, shame to tell, perhaps speaking of 
 what dress this or that girl had on at this or that 
 marriage, or, worse still, what hat this girl or that 
 had on the Day of the Lord, perhaps even on the 
 day of the Holy Communion, showing that their 
 minds were on the vain things of the world instead 
 of on the wise things of salvation." 
 
 ' ' But why are the girls in the ' culaist ' ? What do 
 they fear?" "May the Good Being keep you, good 
 man. They are in the ' culaist ' for concealment, and 
 the fear of their life and of their death upon them 
 that they may be heard or seen should the good elder 
 happen to be passing the way." "And should he 
 what then?" "Oh, the elder will tell the minister, 
 and the good minister will scold them from the pul- 
 pit, mentioning the girls by name. But the girls 
 have a blanket on the door and another blanket on 
 the window to deafen the sounds and to obscure the 
 light." 
 
 "Do the young maidens allow the young men to 
 join them in the 'culaist'?" "Indeed, truth to tell, 
 the maidens would be glad enough to admit the 
 young men were it not the fear of exposure. But 
 the young men are so loud of voice and heavy of 
 foot, and make so much noise, that they would be- 
 
 241
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 tray the retreat of the girls, who would get rebuked, 
 while the young men would escape. The girls 
 would then be ashamed and cast down, and would 
 not lift a head for a year and a day after their well- 
 deserved scolding. They sufTer most, for, sad to 
 say, the young men are becoming less afraid of be- 
 ing admonished than they used to be." 
 
 "And do the people have spirits at their mar- 
 riages?" "Oh yes; the minister is not so hard upon 
 them at all. He does not interfere with them in 
 that way unless they take too much and talk loudly 
 and quarrel. Then he is grieved and angry, and 
 scolds them severdy. Occasionally, indeed, the 
 carles have a nice 'frogan' (liveliness) upon them, 
 and are very happy together. But, oh, they never 
 quarrel nor fight, nor get angry with one another. 
 They are always nice to one another and civil to all 
 around them." 
 
 "Perhaps were the minister to allow the people 
 less drink and more music and dancing and merry- 
 making they would enjoy it as much. I am sure 
 the young girls would sing better, and dance better, 
 with the help of the young men. And the young 
 men themselves would be less loud of voice and less 
 heavy of heel among the maidens. Perhaps the 
 happiness of the old people too would be none the 
 less real nor less lasting at seeing the joyousness of 
 the young people." 
 
 To this the woman promptly and loyally replied: 
 "The man of the Lord is untiring in work and un- 
 failing in example for our good, and in guiding us to 
 our heavenly home, constantly reminding us of the 
 littleness of time and the greatness of eternity, and 
 he knows best, and we must do our best to follow 
 his counsel and to imitate his example." 
 
 242
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Mr. Carmichael speaks also of a famous 
 violin-player, who died a few years ago in the 
 island of Eigg, a good man celebrated for his 
 knowledge of old-world airs and for his old- 
 style playing. One day at divine service a 
 preacher denounced him, saying, " Tha thu 
 shios an sin cul na comhia," etc. (in effect, 
 " You that are down there behind the door, 
 miserable grey-haired man with that old fid- 
 dle beside you, that you play with a cold hand 
 without and the devil's fire in your heart "). 
 After that public admonition the old man's 
 family pressed him to play no more of his 
 sinful airs and old songs and to burn his 
 fiddle. In vain this last minstrel pleaded that 
 his violin was a valuable one, as indeed it 
 was, and famed for its tone and as the handi- 
 work of a pupil of Stradivarius. At last he 
 was forced to part with it to a passing pedlar 
 for a few shillings. " It was not the wretched 
 thing that was got for it," he exclaimed after- 
 wards, " that grieved my heart so sorely, but 
 the parting with it! the parting with it ! . . . 
 and I to that gave the best cow in my father's 
 fold for it when I was young." The voice of 
 the old man faltered, and tears ran down his 
 face. lie was never again seen to smile. 
 
 One other instance and 1 have done, A 
 lady, still youthful, related to Mr. Carmichael 
 
 243
 
 The Cod and His Heritage 
 
 what followvs: "When we came to Islay I 
 was sent to the parish school to obtain a 
 proper grounding in arithmetic. I was 
 charmed with the schoolgirls and their Gaelic 
 songs. But the schoolmaster (a Lowlander) 
 denounced Gaelic speech and Gaelic songs. 
 On getting out of school one evening the 
 girls resumed a song they had been singing 
 the previous evening. The schoolmaster 
 heard us, however, and called us back. He 
 punished us till" the blood trickled from our 
 fingers, although we were big girls with the 
 dawn of womanhood upon us. The thought 
 of that scene thrills me with indignation." 
 I think the thought of that scene, and of a 
 crowd of incidents of a kindred nature, must 
 fill with bitter resentment and indignation 
 every man and woman who has a drop of 
 Gaelic blood in his or or her veins, all men 
 and women who have any ancestral pride, 
 any love for the things of beauty and honour 
 that their fathers and mothers loved and their 
 forebears for generations loved. 
 
 For forty years Mr. Carmichael collected a 
 vast mass of oral lore, written down from the 
 recital of men and women throughout the 
 Highlands and Islands, from Arran to Caith- 
 ness, from Perth to St. Kilda, but the greater 
 
 244
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 part in the outer Hebrides. The present col- 
 lection, long announced as Or agus Ob (Gold 
 and Dross), and now more adequately and 
 fitly called Carmina Gadelica, is a selection 
 from this mass. Ortha nan Gaidheal, runs 
 the Gaelic title ; and the setting forth, " Ur- 
 nan agus Ubagan, le solus air facia gnatha 
 agus cleachdana a chaidh air chul crussaichte 
 bha bhialachas feadh Gaidhealtachd na H- 
 Alba: agus tionndaichte bho Ghaidhlig gu 
 Beurla, le Alastair Macgillemhicheil," which, 
 being interpreted, means in eflfect that this 
 collection of ancient hymns and incanta- 
 tions, and records of old rites and old cus- 
 toms, has been gathered in the Highlands 
 and Islands of Scotland (the Gaeldom of 
 Alba . . . Gaidhealtachd na H-Alha) and trans- 
 lated from Gaelic into English by Alexander 
 Carniichael. Of the people who to this day. 
 at the winter ceilidh or in the boats on sum- 
 mer nights, still repeat the legendary tales 
 Mr. Carmichael gives several interesting 
 sketches. In every crofting townland there 
 arc several story-tellers who recite the oral 
 lore of their predecessors. These story-tellers 
 of the Highlands, says Mr. Carmichael, " are 
 as varied in their subjects as are literary men 
 and women elsewhere : one is a historian, 
 narrating events simply and concisely; an- 
 
 245
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 other is a historian with a bias, colouring his 
 narrative according to his leanings. One is 
 an inventor, building fiction upon fact, min- 
 gling his materials, and investing the whole 
 with the charm of novelty and the halo of 
 romance. Another is a reciter of heroic poems 
 and ballads, bringing the different characters 
 before the mind as clearly as the sculptor 
 brings the figure before the eye. One gives 
 the songs of the chief poets, with interesting 
 accounts of their authors, while another, gen- 
 erally a woman, sings, to weird airs, beauti- 
 ful old songs, some of them Arthurian. There 
 are various other narrators, singers, and 
 speakers, but I have never heard aught that 
 should not be said nor sung." 
 
 There is no people in the world so well 
 bred in this beautiful reticence as the Gaelic 
 peasant. He has an innate refinement which 
 makes him unique among the races of the 
 north. It is this people which is now but a 
 remnant, and soon will be a memory. 
 
 And what stores of old wisdom and legend 
 and song they had as their common heritage, 
 that a few (alas a small and ever diminishing 
 few !) still have. Here are two types in in- 
 stance. Hector Macisaac and his wife. This 
 old couple lived alone (their daughter having 
 gone into service to help her parents) in a 
 
 246
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 turf-walled hut thatched with reeds ; and their 
 life, like that of so many of the crofters, was 
 one of utmost penury and often of actual 
 privation. Mr. Carmichael knew both well : 
 from the woman he heard many secular runes, 
 sacred hymns, and fairy songs ; from the hus- 
 band numerous heroic tales, poems, and 
 ballads. Indeed so many were the stories 
 and poems which the old islander recited at 
 different times that Mr. Carmichael says they 
 would fill several volumes ; and many books, 
 he adds, could have been filled with the 
 stories and poems recited by two others 
 alone, out of the many score of like-gifted 
 islanders he knew — an old blind cottar. Hec- 
 tor Macleod of Lianacuithe, in South Uist, 
 and another old cottar, Roderick Macneill of 
 Miunghlaidh, in Barra. Yet neither of them 
 told more than a small part of what he knew. 
 None of the three men knew any letters, nor 
 any language but Gaelic, nor had ever been 
 out of his native island. All expressed regret 
 in well-chosen words that they had not a 
 better place in which to receive their visitors 
 (Mr. Carmichael and Campbell of Islay), and 
 all thanked them in polite terms for coming 
 to see them and for taking an interest in their 
 decried and derided old lore. All were in all 
 things courteous. 
 
 247
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Some idea of the way in which the con- 
 tinuity of oral lore is maintained is given by 
 Mr. Carmichael in an account such as that of 
 his friend Kenneth Morrison, an old, blind, 
 and poor man of Trithion, in Skye. He knew 
 many stories and poems, but mentioned the 
 names of many old men in the extensive but 
 now desolate parish of Minnhnis who had 
 been famous story-tellers in his boyhood — 
 men who had been born in the first decade 
 of the century. Several of these, he said, 
 could recite stories and poems during many 
 nights in succession, some of the tales re- 
 quiring several nights to relate. Kenneth 
 repeated fragments of many of these, identi- 
 cal with poems and stories or with parts of 
 poems and stories published by Macpherson, 
 Smith, the Stewarts, the MacCallums, the 
 Campbells, and others. 
 
 Of the treasure of old songs, hymns, and 
 folk-lore of incalculable interest brought to- 
 gether in these two beautiful volumes, the 
 greater number have been rescued from obli- 
 vion in the islands and among the Roman 
 Catholic population. Broadly speaking, the 
 northern Hebrides are Protestant, the south- 
 ern Catholic. At the same time, it should be 
 added, many of these treasure-trove have 
 been equally common on the mainland, and a 
 
 248
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 large proportion among Protestants also. 
 Nor was the collector content with a single 
 version only. From one to ten have been 
 taken down, differing more or less ; and it 
 must often have been no easy matter to se- 
 lect. In some instances Mr. Carmichael has 
 given variants. Even this selection, however, 
 could not be used as it stood, and the col- 
 lector adds that several poems and many 
 notes are wholly withheld, while a few of the 
 poems and all the notes have been abbrevi- 
 ated. 
 
 The collection comprises Achaine (Invoca- 
 tions, Blessings, and Prayers) ; Aimsire 
 (Hymns of the Seasons) ; Oibre (Songs and 
 Hymns of Labour) ; and, in the second vol- 
 ume, Uibe (Incantations, Charms, Spells) and 
 Measgain (Miscellaneous). 
 
 Every one of these Achaine, Aitnsire, and 
 Oibre has a singular beauty of thought and 
 generally of expression also, and often that 
 beauty is made more excellent for us by the 
 note that goes with the rami, achanaidh, or 
 urnuigh (rune, invocation, or blessing). Take, 
 for example, the " Rann Rfnnh Urnuigh," or 
 Rune before Prayer. " Old people in the 
 isles sing this or some other short hymn be- 
 fore prayer. Sometimes the hymn and the 
 prayer arc intoned in low, tremulous, un- 
 
 249
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 measured cadences, like the moving and 
 moaning, the soughing and the sighing of the 
 ever murmuring sea on their own wild shores. 
 They generally retire, perhaps to an out- 
 house, to the lee of a knoll, or to the shelter 
 of a dell, that they may not be seen or heard 
 of men. I have known men and women of 
 eighty, ninety, and a hundred years of age 
 continue the practice of their lives in going 
 from one to two miles to the seashore to join 
 their voices in the voicing of the waves and 
 their praises with the praises of the ceaseless 
 sea. 
 
 This " Rune before Prayer " is as follows 
 in English : 
 
 I am bending my knee 
 In the eye of the Father who created me, 
 In the eye of the Son who purchased me, 
 In the eye of the Spirit who cleansed me, 
 
 In friendship and affection. 
 Through Thine own Anointed One, O God, 
 Bestow upon us fulness in our need, 
 
 Love towards God, 
 
 The affection of God, 
 
 The smile of God, 
 
 The wisdom of God, 
 
 The grace of God, 
 
 The fear of God. 
 
 And the will of God, 
 To do on the world of the Three 
 As angels and saints 
 Do in heaven. 
 
 250
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Each shade and light, 
 Each day and night, 
 Each time in kindness, 
 Give Thou us Thy Spirit. 
 
 Can we imagine an English peasant or a 
 peasant of any other country repeating night- 
 ly, alone and solemnly, this poem or one of 
 the hundreds like it ; or an aged English or 
 any other peasant going habitually from one 
 to two miles to the seashore " to join his 
 voice with the voicings of the waves and his 
 praises with the praises of the ceaseless sea "? 
 The very names of many of these rescued 
 songs and hymns are beautiful. Some of the 
 songs are very ancient, with their meanings 
 obscure or lost now, as Duan na Mathairn. 
 
 Thou King of the moon, 
 Thou King of the sun, 
 Thou King of the planets. 
 Thou King of the stars, 
 Thou King of the globe. 
 Thou King of the sky, 
 Oh! lively thy countenance, 
 Thou beauteous Beam. 
 
 Two loops of silk 
 
 Down by thy limbs, 
 
 Smooth-skinned ; 
 
 Yellow jewels. 
 
 And a handful 
 
 Out of every stock of them.
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 Very likely this is but a fragment, remem- 
 bered perhaps with some dim recollection of 
 when and how it should be said, and to what 
 end. " The Guiding Light of Eternity," 
 "The Light 'ner of the Stars," "The Soul 
 Plaint," the several Sleep Prayers and Rest- 
 ing Blessings and Consecrations of Peace 
 and " The Soul Peace," are among the most 
 beautiful names. Sometimes, in a relatively 
 modern poem some old-world wisdom will 
 suddenly appear, as in this quatrain in a 
 singular " Ora Boisilidh," or Bathing Prayer: 
 
 A chuid nach fas 's a chumhanaich. 
 
 Gum fas 's an dubha-thrath ; 
 A chuid nach fas 's an oidhche dhiot. 
 
 Air dhruim a mheadhon la. 
 
 (The part of thee that does not grow at dawn, may it 
 grow at eventide; the part of thee that does not grow at 
 night, may it grow at ridge of middle -day.) 
 
 Sometimes too a peculiarly Celtic symbolism 
 occurs even in the most unlikely place, as in 
 an " Invocation for Justice " for an intending 
 litigant, where the wronged man says he will 
 go forth in the likeness of a deer, in likeness 
 of a horse, in likeness of a serpent, and at last 
 as a king, meaning that he will be wary, 
 strong, wise, and dignified. 
 
 252
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 A beautiful and touching poem called Eosai 
 Bu Choir a Mholadh (Jesu, who ought to be 
 praised) is made the more wonderful for us 
 by the knowledge that it was composed by 
 a poor illiterate woman of Harris, and a leper. 
 She had to leave the upland community and 
 dwell alone on a desolate tract of seashore, 
 and live on herbs and shell-fish. After a 
 time she became cured, and made this touch- 
 ing song, remembered with affection to this 
 day. In some of the good-wishing poems 
 there are not only lovely lines but others 
 which enshrine old names and legendary as- 
 sociations once familiar to the ancient Gael 
 of a now forgotten day. Thus the Ora nam 
 Buadh, or Invocation of the Graces, opens in 
 these lines: 
 
 I bathe thy palms 
 
 In showers of wine, 
 
 In the lustral fire, 
 
 In the .seven elements, 
 
 In the juice of rasps. 
 
 In the milk of honey, 
 
 And I place the nine pure choice graces 
 
 In thy fair dear face, 
 
 The grace of form. 
 
 The grace of voice. 
 
 The grace of fortune, 
 
 The grace of goodness, 
 
 The grace of wisdom, 
 
 253
 
 The Gael mid His Heritage 
 
 The grace of charity, 
 
 The grace of maidenliness, 
 
 The grace of whole-souled loveliness, 
 
 The grace of goodly speech. 
 
 This ora is one of the longest poems in Mr. 
 Carmichael's collection. In it is one of those 
 survivals to which I have alluded, as in the 
 verse beginning, " Is tu gleus na Mnatha 
 Sithe " : 
 
 Thine is the skill of the Fairy Woman, 
 Thine is the virtue of Bride (Bridget) the calm, 
 Thine is the faith of Mary the mild, 
 Thine is the tact of the woman of Greece, 
 Thine is the beauty of Emer the lovely. 
 Thine is the tenderness of Darthula delightful. 
 Thine is the courage of Maebh the strong, 
 Thine is the charm of Honey-Mouth. 
 
 How typically Gaelic this is, with its mix- 
 ture of Christian and old Celtic and pagan 
 lore, the Virgin Mary and St. Bride Muime 
 Chriosd (Christ's Foster-Mother) alternating 
 with the Fairy Woman and with some dim 
 legend of Helen of Troy,^ and she again with 
 the fair wife of Cuchulain, the great champion 
 of Gaeldom, and with Deirdre (Darthula — 
 Deardhuil — Dearshul as in this Gaelic text), 
 
 ' At least I take it that Is tu gniomh na mnatha 
 Greuig is an allusion to Helen. 
 
 254
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 the Helen of the Gael, and with Maeve, the 
 Dark Queen whose name and personality 
 loom so vast and terrible in ancient Gaelic 
 history, and "Honey-Mouth" {Binnc-bheiil), 
 whom I take to be Angus, the God of Love. 
 
 Of a singular and touching beauty also is 
 the strange " farewell " or death poem called 
 An Treoraich Anama, The Soul-Leading — or 
 sometimes Fois Anama, Soul Peace. This is 
 slowly intoned over the dying person by some 
 dear and intimate friend, and all present join 
 in his strain. During the prayer, the anama 
 charti, or soul friend, makes the sign of the 
 cross with the right thumb over the lips of 
 the dying. A strange scene, truly, and fit 
 for a Gaelic Rembrandt, that of the smoke- 
 begrimed turf cottage of a poor crofter, with 
 the soul friend and others near and dear 
 intoning this invocation to " strong Michael, 
 high king of the angels," and the dying man 
 with his feet already abhuinn diibh a bhais (in 
 the black river of death), and his soul about 
 to go on its long wayfaring across the bcan- 
 ntaibh na bitlibhuantachd (the mountains of 
 eternity). 
 
 The whole second section consisting of the 
 Aimsire, or Seasons Chants, is fascinating and 
 valuable to an extraordinary degree, and in 
 no part of the two volumes is there such a 
 
 255
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 wealth of valuable commentary, particularly 
 in the long sections devoted to St. Michael 
 and to Sloinntircachd Bhride, the genealogy 
 of St. Bride, the Mary of the Gael, the be- 
 loved Muime Chriosd, Christ's foster-mother, 
 the dearest of all the great dead to the heart 
 of every true Gael. Michael is the Poseidon 
 of the Gael, is indeed no other than Man- 
 annan, perhaps the greatest of the Celtic 
 gods. From Mounts St. Michael in Brittany 
 and in Cornwall to Ard-Micheil in far North 
 Uist there were temples to his honour, and 
 to-day the scattered names keep him in re- 
 membrance, and many places have remains. 
 His legendary tomb, though Mr. Carmichael 
 does not allude to this, is at Kilmicheil, in 
 the Kyles of Bute ; but perhaps this was not 
 the brian Michcil, the god, but some good 
 saint from Columba's brotherhood on lona. 
 To this day on the 29th of September the 
 Feast of St. Michael is still celebrated in the 
 Hebrides, and perhaps elsewhere ; but the 
 ceremonies are much curtailed, and are rap- 
 idly being ignored and forgotten. In the in- 
 valuable pages which Mr. Carmichael has 
 devoted to " Michael nam Buadh " and to 
 St. Bride there is a treasure of legendary lore 
 and beauty, a profoundly significant record 
 of now forgotten customs. 
 
 256
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 In lovely and primitive beauty the third 
 section, that of the Oibre, or Chants of La- 
 bour, stands unique. These kindling bless- 
 ings and smooring-of-the-peats blessings, 
 these herding croons and milking croons, 
 these shepherd songs and reaping chants, 
 these beautiful lamb-marking chants and 
 quaint waulking or warping songs and loom 
 blessings, these hunting blessings and sea 
 prayers, and solemn ocean blessing, for sure 
 there is not in any country in the world so 
 beautiful a heritage. 
 
 What would the sportsman of to-day think 
 of the young Gaelic huntsman, who was con- 
 secrated before he began his experiences? 
 Oil was put on his head, a bow placed in his 
 hand, and he was required to stand with 
 bare feet on the bare grassless ground, and 
 to take a solemn oath as to what not to do 
 — not to kill a bird sitting, nor a beast lying 
 down, nor the mother of a brood, nor the 
 swimming duck (i.e. because of her young), 
 and so forth. 
 
 The white swan of the sweet gurgle, 
 The speckled dun of the brown tuft 
 
 are to be held free. The Bcannachadh Seilg 
 ends quaintly with — 
 
 257
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 [And with you for guidance be] 
 The fairy swan of Bride of flocks, 
 The fairy duck of Mary of peace. 
 
 Fascinating as is the second volume its ap- 
 peal is to the folkloiist primarily. Here are 
 scores of strange and often in their inconse- 
 quence bewildering examples of the eolas and 
 sian, the charm or spell. These range from 
 the beautiful " Charm of the Lasting Life " 
 to various spells of the evil eye and to mys- 
 terious and weird maledictions. In the Mis- 
 cellaneous section are some singular poems, 
 notably Bantighearna Bhinn, the Melodious 
 Lady-Lord, and the Dtuin nan Daol, or Poem 
 of the Beetles, with interesting notes by the 
 translator dealing with this ancient and pe- 
 culiar Christian superstition. The great col- 
 lection ends with a strange and apt little song, 
 a fragment of a sea chant perhaps. 
 
 Mar a bha, As it was, 
 
 Mar a tha, As it is, 
 
 Mar a bhitheas As it shall be 
 
 Gu brath. Evermore. 
 
 Ri tragadh. With the ebb, 
 
 'S ri lionadh. With the flow. 
 
 There is an appendix of the names of the 
 reciters to whom Mr. Carmichael was in- 
 debted, their occupation, place of residence, 
 
 258
 
 The Gael and His Heritage 
 
 and district. Many of his informants were 
 women — as Ciorsdai Macleod, who had 
 much lore about the slnagh, the fairy hosts, 
 and the second sight ; or Morag Mackay, 
 who had her isolated cot among the green, 
 grassy mounds of the ruined nunnery on the 
 lovely little island of Heisgeir-nan-Cailleach ; 
 or Oighrig Maccriomthain (Macrimmon), 
 " who had many beautiful songs " ; or Isebeal 
 Chisholm, a wandering tinker of North Uist, 
 who knew innumerable incantations and incan- 
 tation formulae; or Fionnaghal Macleod, of 
 Clachanreamhar, in South Uist, " who was full 
 of occult lore and old beliefs of many kinds." 
 There was another woman, Mary Macrae 
 of Harris, from whom Mr. Carmichael learned 
 much, including the beautiful prayer and in- 
 vocation, Dia Liom A Laighe, " God with me 
 lying down," given in vol. i. In her youth 
 this woman came to the Hebrides from Kin- 
 tail with her father, Alexander, whose mother 
 was one of the celebrated ten daughters of 
 Macleod of Rarasay, mentioned by Dr. John- 
 son and Boswell. Let me finish this article 
 by quoting what Mr. Carmichael has to say 
 of her, for indeed I think she also is a type 
 of the half forlorn and weird, half wiUlly gay 
 and young si)irit of her aiicicnl, disappearing 
 race, ever ready to dance to its own shadow 
 
 259
 
 The Gael and His Hcritgge 
 
 if nothing else be available, yet so sad with 
 a sadness that must live and pass in silence. 
 
 She often walked with companions, after the work 
 of the day was done, distances of ten and fifteen 
 miles to a dance, and after dancing all night walked 
 back again to the work of the morning fresh and 
 vigorous as if nothing unusual had occurred. She 
 was a faithful servant and an admirable worker, 
 and danced at her leisure and carolled at her work 
 like "Fosgay Mhoire," our Lady's lark, above her. 
 The people of Harris had been greatly given to old 
 lore and to the old ways of their fathers, reciting and 
 singing and dancing and merry-making; but a re- 
 action occurred, and Mary Macrae's old-world ways 
 were adjured and condemned. But Mary Macrae 
 heeded not, and went on in her own way, singing 
 her songs and ballads, intoning her hymns and in- 
 cantations, and chanting her own "port-a-bial" 
 (mouth-music), and dancing to her own shadow 
 when nothing better was available. 
 
 Truly Mary Macrae stands for her people, 
 who, poor and ignored remnant as they are, 
 heed little the loud ways of a world that is 
 not for them, but go their own way, singing 
 their songs and ballads, intoning hymns or 
 incantations, chanting their own wild, sea- 
 smitten music, and dancing to their own 
 shadow, to the shadow of their ancestral 
 thought and dream, whether in blithe way- 
 wardness or in an un forgetting sorrow. 
 
 260
 
 SEUMAS: A MEMORY 
 
 "A ghraidhean mo chridhe," 
 A ghaoilean mo dhaoine. 
 
 (Thou dear one of my heart, 
 Thou beloved one of my people.) 
 
 I have again and again, since my first 
 book, Pharais, alluded to Seunias Macleod: 
 and as I have shown in the skotch called 
 " Barabal " and in the dedication of the vol- 
 ume entitled The Divine Adventure, it is to 
 this old Highlander, as well as to my Hebri- 
 dean nurse Rarabal. that I owe more than to 
 any other early influences. 
 
 Let me tell one other story of him, which 
 I have meant often to tell, but have as often 
 forgotten. 
 
 Me had gone once to the Long Island, with 
 three fishermen, in their herring-coble. The 
 fish had been sold, and the boat had sailed 
 southward to a Lews haven where Seumas 
 had a relative. The younger men had "han- 
 selled " their good bargain ovcrwell.and weie 
 laughing and talking freely as they walked 
 
 261
 
 Scumas: A Memory 
 
 up the white road from the haven. Some- 
 thing was said that displeased Seumas great- 
 ly, and he might have spoken swiftly in re- 
 proof; but just then a little naked child ran 
 laughing from a cottage, chased by his smil- 
 ing mother. Seumas caught up the child, 
 who was but an infant, and set him in their 
 midst, and then kneeled and said the few 
 words of a Hebridean hymn beginning: 
 
 ' ' Even as a little child 
 Most holy, pure. . . ." 
 
 No more was said, but the young men under- 
 stood ; and he who long afterward told me 
 of this episode added that though he had 
 often since acted weakly and spoken foolishly, 
 he had never, since that day, uttered foul 
 words. Another like characteristic anecdote 
 of Seumas (as the skipper who made his men 
 cease mocking a " fool ") I have told in the 
 tale called " The Amadan " in The Dominion 
 of Dreams. 
 
 I remember asking him once — as simply as 
 one might ask about the tides, or the weather 
 — what he thought of the elements. And he 
 answered as simply. " Fire is God's touch," 
 he said: "and light is God Himself: and 
 water is the mother of life." I asked him if 
 he thought all the old gods were dead. He 
 
 262
 
 Scumas: A Memory 
 
 asked why. I said that he had just spoken 
 Oi water as the mother of Hfe, and yet that 
 he had often told me legends of Manan, the 
 god of the sea. 
 
 " No," he answered, " they are not all 
 dead. They think we are. They do not 
 change. They are very patient, the old an- 
 cient gods. Perhaps it is because they do 
 not care at all, no, not a whistle of the wind, 
 for what we think or what we do." 
 
 " But," he added, " some have died. And 
 some are very old, and are sleeping, till they 
 get their youth again." 
 
 " And Manan . . . does he live? " 
 
 " Ay, for sure. He was here before Christ 
 came. He will see the end of all endings. 
 They say he sleeps in the hollows of great 
 oceans, and sits on mountain-bergs of ice at 
 the Pole, chanting an old ancient chant." 
 
 Another time I asked him why he had 
 never married. " There is only one love," he 
 said simply, " and that I gave to the woman 
 of my love. lUit she died of a fever when I 
 was down witli it too. That was in Skye. 
 When I got up, my heart was in her grave. 
 I would be very young, then : but 1 had too 
 much life \>u{ away. And tiien." he added, 
 with a smile half whimsical, half wistful, " l»> 
 
 263
 
 Scumas: A Memory 
 
 marry a woman for comfort or for peace is 
 only for those who haven't the way of the 
 one or the power to make the other." I am 
 glad to know that another is hardly less in- 
 debted to old Seumas Macleod. I am not 
 permitted to mention his name, but a friend 
 and kinsman allows me to tell this : that when 
 he was about sixteen he was on the remote 
 island where Seumas lived, and on the mor- 
 row of his visit came at sunrise upon the old 
 man, standing looking seaward with his bon- 
 net removed from his long white locks ; and 
 upon his speaking to Seumas (when he saw 
 he was not " at his prayers ") was answered, 
 in Gaelic of course, " Every morning like this 
 I take off my hat to the beauty of the world." 
 
 The untaught islander who could say this had 
 learned an ancient wisdom, of more account 
 than wise books, than many philosophies. 
 
 I could write much of this revered friend — 
 so shrewd and genial and wordly-wise, for all 
 his lonely life ; so blithe in spirit and swiftly 
 humorous; himself a poet, and remembering 
 countless songs and tales of old ; strong and 
 daring, on occasion ; good with the pipes, as 
 with the nets ; seldom angered, but then with 
 a fierce anger, barbaric in its vehemence ; a 
 loyal clansman ; in all things, good and not so 
 good, a Gael of the Isles. 
 
 264
 
 AILEEN: A MEMORY 
 
 ♦ . (The Soul of a Story) 
 
 "But to what headland of a strange shore, O my 
 soul, art thou steering the course of my ship?" — 
 Pindar, Nem. iii. 
 
 This is not a story, in truth : it is a memory 
 and a speculation. 
 
 One day many things fell away from her, 
 or became unreal. A friend had said to her : 
 " You cannot understand the thing- I speak 
 of, because you have all happiness and all 
 fortune, and above all because you have no 
 sorrow." 
 
 She had said that surely this life was 
 enough : why did the mind crave so passion- 
 ately for more life, for life to be taken up 
 again? It troubled her. Thought was meshed 
 in a net of dreams. Had she put her hand 
 secretly upon sorrow, she wondered. She 
 remembered an old tale of a mother, young 
 too, and beautiful, who had all things of de- 
 sire, and yet never saw the white flame of 
 
 265
 
 Aileen: A Memory 
 
 her heart's desire : to whom treasures of the 
 world were as dust by the highway, blossom 
 on the grass, foam on the shore. Below her 
 gladness lay an incalculable sorrow, as below 
 her beauty lay the enchantment of a beauty 
 greater than hers. " You have all things," 
 said those who loved her: and one added, 
 " You of all people must long to live again, 
 to taste life anew." 
 
 To live again — to taste life anew — Aileen 
 wondered. Did she ? No : in that thought 
 her soul shook like a fiame in wind. Could 
 she not love Beauty, and yet be no bondager; 
 reflect it, and yet be free of it, as a small 
 pool reflects the mysterious march of the 
 stars? It was a revelation to her that she 
 had, unaware, nourished a pain that was with 
 her every day, as the shadow of a mountain 
 over a lake will lie in that lake from dawn 
 to dayset, though wind and sunlight weave 
 traceries from hour to hour. 
 
 And this pain — it was an irremediable 
 loneliness. She suffered the more because 
 this companion was unguessed by others. 
 She strove to overcome, to ignore, to hide 
 this phantom, which so often came on the 
 breath of a rose or the vibration of a lovely 
 sound, unexpectedly, subtly, as though wil- 
 fully clothing itself in the extreme essence 
 
 266
 
 Aileen: A Memory 
 
 of beautiful things, finding even the most 
 delicate beauty too obvious. 
 
 One day she knew that fear had been born 
 in her heart, and was a watcher there be- 
 side the other dweller. This fear was of life. 
 It was a fear that life might not, after all, 
 be laid away with the suspended breath. It 
 was the fear of immortality. No, she thought, 
 not that perhaps. She did not know. It was 
 not the vague immortal life she feared : the 
 " future " so long taught as a surety and out- 
 held as a goal. It was the fear that life might 
 have to be taken up again, here: that the 
 soul had lives to go through, as, in the old 
 tale, the King of Ireland's son had to live 
 and die in the seven kingdoms of his inherit- 
 ance before he should at last be free and 
 let forth to be a wandering beggar. But the 
 soul has little concern in our happiness or 
 unhajjpiness. That silent watcher has her 
 own inexplicable sorrow and her own inex- 
 plicable joy. All the rest is of hazard ; and 
 we may be happy and fortunate, and yet 
 inwardly bow down before entranced sorrow 
 — as we may have ills and misfortunes and 
 gathered griefs, and yet inwardly rejoice with 
 the pulse of life and the inextinguishable 
 hope of that strong passion \.o be taken up 
 again and livid anew. 
 
 267
 
 Aileen: A Memory 
 
 And I wonder — I wonder — how often I 
 have wondered if so beautiful and vivid a 
 soul could really pass and be as dust upon 
 the wind that is blown now this way and now 
 that, and in the end is gathered to the wilder- 
 ness of lifeless things. There is an old wis- 
 dom, that what the soul itself desires, that 
 it shall surely have. And among the people 
 to whom Aileen belonged there is a mysteri- 
 ous saying, " It is not every one, happy or 
 unhappy, or good or bad, who has a living 
 soul." Is there any wave upon the sea or 
 leaf before the wind more feeble than the 
 aimless will? — or is there any disaster of the 
 spirit worse than that by which a winged 
 destiny becomes a wingless and obscure fate? 
 But who is to know how fatality is measured 
 or how fulfilled — who is to know that behind 
 the broken will there is not a heroic spirit 
 upon whom has fallen the mystery of un- 
 timely sleep? 
 
 268
 
 THE FOUR WINDS OF EIRINN 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 ' ' Belles et puissantes sont les harmonies nouvelles 
 des gens de Thul6." — Melchior de Vogu6. 
 
 This essay originally appeared in The Fort- 
 nightly Review (February 1903), on the publi- 
 cation of the volumes entitled Cuchulain of 
 Muirthemne Arranged and Retold by Lady 
 Gregory, and The Four Winds of Eirinn: 
 Poems by the late Ethna Carbery (Anna Mac- 
 mamis). Since its appearance, and just as the 
 contents of the present volume had been com- 
 pleted for printing, two books reached me, 
 which, coming out of the heart of Ireland, 
 should be mentioned under a title so distinc- 
 tive as that which heads this page. The 
 Divine Vision, the new volume of poetry of 
 Mr. George Russell (" A. E."), has the spirit- 
 ual intensity, the rapt ecstasy of his most 
 characteristic verse. It is the poetry of a 
 mystic who is caught in the heavenly nets. 
 But though it is lifted at times on the Gaelic 
 
 269
 
 The Four PVinds of Eirinn 
 
 spirit and has allusions to what is intimate in 
 the spiritual life of the Gael, it is not Gaelic 
 in the sense in which either of the two books 
 discussed in the following essay is Gaelic. 
 Ethna Carbery's poems are the poems of the 
 Irish heart, and Miss Hull's and Lady Greg- 
 ory's retold saga-tales are the mirror of the 
 ancient Irish genius, as Mr. Yeats's poetry is 
 preeminently the poetry of the Irish spirit: 
 but the poems of " A. E." are the poems of a 
 strayed visionary, of a visionary strayed into 
 Ireland, and in love with that imagination 
 and with that dream, but obviously in himself 
 of no country set within known frontiers, of 
 no land withheld by familiar shores. Sur- 
 charged with the intensest spirit of Ireland in 
 the less mystical and poetic sense, is the slim 
 volume of a handful of prose papers by Miss 
 Ethel Goddard, entitled Dreams for Ireland. 
 This book is uplifted with a radiant hope and 
 with an ecstasy of spiritual conviction that 
 make the heart young to contemplate : and 
 would God that its glad faith and untroubled 
 prophecies could be fulfilled in our time, or 
 that in our time even the shadows of the 
 great things to come could lighten the twi- 
 light road. If I am too sad to share in full 
 the radiant faith, too sad to see with such 
 glad eyes or to be so joyously dissuaded by 
 
 270
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 lovely phantoms from the bitterness of things 
 that are, I am sure-set enough in the hope 
 that great things are yet to be accomplished, 
 that a great destiny is yet possible of achieve- 
 ment, an achievement greater than the shap- 
 ing of proud kingdoms and empires. But of 
 that I will say no more here, having already 
 said what I have to say in this paper and in 
 the first part of the section called " For the 
 Beauty of an Idea." Only, to the little vol- 
 ume of Dreams for Ireland, and to all who 
 write and strive in a like spirit, the spirit that 
 brings victory or transforms defeat, I would 
 give this word of the great Pindar, noblest 
 of poets : But sowing in tlw fair fiowcr of this 
 spirit . . . be not too careful for the cost: loose 
 free like a mariner thy sail unto the wind. 
 
 If, with two books before me on which I 
 have something to say, I have chosen the title 
 of the lesser, that is because of its peculiar 
 fitness. The four winds of Eirinn breathe 
 through each, if with a stronger sound and 
 more primitive voice in that which deals with 
 a spiritual and material order long ago re- 
 mote from us, with the heroic passions and 
 beauty of a world that ceased before English 
 was grown a language. Even in the order 
 of importance I am not prepared to admit 
 
 271
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 that the small posthumous book of verse by 
 Ethna Carbery is so far behind the admir- 
 able compilation we owe to Lady Gregory. 
 But by that I do not mean literary im- 
 portance. The poems of The Four Winds of 
 Eirinn have already appeared in Nationalist 
 papers and circulated throughout Ireland, 
 and are loved and treasured in innumerable 
 hill-crofts and moorside cabins. A thousand 
 readers knew the author's name who had no 
 idea whether she was of the small band of 
 living singers or of that great Irish company 
 whose songs are the treasure of a whole peo- 
 ple. Only a few knew that Ethna Carbery 
 was the wife of a Donegal patriot and writer 
 of distinction, Seumas Macmanus ; but long 
 before her recent premature death she had 
 become a familiar presence at many hearths. 
 Her slender posthumous volume may now 
 be had at a sum which is within the reach 
 of all save the poorest of her own land. 
 That, however, need not trouble any. There 
 is not a poem in her book unknown to hun- 
 dreds who could not purchase the little vol- 
 ume or could read it were it possessed. One 
 copy of a book such as The Four Winds of 
 Eirinn is enough to light many unseen fires. 
 Few readers out of touch with the Gaelic 
 peasant have any idea of the power of a 
 
 272
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 single enthusiast ; of how one man, speaking 
 in a barn at harvest-time, or by the croftside, 
 or on the long road, or by the fireside at the 
 winter ceilidh, or at the rising of the moon 
 in the dusks of summer, can spread from 
 one to one, to a Httle group, to a gathering 
 clan, to countless unknown brothers and 
 sisters, tidings that are sprung from a 
 living heart and march in music and are 
 clothed in the speech of beauty. For there 
 is perhaps no people so susceptible to the 
 charm of verbal rhythm as the Gaelic Irish. 
 To put a sorrow or a joy into mournful or 
 dancing music is as natural to them as, to 
 the English temperament, it is natural to se- 
 crete sorrow and to veil joy. 
 
 It would be uncritical to say that the poetry 
 of Ethna Carbery is compelling because of 
 its art. 
 
 Poetry may express itself subtly in the 
 " signature of symbol," or immediately in the 
 utterance of unveiled emotion. The one 
 method is not necessarily superior to the 
 other. But only the artist may dare to move 
 beyond elemental emotion. He who would 
 pass from the cries and tumult of the un- 
 loosened passions, and create anew in symbol 
 those ancient cries and that unresting tumult, 
 must be as Orpheus descending into the in- 
 
 273
 
 The Pour JVinds of Eirinn 
 
 ferno of defeated dreams, to come again, in 
 the serene mystery of song, with lovelier 
 music and more far-seeing eyes. " I tell 
 you," says Nietzsche, " one must have chaos 
 within to enable one to give birth to a danc- 
 ing star." 
 
 In each there is one perfection : simplicity. 
 In. art, whose controlling spirit is delibera- 
 tion, there is nothing so deliberate as simplic- 
 ity. It may be an innate quality, a habit of 
 the mind ; it is more often, perhaps, the dis- 
 dain of the imagination for artifice, the pride 
 of the imagination in a noble economy. 
 
 In itself, poetry is, to put an old definition 
 in a new way, the emotion of life rhythmically 
 remembering beauty: as pictorial art and the 
 art of verbal romance are the vision of life 
 seen in beauty and in beauty revealed : and as 
 music is the echo of life heard in beauty. 
 But the poet, in emotion rhythmically re- 
 membering beauty, must, in the purging fire 
 of creation, be not less the artist than the 
 poet — he who knows how to shape and con- 
 trol, what to enhance, above all what to forgo, 
 for supreme art is the irreducible economy 
 of the imagination accepting the last austere 
 law of beauty. Emotion is not enough, nor, 
 even, is the passage of emotion into rhyth- 
 mic utterance enough. The thyme and mar- 
 
 274
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 joram are not yet honey, as Emerson said 
 beautifully of the poetry of Thoreau. In the 
 rarest lyric verse there must be unseen light- 
 ning — " the fiery lightning that goeth with all 
 victory," as Pindar has it in one of his great 
 odes. There are few poets in a generation 
 to whom the " fiery lightning " is a reality. 
 That generation is fortunate, indeed, which 
 produces wrestlers in song worthy of an 
 Olympian wreath of wild olive, or a Pythian 
 wreath of bay, or Isthmian pine-garland, or 
 the wild parsley of Nemea. 
 
 Ethna Carbery had not time to become a 
 rare artist, for she died in those early years 
 when emotion docs not readily come under 
 the yoke of that severe discipline which is the 
 first commandment of art. She is not a poet 
 to compare with Mr. Yeats, for example. In 
 technical quality she has not the metrical 
 facility of Nora Hopper or Katharine Tynan. 
 Her lyrics lack the precision and distinction 
 of the verse of Moira O'Neill. But in essen- 
 tial poetic faculty she stands high among the 
 Irish poets of to-day; in this respect indeed 
 she falls behind none save Mr. Yeats and 
 " A. E."; and as an Irish writer for an Irish 
 public I doubt if any of those just named has 
 more intimately reached the heart of the 
 people. The poetry of Mr. Yeats is a poetry 
 
 275
 
 The Four JVinds of Eirinn 
 
 that appeals to those for whom the charm of 
 beauty is beyond any other charm, and to 
 whom beauty means a trained and ordered 
 loveHness, and in whom is a more or less 
 trained and ordered sense of that loveHness. 
 The poetry of "A. E." is a poetry that ap- 
 peals to those to whom the charm of spiritual 
 ecstasy is beyond any other charm. The 
 poetry of writers such as Katharine Tynan 
 and Nora Hopper, and in a less degree of 
 Moira O'Neill, is a poetry written rather for 
 the delight of those in sympathy with the 
 keen and warm life of the people than for 
 the people themselves. Their poetry is rarely 
 in the signature of interpretation ; they are 
 minnesingers of charm and distinction. There 
 are not many of their verses which would 
 come naturally to the lips of an Irish peasant, 
 as would come one or two of Moira O'Neill's 
 Songs of the Glens of Antrim; for, to mention 
 only the most significant reason, they are 
 commonly shaped in the English and not in 
 the Gaelic form of thought — and the form of 
 thought is a still subtler thing than the form 
 of literary style. True, most of Mr. Yeats's 
 poetry is Gaelic in its inward life, partaking 
 of the Gaelic colour and shaped in the Gaelic 
 mould ; but he has the esoteric manner of 
 those ancient poetic ancestors of his who 
 
 276
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 were renowned for their obscurity. In one 
 of the old Irish tales a bard is alluded to with 
 great praise, for after he had spoken before 
 the king and the assembled warriors, priests, 
 and other bards, it was admitted that no other 
 showed so great wisdom or so irrefutably cut 
 away the ground from the matter in debate, 
 because neither king nor any other could 
 understand him, " so great was his high, 
 noble, beautiful obscurity." And in another 
 episode, that Dr. Whiteley Stokes has trans- 
 lated for us in the Irische Tcxtc, we learn 
 how one Senchan went on a circuit into Scot- 
 land, and how there " the Spirit of Poetry 
 met him on the road in the shape of a loathly 
 monster, and conversed with him in the ob- 
 scurity of poetry." Truly, the chronicler of 
 Senchan must have suffered much ere he 
 committed himself to that " loathly mon- 
 ster!" 
 
 Well, I am sure that if Irish peasants were 
 to hear The Shadoivy Waters, or even the 
 greater number of the poems of The Wind 
 Among the Reeds, they would, while respon- 
 sive to the music and the charm of atmos- 
 phere, rank the author as the greatest of liv- 
 ing bards by virtue of his " high, noble, beau- 
 tiful obscurity." That they could really fol- 
 low The Shadoivy Waters, as they have proved 
 
 277
 
 The Four IVinds of Eirinn 
 
 they can follow with sympathy and delight 
 The Countess Cathleen — or as they could follow 
 the stories of Hanrahan the Red in The 
 Secret Rose, or the episodical essays in The 
 Celtic Twilight — is hardly to be believed. This 
 is not to disparage one side of Mr. Yeats's 
 genius, nor is it to disparage a poem of great 
 beauty that I for one account among the ex- 
 celling things he has done. It is merely to 
 state what seems to be a fact, and to em- 
 phasise the diflference of approach in the 
 work of a poet like Ethna Carbery, a writer 
 not less saturated with the Gaelic atmosphere 
 but with a simplicity of thought and diction 
 foreign to the most subtle of contemporary 
 poets, who is never more subtle than when 
 he creates a verbal simplicity as a veil for 
 occult thought and remote allusion. 
 
 We hardly need the tribute of proud love 
 paid to Anna Macmanus, in the pathetic lit- 
 tle memoir contributed by Mr. Macmanus to 
 this posthumous edition of the poems of 
 " Ethna Carbery." In these poems we find 
 everything that the husband says of the wife 
 and the friend of the friend. No reader, 
 surely, could fail to recognise how " before 
 the tabernacle of poor Ireland's hopes a per- 
 petual flame burned in her bosom " ; how 
 that from childhood even, " every fibre of her 
 
 278
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 frame vibrated with the love of Ireland " ; 
 how that her love went out to the hills of 
 Tir-Chonaill long before her joy quickened 
 among the Donegal mountains, because of 
 the passion come to her upon the Hills of 
 her Heart ! 
 
 ' ' Hills o' my heart! 
 For sake of the yellow head that drew me wandering 
 over 
 Your misty crests from my own home where sor- 
 row bided then, 
 I set my seven blessings on your kindly heather 
 cover, 
 On every starry moorland loch, and every sha- 
 dowy glen, 
 
 Hills o' my heart/" 
 
 Her earliest as her latest verse has the 
 quality of song and the vibration of poetry. 
 And from first to last there is in it the Gaelic 
 note — so distinctive from any other note. 
 Here Ethna Carbery is Irish in a sense in 
 which the other women poets of her hour and 
 nation cannot claim to be : for there is no 
 reason why much of the poetry of Katharine 
 Tynan, for example, might not be written l\v 
 one who had lived away from Ireland and 
 permitted a foreign colour to \)c tlu- colour 
 of her songs of life, or why much of the 
 poetry of Norah IIopjK'r might not be written 
 
 279
 
 The Four lt'i)iJs of Eirinn 
 
 by one who had never lived in Ireland and 
 knew the Ireland of the heart only imagina- 
 tively and as one among many dreams in the 
 secret gardens of the imagination. But with 
 Ethna Carbery Ireland is always the Mother- 
 land, and she the child that will not be put 
 away from her, no, not by any wandering of 
 longing nor by any chance of accident. How 
 unmistakable the note in the very first lines 
 of this little collection of some seventy poems 
 — only two-thirds of which had been revised 
 by the author before her early death : 
 
 "There's a sweet sleep for my love by yon glimmer- 
 ing blue wave, 
 But alas ! it is a cold sleep in a green-happed narrow 
 grave. 
 
 O shadowy Finn, move slowly, 
 Break not her peace so holy. 
 Stir not her slumber in the grass >our restless 
 ripples lave." 
 
 And what an added pathos to this poem 
 of "The Cold Sleep of Brighidin " that it 
 was the singer's own death-lament as well as 
 that of the " Breedyeen " of her song; and 
 that she too lies in sleep by the " glimmer- 
 ing blue wave " of Loch Finn ! 
 
 Again, in the second poem, " Shiela Ni 
 Gara " : 
 
 280
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 "Shiel Ni Gara, is it lonesome where you bide, 
 With the plover circling over and the sagans 
 spreading wide? 
 
 "Is it a sail ye wait, Shiela? 'Yea, from the wes- 
 tering sun.' 
 Shall it bring joy or sorrow? 'Oh joy, sadly won.' 
 Shall it bring peace or conflict? 'The pibroch in 
 
 the glen. 
 And the flash and crash of battle where my banner 
 shines again.' 
 
 "Green shears of Hope rise round you like grass- 
 blades after drouth, 
 
 And there blows a red wind from the East, a white 
 wind from the South, 
 
 A brown wind from the West, grddh, a brown wind 
 from the West — 
 
 But the black, black wind from Northern hills, 
 how can you love it best?" 
 
 "Said Shiela Ni Gara, "Tis a kind wind and a true. 
 For it rustled soft through Aileach's halls and 
 
 stirred the hair of H ugh : 
 Then blow, wind! and snow, wind! What matters 
 
 storm to me. 
 Now I know the fairy sleep must break and let the 
 
 sleepers free?' 
 
 "But, Shiela Ni Gara, why rouse the stony dead, 
 Since at your call a living host will circle you in- 
 stead ? 
 Long is our hunger for your voice, the hour is draw- 
 ing near — 
 Oh, Dark Ruse of our Passion — call, and our hearts 
 shall heart" 
 
 281
 
 The Four Winds of PArinn 
 Again, in the third, " In Tir-Na'n-Og ": 
 
 "/« Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Jir-na'n-Og, 
 Summer and spring go hand in hand, and in the 
 
 radiant weather 
 Brown autumn leaves and winter snow come floating 
 down together. 
 
 "In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 All in a drift of apple-blooms my true love there is 
 
 roaming, 
 He will not come although I pray from dawning 
 until gloaming. 
 
 "In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 The Sidhe desired my Heart's Delight, they lured 
 
 him from my keeping. 
 He stepped within a fairy ring while all the world 
 was sleeping. 
 
 "In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 He hath forgotten hill and glen where misty shadows 
 
 gather, 
 The bleating of the mountain sheep, the cabin of his 
 father. 
 
 "In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 No memory hath he of my face, no sorrow for my 
 
 sorrow. 
 My flax is spun, my wheel is husht, and so I wait the 
 morrow." 
 
 282
 
 The Four IVinds of Eirinn 
 
 But, in truth, one might quote from each 
 poem in the book. All are Gaelic in mould 
 of thought and colour of art. Of the sixty- 
 eight there are at least sixty whose very 
 names have a cradle-song for some of us, 
 but must be strangely foreign to many. 
 " Shiela Ni Gara," " The Song of Ciabhan," 
 " Mo Chraoibhin Cno," " Paistin Fionn," 
 " Niamh," " The Brown Wind of Con- 
 naught," " Mo Bhuachaill Cael-Dubh," " I- 
 Breasil," " To the Comely Four of Aran," 
 "Vein o' my Heart," " Nial Glondubh to 
 Gormlai," " The Shadow-House of Lugh," 
 and the like. 
 
 These poems of the Four IVinds of Eirinn 
 fall into four groups, though (and wisely) not 
 so arranged — poems of the Gaelic past, poems 
 of love, poems of national longing and a 
 burning patriotism, and poems of the Gaelic 
 imagination and of the unquenchable long- 
 ing and desire of the heart for an Avalon of 
 which it dreams, but whose foam-white coasts 
 it cannot see — for the " Well o' the World's 
 End " which it cannot reach : 
 
 "Beyond the four seas of Eri, beyond the sunset's rim. 
 It lies half forgot, in a valley deep and dim. 
 Like a star of fire from the skies' gold tire. 
 And whoso drinks the nine drops shall win his 
 heart's desire — 
 
 At the Well o' the World's End. 
 
 283
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 "What go ye seeking, seeking, seeking, 
 O girl white-bosomed, O girl fair and young?" — 
 
 "I seek the well-water, the cool well water. 
 That my love may have love for me ever on his 
 tongue." 
 
 Perhaps the poems which longest will lie 
 close to the Irish heart are those which show 
 the shadow of Irish sorrow and the rainbow- 
 gleam of Irish hope — that sorrow and that 
 hope which from the grey glens of Donegal 
 to Kerry of the Kings inspire all the songs 
 that are sung, and all that is imperishable 
 in the nation's heart. Of these a typical ex- 
 ample is " Mo Chraoibhin Cno " (Mo chree- 
 veen no — literally " My cluster of nuts," fig- 
 uratively "My brown-haired girl" — here 
 used by the poet as an analogue of Ireland, 
 one of her many secret names of love): 
 
 Mo ChraoibhIn Cno! 
 
 "A sword of light hath pierced the dark, our eyes 
 have seen the star. 
 O Mother, leave the ways of sleep now days of 
 
 promise are; 
 The rusty spears upon your walls are stirring to 
 
 and fro, 
 In dreams they front uplifted shields — Then wake, 
 Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 
 284
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 "The little waves keep whispering where sedges fold 
 you in, 
 And round you are the barrows of your buried kith 
 
 and kin; 
 O famine-wasted, fever-burnt, they faded like the 
 
 snow 
 Or set their hearts to meet the steel — for you, 
 Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 
 
 "Their names are blest, their caoine sung, our bitter 
 tears are dried; 
 We bury sorrow in their graves, Patience we cast 
 
 aside ; 
 Within the gloom we heard a voice that once was 
 
 ours to know — 
 It was Freedom— Freedom calling loud. Arise! 
 Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 
 
 "Afar beyond that empty sea, on many a battle- 
 place. 
 Your sons have stretched brave hands to death 
 
 before our foeman's face — 
 Down the sad silence of your rest their war-notes 
 
 faintly blow. 
 And they bear an echo of your name — of yours, 
 Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 
 
 "Then wake, a gradh ! we yet shall win a gold crown 
 for your head. 
 Strong wine to make a royal feast — the white wine 
 
 and the red — 
 And in your oaken mether tlie yellow nieud sliuU 
 
 How, 
 What day you rise, in all men's eyes — a Queen, 
 Mo Chraoibhfn Cno! 
 
 285
 
 The Four IVinds of Eirinn 
 
 "The silver speech our fathers knew shall once again 
 be heard; 
 The fire-lit story, crooning song, sweeter than lilt 
 
 of bird; 
 The quicken-tree shall break in flower, its ruddy 
 
 fruit shall glow. 
 And the gentle people dance beneath its shade — 
 Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 
 
 "There shall be peace and plenty — the kindly open 
 door. 
 Blessings on all who come and go — the prosperous 
 
 or the poor — 
 The misty glens and purple hills a fairer tint shall 
 
 show. 
 When your splendid Sun shall ride the skies again — 
 Mo ChraoibhfnCno!" 
 
 Alas! 'tis but the old sweet impossible 
 dream for what is gone away upon the wind. 
 Not now, never again in this little world 
 that is our world, as we know it to-day, can 
 come this golden age, heralded by our re- 
 turning prayers. For us, the Gentle People 
 have no longer a life common with our own. 
 They have gone beyond grey unvisited hills. 
 They dwell in far islands perhaps, where the 
 rains of Heaven and the foam of the sea 
 guard their fading secrecies. Not here, in 
 any Avalon betwixt the last beaches of the 
 Hebrides and the stones of Carnac, shall that 
 glen be found, that shore be touched, where 
 
 286
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 the old Gaelic world shall live anew. An 
 evil has fallen upon us, that may or may not 
 have been inevitable ; that may or may not 
 be from within ourselves as well as from with- 
 out. It is inevitable now. 
 
 "In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 In Tir-na'n-Og, 
 The blackbird lilts, the robin chirps, the linnet 
 
 wearies never, 
 They pipe to dancing feet of Sidhe and thus shall 
 pipe for ever." 
 
 Yes, but that is in Tir-na'n-Og, the land of 
 the ever-young. That is in I-Breasil, the Isle 
 of Youth. That is in F"latheanas, where the 
 strong of soul are. It has no shores, that 
 land ; no boat's prow cleaves the surf around 
 that isle; we do not hear the laughing voices 
 yonder. Alas ! yes — in Tir-na'n-Og. But now 
 we front new ways. The spirit has changed 
 within us ; arid with the changing of the 
 spirit in the soul of a nation all that was its 
 treasure must be lost too, all that cannot be 
 preserved against Time and the bitter moth. 
 And indeed we lament often for what never 
 was : only the same old desire of the heart, 
 the same old longing, that a thousand years 
 ago dreamed against to-day, and that to-day 
 re-dreams the dream of the world a thousand 
 years ago. 
 
 287
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 The happy years may come. Who shall 
 dare say No? But they cannot come, as 
 things are : not for us, at least, longing in 
 our own way. For we long for what is gone, 
 and going, and we are caught in the great 
 net which has swept in our kindred, and all 
 the nations. Can any Gael honestly say that 
 Ireland, that the Highlands, that the Isles are 
 in the deep sense nearer true wellbeing now 
 than they were half a century ago, twenty 
 years ago, ten years ago? Depopulation, the 
 decay of the old language, the ceaseless 
 pressure of what in bitter unconscious irony 
 is called the civilising factor ; the deadening 
 of a new and dull ideal of prosperity, not 
 a blithe weal but a restless discontent ; the 
 cancer of racial hate in Ireland, the levelling 
 and crushing curse of a growing materialism 
 in Scotland ; the paralysing selfishness of both 
 native and alien landowners ; and, with these, 
 and much else, the losing of old virtues in 
 the half-eager, half-sullen assumption of other 
 ways and manners — all this has made, and 
 is making, the passing of the old order bitter 
 and tragic for those whose hearts are bound 
 up in it, whose life is part of it, whose souls 
 are the offspring of its soul. 
 
 If I and others of my generation feel this, 
 how much more must those feel it whose 
 
 288
 
 The Four lVi)ids of Eirinn 
 
 memories go far back ; who remember the 
 homeless glens, when the smoke of many 
 hearths rose in peace ; the deer-forests, where 
 the hillside crofts held a contented people ; 
 the islands where now the flocks of the capi- 
 talist sheep-farmer are the only inhabitants? 
 A few days ago I met a grey-haired High- 
 land gentleman on his way back to the far 
 Isles, to take farewell of the last of his clan 
 who upheld the old ways and kept to the 
 old traditions and used the ancient speech. 
 " For it is all going," he said ; " no, it is all 
 gone. Soon I will be the last, there. They 
 have no Gaelic now, the young people. They 
 and the others have forgotten all that our 
 fathers had of tale and song. Our old world 
 is passed away. It is a new world we are in 
 noyv. For them that like it, it may be well ; 
 it is not well for us who do not like it. For 
 me, as with Donnacha' Ban : 
 
 '"'S mithich teAmadh do na gleannaibh 
 O'n tha gruaimich air na beannaibh, 
 'S ceathach duinte mu na meallaibh 
 A' cur dallaidh air ar Idirsinn.' " 
 
 " It is time now to go down into the glens, 
 
 for gloom is fallen on the mountains, and 
 
 mists shroud the hills, darkening our vision." 
 
 There are still many of us who arc of this 
 
 289
 
 The Four 1 Finds of Eirinn 
 
 broken clan. We have not wholly lost heart ; 
 there is much left to fight for; there is still 
 one inspiring hope : but we know that nearly 
 all of what we would see stay must go, that 
 nothing of what we see going shall turn back, 
 that nothing of what we know gone shall 
 come again. 
 
 The secret of the Celtic muse is veiled in 
 tears. The poetry of the Gael is the poetry 
 of sorrow. It is not impossible that one day 
 a new triumphal paean may be heard, the 
 clarions of joy. That, indeed, would be a 
 divine ministry of the patient and watching 
 gods. 
 
 Years ago, when writing went with drifting 
 thought and not with thought rising from the 
 depths, I wrote this : without pain as a mem- 
 ory, and without despair as a will-o'-the-wisp, 
 there would be no lyric beauty of enduring 
 worth. 
 
 But now I do not think this, though up to 
 a point its truth is obvious. For joy can be, 
 and ought to be, the supreme torch of the 
 mind ; and hope can be and ought to be the 
 inspiration of that grave ecstasy which is art 
 become religious, that is . . . art expressing 
 an august verity, with the emotion of the life 
 that is mortal deepened by the passion of the 
 soul that is immortal. 
 
 290
 
 The Four JVinds of Eirinn 
 
 "So simple is the heart of man, 
 So ready for new hope and joy; 
 Ten thousand years since it began 
 Have left it younger than a boy." 
 
 Nevertheless it is true that pain is a wind that 
 goes deep into the obscure wood, and stirs 
 many whispers and lamentations among the 
 hidden leaves, and sends threnodies on long 
 waves from the swaying green shores of oak 
 and pine and beech. " It is that which gives 
 artists the strongest power of expression," 
 wrote one who for himself knew the truth 
 of what he said, the great Millet. But de- 
 spair . . . that is a quality of the mind, while 
 pain is an elemental condition of life. It is 
 in nature for all that lives to know pain: it 
 is not natural for anything that lives to know 
 despair. So while despair may have its beauty, 
 as a desolate polar sea has its own desolate 
 beauty, or as a barren hillside without green 
 of grass or song of bird may have a wild 
 and barren beauty, it is the beauty of what 
 redeems — light and cloud, mist and shadow 
 and air — not a beauty inherent, not the 
 beauty of those things which fundamentally 
 are elemental and eternal. The clouds of 
 man's hopes and dreams which drift through 
 the human sky, and the wind of the spirit that 
 shepherds them, belong to the higher regions. 
 
 291
 
 Tlir Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 Here, by some subtlety of association, I re- 
 call those beautiful lines in The Last Ad- 
 venture of Balaustion: 
 
 "Why should despair be? Since, distinct above 
 Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind 
 And floats the cloud. ..." 
 
 And this poor girl, with her heart of song 
 and her frail reed of life, who died so young 
 among the mountains of Donegal, she, too, 
 knew it. What a caoinc of world-old sadness 
 in that poem she wrote not long before her 
 death, "The Passing of. the Gael": 
 
 "The whip of hunger scourged them from the glens 
 and quiet moors, 
 But there's a hunger of the heart that plenty 
 
 never cures; 
 And they shall pine to walk again the rough road 
 that is yours. 
 
 "They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid 
 them stay; 
 The fields are now the strangers', where the 
 
 strangers' cattle stray. 
 Oh! Kathaleen Ni Hoolihan, your way's a thorny 
 way! ' ' 
 
 But pain wearies even the sense of pain, 
 and it is a relief to turn to this dead young 
 singer's poetry of fantasy. How fine much 
 
 292
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 of this is, whether simple as " The King of 
 Ireland's Cairn ": 
 
 "Blow softly down the valley, 
 O wind, and stir the fern 
 That waves its green fronds over 
 The King of Ireland's cairn. 
 
 • ••>■• 
 
 "Say, down those halls of Quiet 
 Doth he cry upon his Queen? 
 Or doth he sleep contented 
 To dream of what has been?" 
 
 Or of more sutble thought and remoter ex- 
 pression in poems such as that (" Angus the 
 Lover ") which begins : 
 
 "I follow the silver spears flung from the hands of 
 dawn" — 
 
 or as " The Green Plover, " or as " The 
 Shadow-House of Lugh": 
 
 "Dream-fair beside dream waters, it stands alone: 
 A winging thought of Lugh made its comer stone: 
 A desire of his heart raised its walls on high. 
 
 "He hath no vexing memory of blood in slanting 
 
 rain. 
 Of green spears in hedges on a battle plain ; 
 But through the haunted quiet his love's silver 
 
 words 
 Blew round him swift as wing-beats of enchanted 
 
 birds. 
 
 293
 
 The Pour IVitids of Eirinn 
 
 "He plays for her pleasure on his harp's gold wire 
 The laughter-tune that leaps alone in trills of fire; 
 She hears the dancing feet of Sidhe where a white 
 
 moon gleams, 
 And all her world is joy in the House of Dreams. 
 
 "His days glide to night, and his nights glide to day : 
 With circling of the amber mead, and feasting gay: 
 In the yellow of her hair his dreams lie curled, 
 And her arms make the rim of his rainbow world." 
 
 Or in poems of the longing of love, as 
 " Feithfailge " : 
 
 ' ' The blue lake of Devenish! 
 I vex the purple dark with sighs — 
 
 {The blue lake of Devenish) 
 Across the world my sorrow flies, 
 A-hunger for the grey and wistful 
 Beauty of Feithfailge's eyes." 
 
 Or as " At the Well of the Branchy Trees," 
 or " Hills o' My Heart," or " Mo Bhuachaill 
 Cael-Dubh," or " The Sad Song of Finian," 
 with its true Gaelic hyperbole of lament in — 
 
 "I am adrift on the waves of the world — 
 Ochon! Ochon! 
 Tossed by the storm, by the green seas whirled, 
 All for the sake of the yellow-curled 
 Slender girl that I wished my own" — 
 
 or a half-score more as fine. 
 
 294
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 There is a legend common throughout 
 the Highlands and Isles, and current in 
 many parts of Ireland, about the Lennan-Shee 
 (Lcannain-Sidhc), or Fairy Lover. Only the 
 other day I heard a striking variant of the 
 usual tale, and at the same time a good 
 answer. One of the hearers objected that all 
 these stories of the Lennan-Shee were untrue, 
 for he had lived many years in the Highlands 
 and had never heard of any who had met or 
 seen or known of a fairy lover, and that what 
 one was not aware of in a country would not 
 be existing in that country. " As for that," 
 said the narrator, " 's iomadh rttd a bhios ant 
 mcasg an f sluaigh air nach bi fios agaibh-sa " 
 (" There's many a thing among the people 
 of which you are left in ignorance "), a re- 
 mark greeted all round with " Tha sin fior " 
 (" That is true "). And of the many who in 
 one way or another have dealt with this 
 legend, I recall none who has done so more 
 subtly than Ethna Carbery in " The Love- 
 Talker " : 
 
 "I know not what way he came, no shadow fell 
 
 behind, 
 But all the sighing rushes swayed beneath a fairy 
 
 wind : 
 The thrush ceased its singing, a mist crept about, 
 We two clung together — with the world shut out.
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 "Beyond the ghostly mist I could hear my cattle 
 
 low, 
 The little cow from Ballina, clean as driven snow, 
 The dun cow from Kerry, the roan from Inisheer, 
 Oh, pitiful their calling — and his whispers in my 
 
 ear! 
 
 "His eyes were a-fire; his words were a snare; 
 I cried my mother's name, but no help was there; 
 1 made the blessed Sign: then he gave a dreary 
 
 iQoan, 
 A wisp of cloud went floating by, and I stood 
 
 alone." 
 
 How natural it seems to turn from this 
 Gaelic singer of to-day to the unknown 
 shenachies who told the primitive Gaelic 
 legends of the Cuchulain cycle at a time when 
 the Angels had not troubled the fens of Eng- 
 land — to that largely lost and much confused 
 cycle of legendary lore from which, in Cuchu- 
 lain of Muirthemne (Coohoolin of Mflr-ev-na, 
 as pronounced), Lady Gregory has with 
 much skill and no little beauty evolved a 
 sequent narrative ! For the two worlds meet, 
 thus : or rather, they are one. Time makes 
 no division when the mental outlook, the 
 mental life, remains unchanged save in what 
 is unessential in manner and method. The 
 Gael who believes in the fairy lover can also 
 v.ell believe in the story of the love of Angus, 
 
 296
 
 The Four Winds of Eir'uin 
 
 son of the Dagda, for Caer Ormaith, daughter 
 of Ethel Anbual ; and how for one year Caer 
 would be a beautiful woman and for the next 
 year be a white swan on a mountain loch, and 
 how Angus, because of the longing of his 
 love, took swan-shape upon him by the locli- 
 side, so that the lovers spread their wings and 
 rose from the loch, in their going their wings 
 making a music so sweet that all who heard 
 it fell asleep for three days and three nights. 
 Or in that tale of how Cathbad the Druid 
 told the childless Fedlimid that his wife would 
 bear a daughter for whom many great heroes 
 and bright candles of the Gael would lose 
 their lives ; and of how the girl was born, she 
 for whom heroes would fight and kings go 
 seeking; and how Cathbad said: "Let Deir- 
 dre be her name, sweet menace that she is ": 
 and how he chanted to her: 
 
 "Many will be jealous of your face, O flame of 
 beauty; for your sake heroes shall go to exile. For 
 there is harm in your face: it will bring banishment 
 and death on the sons of kings. In your fate, O beau- 
 tiful child, arc wounds and ill-doings, and shedding 
 of blood. 
 
 " You will have a little grave apart to yourself; you 
 will be a tale of wonder fur ever, DSirdrS." 
 
 Or in that tale of how Fedelm of the Sidhe 
 — the young girl of the mouth of red berries, 
 
 297
 
 The Four Winds of Eirimi 
 
 with voice sweeter than the strings of a 
 curved harp, and skin showing through her 
 clothes hke the snow of a single night — was 
 of a sudden seen by Maeve, the Warrior- 
 Queen, sitting on a shaft of her chariot, and 
 had no word to say to the Queen about her 
 hosts of Cruachan gathered for battle against 
 Cuchulain and the Ultonians, but only, over 
 and over, " I see crimson on them, I see red." 
 And how true that foretelling was, when that 
 great army of Ireland was swept away, " wan- 
 dering and going astray like a mare among 
 her foals that goes astray in a strange place, 
 not knowing what path to take " ; and how 
 the remnant crossed the ford of the Sionnan 
 at Athluain, notwithstanding that in Maeve's 
 company were unvanquishable heroes and 
 three princes of the Sidhe in shining armour, 
 Delbaeth, and Cermat Honey-mouth, and 
 Angus Og, son of the Dagda — for even the 
 gods do not always prevail against the souls 
 of the greatest. 
 
 Or in that tale of how the harpers of Cain- 
 bile came to Maeve's camp, and played on 
 magic harps ; but how they were driven forth 
 as spies, and followed with spears till they 
 reached the great stone of Lecmore, when 
 the harpers took on themselves the shape of 
 wild deer and went away. Or in that tale of 
 
 298
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 the Wedding of Maine, son of Ailell and 
 Maeve, where beauty and death are as subtly- 
 interwoven as in the familiar Gaelic sgeul of 
 the love of Baile the Sweet-Spoken and Ail- 
 linn, when, after death, grave-wood grew into 
 grave-wood and green branches from the 
 North and the South became one overhang- 
 ing branch under which the four winds 
 moved. Or in that tale of how, after the 
 heavy wound of Fraech, " boy darling of the 
 King of the Sidhe of Ireland," a sorrowful 
 crying was heard on Cruachan, and strange 
 women in beautiful raiment were seen on the 
 hill, and how Fraech in his sickness called 
 suddenly, " Lift me out of this, for that is 
 the cry of my mother and of the women of 
 Boann " ; and how he was carried to Cru- 
 achan, and left upon the hill, and how thrice 
 fifty queens bore him to the secret gates, 
 crying a sorrowful cry ; and how it is from 
 this cry that the musicians of Ireland learned 
 the sorrowful cry of the women of the Sidhe. 
 
 Or in a hundred tales akin to these tales, 
 in this Vjook and in other books, and in many 
 minds, might Ijelief as well be. 
 
 To come under the enchantment of a book 
 such as this legendary lore — gathered by 
 Lady Gregory from many sources, with con- 
 stant excellence in choice, retold with care- 
 
 299
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 ful art of simplicity, and not rarely in that 
 spellbound prose which is born of the en- 
 chanted mind — one must be, as Mr. Yeats 
 says in his finely persuasive rather than cri- 
 tical preface to this book, as were the people 
 of old-time, who were in love with a story 
 and gave themselves up to imagination as if 
 to a lover. Not otherwise can this sea of 
 troubling winds and troubled waters, and of 
 bewildering currents and rising and falling 
 tides, be rightfully enjoyed. To change the 
 image, the book must be approached as one 
 approaches a forest, dense with intricate by- 
 ways, proud with wide glades, given over to 
 the wilderness at times, and to enter which 
 with the dews of dawn means that one need 
 not look to emerge till the stars are come. 
 The paths may be difficult, sometimes the 
 way seem trackless. But " delight will al- 
 ways overtake one in the end." 
 
 Ciichiilain of Miiirthemne is no mere book of 
 pleasure for the eager or the weary reader. 
 It is the initial part of a work which, possibly, 
 may ultimately be considered worthy to rank 
 with the Arthurian chronicle of Malory and 
 with the Mabinogion which Lady Charlotte 
 Guest (in some such manner as Lady Gregory 
 has now done) gave to the world. Had Mac- 
 pherson been profoundly intimate with Gaelic 
 
 300
 
 The Four IVinds of Eirinn 
 
 life, and had he been a Gaelic scholar — had 
 he been free from the ideals of a Lowland 
 bourgeois, and not caught in the intellectual 
 sentimentality of the eighteenth century of 
 his day — he might have achieved a triumph 
 as great, I think greater, perhaps, than any 
 of these. For with all my appreciation of 
 Lady Gregory's achievement, I cannot think 
 with Mr. Yeats that it is so great a book as 
 he maintains. This is not to disparage a 
 work which calls for gratitude. But Lady 
 Gregory's Cuchulain is not the shapen tri- 
 umph of imagination ; it is — and how differ- 
 ent this is, while so fine — the skilful and in 
 the main satisfying relation of many imagina- 
 tions by an enthusiast, and an enthusiast who 
 shows that she is also an artist in the use of 
 words. 
 
 Surely one need not mistake the editorial 
 faculty for the creative faculty. A year or 
 two ago Miss Eleanor Hull summarised the 
 Cuchulain Saga, achieving therein a work of 
 great value as well as of interest. Without 
 it, it is very doubtful if Lady Gregory's book 
 would be as nearly excellent as it is. For 
 students of Gaelic legend and literature, more- 
 over, Miss Hull's "Saga" is mucii the more 
 valuable work : and I am glad of this oppor- 
 tunity to draw attention to its unfair neglect 
 
 301
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 since the appearance of its more literary but 
 in one or two vital respects much less satis- 
 fying rival. Ciichulain of Muirthcmne is the 
 ordered and artistic narration: the Ciichulain 
 Saga is the careful analysis, or, to put it an- 
 other way, the crude architectural structure 
 from which a symmetrical edifice was to 
 emerge. But one knows that there is an- 
 other and greater way: the way that a Gaelic 
 poet of the first order might take — the way 
 that would give us all the beauty and wonder 
 gathered out of the past, with a new beauty, 
 a new wonder, gathered somehow, we know 
 not how, out of the present — and yet, when 
 we look curiously, neither the floating wonder 
 nor the rising and falling beauty being dis- 
 sociate in time, but one wonder, and one 
 beauty. A new and greater Macpherson, 
 working from deep knowledge truly in a 
 true way; a new Villemarque, with more 
 scrupulous heed and with a familiarity as 
 great and a power greater than that of Briz- 
 ieux; a Celtic William Morris — what might 
 such an one make of the Cuchulain Cycle, 
 the Fionn Cycle, of Oisin of the Deer? 
 
 Sir Samuel Ferguson might have done it, 
 but he was never on the crest, only alone for 
 a time on the uplift of the great wave, and 
 he lacked the supreme gift of the Celt, the 
 
 302
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 gift of an incommunicable charm. Mr. Yeats 
 might do it : the Wanderings of Oisin uphold 
 the chance. But I fear the work is for one 
 far less preoccupied than he with the many 
 subtle problems of art and of the shaken 
 mind and of life turning for ever among her 
 revolving mirrors. It will have to be the life- 
 work of a single-minded dreamer and maker, 
 as, with all its insincerities and banalities, 
 Ossian was the life-work of that perplexing 
 genius, at once so high and so small, so uni- 
 versal and so provincial, James Macpherson. 
 For I feel this about Cuehulain of Muir- 
 themne, that it is a fine ideal finely fulfilled 
 (and how much that is in a day of few ideals 
 and few fulfillings !), but that it is — I know 
 not what ? — over-scholarly in its unwavering 
 heed to be consciously the thing it sets out 
 to be : over-cold in its strange sameness of 
 emotion : a little chill with the chill of studi- 
 ous handicraft. Once, with two-thirds of the 
 book read, and somewhat weary of its even 
 waters, I turned to the earlier and fragmen- 
 tary and in every way cruder telling of Stan- 
 dish O'Grady. It was like leaving the banks 
 of a still loch for the slippery heather slopes 
 of a mountain torrent — but the sudden fresh- 
 ness, the leap, the vigour, the cry in the ears, 
 the stir, the rush ! In a word, it seems to me 
 
 30.3
 
 The Four ll^iuds of Eirinn 
 
 that the Hterary flaw in Lady Gregory's 
 version is its monotonous passionlessness. 
 Rightly or wrongly, I have the idea that her 
 mind may have quickened continually when 
 she was writing this book, but that her pulse 
 never quickened. " It is not the book for 
 the beating of my heart to be heard in," the 
 author might reply. But can that plea be 
 averred of any book of the imagination, 
 whether primary or reflected? It is here that 
 style — that subtle revealer — brings to the 
 test. And to me the style of this book, sim- 
 ple and gracious as it is, reveals rather an 
 enamoured mind than an enthralled heart. 
 Perhaps, however, one less familiar than the 
 present writer with the themes and legends 
 which Lady Gregory has woven in sequence 
 could better estimate the general value of 
 this book. That I am indeed ready to ad- 
 mit. For I miss, too often, a wilder but a 
 native note that she has purposefully ignored ; 
 sometimes wisely perhaps, sometimes inevi- 
 tably I suppose, sometimes I cannot but feel 
 to the weakening of her tale and the adum- 
 brating of that tale's features for those whose 
 approach is new. Again and again I have 
 felt her rendering to be, from this standpoint, 
 disastrous. The wind was out of the leaves, 
 the fires had faded, the authentic voices were 
 
 304
 
 The Four irinds of Eirinn 
 
 the dim echoes of phantoms. And though, 
 again, I feel with others the charm and re- 
 cognise the art of Lady Gregory's style, I 
 find in it, constantly, a lack of virility that is 
 at times almost prettiness — as, to take the 
 first instance I can come upon at random, 
 the fatal vulgarism (one indulged in not once 
 only but again and again) of the misuse of 
 " nice " in the story of Aileel's treachery 
 upon Fraech — " So he went and broke a 
 branch off the tree . . . and it is beautiful he 
 looked over the black water, his body without 
 fault and his face so nice," etc. 
 
 But lapses of the kind are perhaps inevi- 
 table. In the main the fine and quiet art of 
 the telling is the justification of the aim the 
 writer had in view — to write an English as 
 nearly as possible the vernacular of those 
 who now have the foreign language as their 
 own language, but still retain the Gaelic 
 mind. 
 
 To say that every lover of Celtic literature 
 should obtain, should become familiar with 
 this book, is to say what is obvious. But 
 surely others also may read it with pleasure : 
 as, a century ago, readers knowing nothing 
 of the mabinogi of Bronwcn, or the mabinogi 
 of Pwyll, or the mabinogi of Manwyddan, 
 turned with curiosity, and then with interest, 
 
 3^5
 
 The four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 and then with dehght to these and other 
 niabinogion in the beautiful Enghsh retelling 
 of Lady Charlotte Guest ; as, later, readers 
 turned to the Arthurian romances under the 
 compelling spell of a great poet ; as, later, 
 readers ignorant of Scandinavian poetry and 
 mythology turned to a new world, led by the 
 chanting voice of the poet of Sigurd the 
 \'olsung. One does not need knowledge of 
 Celtic myth and legend in order to find charm 
 and delight in Ctichulain, though the wider 
 the knowledge and the deeper the intimacy 
 the greater that charm and the greater that 
 delight. If one love the tale of Homeric war, 
 if one quicken at the name of Achilles, or at 
 the doom of the house of Agamemnon, or at 
 the wanderings of Odysseus, or at mention 
 of the place where Kronos is the silent King, 
 or at the tale of Danae imprisoned in her 
 tower, or at the tale of Penelope, or at the 
 tale of Helen, surely he can turn also to like 
 ancestral tales of the mighty warfare of Moy- 
 tura, of the Titanic conflict by the Ford of the 
 two champions of the Gael, of that terrible 
 battle at Muirthemne, of Cuchulain that peer- 
 less lord, of the doom of the House of Usna, 
 of the Odyssey of the sons of Turenn, of 
 Conann's Tower of Death, of Ethne in the 
 rock-set Dim of Balor, of Emer the lovely 
 
 306
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 and noble wife of Cuchiilain, and of Deirdre, 
 whose beauty is undying legend in the songs 
 and memories of the Gael to this day.^ 
 
 Not in the Mabinogion, not in the Scan- 
 dinavian Sagas, not even in the Arthurian 
 romances are there women who hold us more 
 enthralled than Emer holds us^ than Deirdre 
 holds us, than wild Maeve holds us as with a 
 spear, than Findabair, that frail reed shaken 
 in the wind, that Fand of the Sidhe. How 
 beautiful this Fand — " And the meaning of 
 the name Fand is, a tear that passes over the 
 fire of the eye : it was for her purity she was 
 
 ' The greatest living Celticist, M. d'Arbois de Ju- 
 bainville, reminds the general reader, what to the 
 specialist is obvious, that Celtic mythology is not 
 copied from Greek mythology. "It is based," he 
 says, "uf)on conceptions originally identical with 
 those from which Greek mythology is derived, but 
 has developed the fundamental elements of the 
 myth in a manner of its own, which is as independent 
 as it is original." As again, in an earlier chapter, 
 he writes: "The characteristics common to Gaelic 
 and to Greek mythology come from an old founda- 
 tion of Gracco-Celtic legends anterior to the separa- 
 tion of the two races, at that unknown period when 
 the Hellenes, or Greeks, abandoning to the Celts the 
 cold valley of the Danube and the mist-laden regions 
 of Western Europe, settled down to the warm i)lains 
 and the splendid coasts of the peninsula lying to 
 the south of the Balkans."
 
 The Pour IViiids of Eirinn 
 
 called that, and for her beauty: for there was 
 nothing in life with which she could be com- 
 pared beside it." How beautiful this queenly 
 Emer, in girlhood and womanhood, and beau- 
 tiful the manner of her death beyond that of 
 any other, I think. And is there any pathos 
 of great love in sight of the House of Sor- 
 row greater than that renouncing bitterness 
 of Emer when she bids Cuchulain go with 
 Niamh, since he says that she only can save 
 him ? . . . " And after that Emer bade Conall 
 to make a wide, very deep grave for Cuchu- 
 lain: and she laid herself down beside her 
 gentle comrade, and she put her mouth to 
 his mouth, and she said : * Love of my life, 
 my friend, my sweetheart, my one choice of 
 the men of the earth, many is the woman, 
 wed or unwed, envied me until to-day; and 
 now I will not stay living after you.' " If 
 there is any loveliness of pathos beyond this 
 loveliness, in any literature, I do not know 
 it. And the last words of this saga, how fit- 
 ting are they : 
 
 " And her life went out from her, and she 
 herself and Cuchulain were laid in the one 
 grave by Conall. And he raised the one stone 
 over them, and he wrote their names in Og- 
 ham, and he himself and all the men of Ulster 
 keened them. 
 
 308
 
 The Four Winds of Eirinn 
 
 " But the three times fifty queens that loved 
 Cuchulain saw him appear in his Druid char- 
 iot, going through Emain Macha; and they 
 could hear him singing the music of Sidhe." 
 
 309
 
 TWO OLD SONGS OF MAY 
 
 (From the Gaelic) 
 
 One of the most beautiful of old Gaelic 
 poems is an Ecstasy of Spring composed no 
 one knows how many generations before the 
 lyric voices of Elizabeth's day. The name of 
 the poet a thousand years ago went away like 
 a blossom on that swift river which fills the 
 pools of oblivion. Perhaps even then it was 
 hardly remembered, for the singer is often 
 but the fleeting shadow who sang of a star, 
 while the star remains. This Ecstasy of 
 Spring is known as the May Day Song, and 
 it is recorded in an old Gaelic MS. of the 
 later part of the ninth or beginning of the 
 tenth century, though how much older it 
 is than this MS. none knows. The MS. is 
 called " Macgnimartha Finn," and recounts 
 the Boyish Exploits of Finn, the great war- 
 rior-king of the Gael, the Gaelic Nimrod. 
 This narrative in Middle-Irish has been trans- 
 lated by Dr. Keneo Meyer in " Eriu," vol. i. 
 Pt. 2, who gives there also a portion of the 
 
 310
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 May Song. It is to be found intact in the 
 " Four Songs " translated by this indefati- 
 gable Celtic student, who brings the light of 
 poetry into his most severely difficult work . . . 
 and how difficult old Gaelic is to translate 
 few can realise. If any present reader knows 
 modern Gaelic, with its confusing complex- 
 ity, its puzzling spelling, its singular inver- 
 sions and habitual pleonasms, let him see 
 what he could make of ancient Gaelic so 
 crudely concise as 
 
 "Tdnic sam(h) sldn soer, 
 dia mbi clden caill ciar, 
 lingiJ ag sing sniid 
 dia ntbi reiJ ran rian." 
 
 He will almost certainly find it incomprehen- 
 sible. The other day I read slowly to a 
 Gaelic islesman the following two quatrains 
 (from another old-Irish poem) : 
 
 "Maidid glass for each lus, 
 bilech doss daire glaiss: 
 tdnic satn{h), ro faith gaim 
 gonit coin ciulinti caiss. 
 
 "Canaid Ion dron dord 
 dia mbi forbb caill cerb, 
 suanatd ler lonn l'iac(h) 
 foling iach brec bedc." 
 
 3"
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 On a second and slower reading, dwelling on 
 each word, he got nothing more from the 
 first quatrain than what he had already got 
 — *' there will be something about a flower 
 {Jus) and a dog {coin) and maybe holly 
 {cuilinn)." In the second, Ion was easily 
 recognisable as a blackbird : but he did not 
 even guess at any more except to make a 
 mistake in brec, first thinking it the fami- 
 liar Gaelic name for a trout {brcac) and 
 then thinking it might be the old word for 
 a wolf (also breac, for one of the mean- 
 ings of the word is "brindled"), where as 
 here it is the adjective " speckled " qualify- 
 ing "salmon" {iach), a name which natu- 
 rally he did not know. And what this isles- 
 man, a Gael with very little English, and 
 in a sense learned, for he could read Gaelic 
 well and even that with old-fashioned spell- 
 ing and obsolete words, could not do, I do 
 not think even a specialist in modern Gaelic 
 could do. But the crude jerky quatrains are 
 full of poetic feeling, as word by word 
 unfolded for us out of the past by Dr. Keneo 
 Meyer: 
 
 "Green bursts out on every herb. 
 The top of the green oakwood is bushy, 
 Summer is come, winter has gone. 
 Twisted hollies wound the hound. 
 312
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 "The blackbird sings a loud strain, 
 To him the live wood is a heritage; 
 The sad excited sea sleeps, 
 The speckled salmon leaps." 
 
 Literally, and Dr. Meyer might as well have 
 so rendered his translation : " Breaks green- 
 ness on every herb " . . . " arrived is sum- 
 mer, gone is winter " . . . " Sings the black- 
 bird a strain loudly " . . . " sleeps the sea, 
 sad, heaving " — for llac may mean that rather 
 than " excited," which does not go with 
 suanaid, " sleeps.") 
 
 In this old poetry the observation is always 
 very close, and what we should call uncon- 
 ventional, as " Forbrit brain, tank sam{h) " 
 ..." Ravens flourish, summer has come " 
 — which is every whit as true, and in the 
 northlands of the Gael even more true, than 
 the identification of May-tide with the often 
 refraining cuckoo, the often tardy swallow. 
 But of the cuckoo, also, the old poetry can 
 speak revealingly ; for if, as seems likely, the 
 word vibind can be rendered " drowsy " (or 
 " softly tender "), the line " canaid cui ceol 
 mbiud mbldith," " singeth the cuckoo a drowsy 
 sweet music," is full of the heat of the sum- 
 mer days that come in May. 
 
 In giving my version, as concisely and in 
 as brief a metre as practicable, of this old-
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 world Song of May, after the redaction of 
 Keneo Meyer, I am aware of how much is 
 missed even though I have tried to retain the 
 most distinctive phrases, as that lovely phrase 
 in the seventh quatrain " where the talk of the 
 rushes is come." I cannot improve upon 
 Dr. Meyer's version, but mine is an effort 
 to translate into rhymed quatrains the old 
 Gaelic song in a metre as succinct as that of 
 the original, to keep to the sense always, and 
 to the actual words where practicable. When 
 I have changed these, it has been to the 
 loss of the old poet ; e.g, his dust-coloured 
 cuckoo does not personify summer, and call 
 her a queen. It says : " Welcome, splendid 
 summer." But in the main I have tried to 
 keep to the original. 
 
 "May, clad in cloth of gold, 
 Cometh this way: 
 The fluting of blackbirds 
 Heralds the day. 
 
 "The dust-coloured cuckoo 
 Cries 'Welcome, O Queen!' 
 For winter has vanished, 
 The thickets are green. 
 
 "Soon the trampling of cattle 
 Where the river runs low! 
 The long hair of the heather, 
 The canna like snow!
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 "Wild waters are sleeping, 
 Foam of blossom is here: 
 Peace, save the panic 
 In the heart of the deer. 
 
 "The wild-bee is busy. 
 The ant honey spills. 
 The wandering kine 
 
 Are abroad on the hills. 
 
 "The harp of the forest 
 
 Sounds low, sounds sweet: 
 Soft bloom on the heights; 
 On the loch, haze of heat. 
 
 "The waterfall dreams: 
 
 Snipe, corncrakes, drum 
 By the pool where the talk 
 Of the rushes is come. 
 
 "The swallow is swooping; 
 
 Song swings from each brae : 
 (?) Rich harvest of mast falls; 
 The swamp shimmers gay. 
 
 " Happy the heart of man, 
 Eager each maid : 
 Lovely the forest, 
 
 The wild plane, the green glade. 
 
 "Truly winter is gone. 
 
 Come the time of delight. 
 The summer-truce joyous, 
 May, blossom-white. 
 
 "In the heart of the meadows 
 The lapwings are (juiet: 
 A winding stream 
 Makes drowsy riot.
 
 Tivo Old Songs of May 
 
 "Race horses, sail, run. 
 Rejoice and be bold! 
 See, the shaft of the sun 
 Makes the water-fiag gold. 
 
 "Loud, clear, the blackcap; 
 The lark trills his voice — 
 Hail, May of delicate colours! 
 'Tis May-Day— Rejoice!" 
 
 The other old GaeHc May-poem is not an- 
 cient, but is certainly over a hundred and 
 thirty, and may be about two hundred years 
 old. I came upon it the other day through 
 the courtesy of an unknown correspondent 
 in America. This gentleman caught sight of 
 a little leather-bound volume in a second- 
 hand book shop in New York, and was puz- 
 zled at the language in which the poems it 
 contained appeared. Well he might be at 
 first, he not having the Gaelic, for the 
 title runs " Comh-Chruinneachidh Orannaigh 
 Gaidhealach," and how was he to know that 
 the imprint at the bottom of the page " Dun- 
 eidiunn M.DCC.LXXVL," is merely Edin- 
 burgh? He was good enough to ascertain 
 an address to which he could forward the 
 book to me, and in his letter said that he 
 thought it only right that this forlorn exile 
 should return to its own land. And right 
 
 316
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 glad was I to have it so. This little volume 
 of Gaelic minstrelsy is " Le Raonuill Mac- 
 domhnuill, ann 'N Eilean Eigg," i.e., by Ron- 
 ald Macdonald of the Isle of Eigg, that beau- 
 tiful precipitous island of the Inner Hebrides 
 which so many years ago Hugh Miller made 
 famous in his geological " Cruise of the 
 Betsy." Or, rather, it was compiled by him ; 
 for the poets of the songs and poems in this 
 volume are for the most part as nameless, as 
 well as tameless and rude and wild, as the 
 makers of the border-ballads. The contents 
 are diversified too: now one comes on a 
 lorram, or boat-chant, now on a Marbh-rann 
 or threnody, now on a love-song such as the 
 " Oran gaoil le Mac Cailein d'inghein Mhic 
 Dhonuill Ilea," or a feudal song so well 
 known as the " Oran le Inghin Alastair 
 ruaigh do Mac Leoid " (" Song by the 
 Daughter of Alexander the Red— i.^., the 
 famous Mary Macleod— to the Macleod"). 
 The book is a delight if only for its quaint 
 wild-swanlike primitive refrains or chorus ef- 
 fects, e.g.: 
 
 " Holibh o iriag o ilil o, 
 
 Holibh o iriag o ro thi, 
 Hulibh o iriag o ilil o, 
 
 Smeurach U- cLann 
 Raonuil mi,"
 
 Tzvo Old Songs of May 
 
 \vhi«h may well have been caught from the 
 snworach (thrush) itself : or this other luimxeag: 
 
 "Hi il u il agus o, 
 Hi il o ho ri nan. 
 Hi il u il agus o 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Fa HI o hu HI o 
 
 Ho ri ghealladh hi il an." 
 
 But to the Maytide poem ! It is nameless, as 
 to author ; and is entitled simply " Oran an 't 
 Samhraidh." It is, however, too long, and 
 in its metrical skill too involved and continu- 
 ously alliterate to be rendered into English 
 here. So I do no more than give the drift 
 of it, for in the opening stanzas is to be found 
 the essential part of the whole poem. I may 
 add that in the first stanza here " son o' the 
 wind " is a poetic simile for the bagpipes (or 
 here, perhaps, the feadan, the whistle or flute 
 of the pipes) : and that, in the third, May is, 
 Gaelic fashion, personified as a youth. 
 
 "At break of day when all the woods are wet, 
 When every bush is shining white, 
 When in a silver maze the grass is set, 
 And the sun's golden light 
 Floods the green vale, 
 Lift, lift along the dewy grassy trail 
 
 The cheerful music of the son o' the wind, 
 Till, in the forest, floating voices sail, 
 And vanishing echoes haunt the old rocks stern 
 and blind.
 
 Two Old Songs of May 
 
 "Let the fresh windy birch her odours breathe, 
 Her shimmering leaves ablaze: 
 Let the wide branchy beech with sunbeams seethe 
 While clustered cattle gaze, 
 The sunshine on them too: 
 Let yonder thrush that flew 
 
 Carry the tidings of the golden day 
 Till not a glen or copse heart-turning to the blue 
 But thrills with the green rapturous loveliness of 
 May. 
 
 "When evening falls, what bell is't rings so 
 clear? . . . 
 
 The cuckoo tolling down day's ebbing tide. 
 And what is that glad call, so near? . . . 
 The Mavis with his rain 
 Of song thrown far and wide. 
 And what these blooms May gathers to his side. 
 And with his sweet warm breath doth redly 
 stain? . . . 
 Roses, red roses, culled from hill and plain, 
 Roses, white roses dipt in dew, for May's awaiting 
 bride." 
 
 3T0
 
 "THE SHADOWY WATERS" 
 
 "I have flown out of the sorrowful eary wheel." — 
 Pythagoras, The Golden Verses. 
 
 It is hardly a decade since the rise of a 
 new Gaelic or Anglo-CeUic " school " in lit- 
 erature was looked at as the idle dream of an 
 enthusiast here, a visionary there. As for a 
 Celtic Drama — a drama that would have 
 nothing in common with the accepted Irish 
 melodrama so popular in England, but would 
 have everything in common with the dreams 
 of Irish poets and the tragic history of Ire- 
 land ; a drama that would not set itself to 
 please through a facile laughter and an easy 
 pathos, but through the magic of legendary 
 associations and the spell of a timeless imagi- 
 nation working within a passionate national- 
 ism of mind and spirit — for a Celtic drama 
 such as this, there was not even derision. 
 The idea was too remote. 
 
 To ignore, now, the Anglo-Celtic school — 
 I prefer to say the Anglo-Celtic group — 
 would be too parochial even for a London 
 
 320
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 critic trained in the narrowest academical and 
 literary conventions. One may ignore this or 
 that writer: all cannot be ignored, for they 
 are now many, and some have that distinction 
 which rebukes the sullen. One may depre- 
 cate the movement, may decry it, may more 
 insolently patronise it — as some French crit- 
 ics patronise Aubanel, Mistral, and the Pro- 
 vencal school, or as they patronise the poets 
 and romancists of the Breton people: but one 
 can no longer say it is not present, or is not 
 to be reckoned with. There are, of course, 
 faults on both sides. On each are wrong 
 claims as well as wrong refusals, wrong as- 
 sertions as well as wrong denials. In time, 
 these adverse influences will combine in un- 
 derstanding, and, later, in sympathy and 
 amity. If on the one side there has been, 
 and still is, obtuseness (to speak of a sullen 
 ill-will on the part of England towards Gaelic 
 Ireland and Gaelic Scotland is now untrue), 
 there is on the other a worse quality than 
 obtuseness, a cultivated hate. It is almost 
 inconceivable to what lengths this cult of re- 
 venge or hatred, this blind irreconcilability, 
 will go. Not only the ignorant and idly pas- 
 sionate yield to its facile contamination, but 
 those who would be spiritual guides and lea- 
 ders pin to it all their hopes. These influences 
 
 321
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 and blind advocates, of course, must exist, so 
 that out of evil good may come : but mean- 
 while they are the subtlest foes of Ireland 
 and of that whole Anglo-Gaelic world which 
 is now gathering itself for a last effort to 
 resist extinction. 
 
 At present, however, there is, of the Irish 
 group, one writer who stands apart. Whether 
 one care for or dispute " the Celtic move- 
 ment," none denies that Mr. Yeats is of the 
 very few writers of the younger generation 
 who can persuade us to the iise of that sadly 
 abused word " genius." As essayist, roman- 
 cist, dramatist, but above all as poet, he has 
 a unique place. 
 
 The colour of his style is the colour of his 
 thought, and the colour of his thought is the 
 colour of a genius larger than his own, the 
 genius of a race. 
 
 With the romances of " The Secret Rose," 
 the fantasies and episodes of " The Celtic 
 Twilight," or the several fascinating and sug- 
 gestive essays in which, I think, is to be found 
 Mr. Yeats's finest work in prose, I do not 
 now attempt to concern myself. Nor, indeed, 
 do I wish at present to consider his poetry as 
 a whole : for his work in verse is familiar to 
 most of us, and has been widely considered 
 by others. But I would say a few words 
 
 322
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 concerning his latest book of verse, and his 
 " Shadowy Waters " and other dramatic work. 
 In a small book of verse, " The Wind 
 among the Reeds," recently given us by Mr. 
 Yeats, I think a note is touched which is 
 significant. It is the beginning of a new 
 music, and of a new motive. It is not often, 
 I imagine, that titles are so apt as that chosen 
 for this little book. These fewer than two- 
 score poems, most of them within the bound- 
 ary of a page, are small and slight as reeds; 
 and the wind which moves in them a delicate 
 music is as invisible, as mysterious, as ele- 
 mental as that " strong creature, without flesh, 
 without bone, that neither sees nor is seen," 
 of which long ago Taliesin sang. To under- 
 stand its intimate music, certainly to feel that 
 music translate itself into the rhythm of 
 dream, one must go to this book as to a 
 solitary place where reeds rise in the moon- 
 shine. To know intimately the mystery of 
 these solitudes, it must be when the wind is 
 the only traveller, and sunlight and shadow, 
 the stars and darkness and the wandering 
 plover are the sole visitants. How else is one 
 (though, indeed, the bh'nd bird in the heart 
 must have sung the same song) to feel as 
 Hanrahan felt, with the curlew wailing over- 
 head, and an old memory beating with
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 bewildered wind against a sense of further 
 sorrow yet to come : 
 
 "O, Curlew, cry no more in the air, 
 Or only to waters in the West ; 
 Because your crying brings to my mind 
 Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair 
 That was shaken out over my breast; 
 There is enough evil in the crying of wind." 
 
 This Httle book has the remoteness, the 
 melancholy, of all poetry inspired by spiritual 
 passion. It has, too, that other melancholy 
 of which one of the subtlest of modern poets 
 wrote in a forgotten early tale : " Les reves du 
 poete et de I'amant — rcves qui, par une loi in- 
 explicable de notre nature, out toujours une 
 teinte de melancolie, meme dans leurs plus 
 splendides rayonnements, et qui ne sont les 
 plus delicieux des rcves que grace a cette 
 meme melancolie." Here we are aware of the 
 stillness of things that are past or are not 
 again to be: 
 
 ' ' I bring you with reverent hands 
 The book of my numberless dreams; 
 White woman that passion has worn 
 As the tide wears the dove-grey sands, 
 And with heart more old than the horn 
 That is brimmed from the pale fire of time, 
 White woman with numberless dreams, 
 I bring you my passionate rhyme."
 
 " The Shadozvy Waters " 
 
 This note of loss, of regret, finds constant 
 expression. 
 
 "I hear the shadowy Horses, their long manes 
 a-shake, 
 
 Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glim- 
 mering white; 
 
 The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping 
 night, 
 
 The East her hidden joy before the morning break. 
 
 The West weeps in pale dew, and sighs passing 
 away, 
 
 The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire. 
 
 O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire, 
 
 The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay. 
 
 Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart 
 beat 
 
 Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast 
 
 Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of 
 rest. 
 
 And hiding their tossing manes and their tumul- 
 tuous feet." 
 
 Mr. Yeats is assuredly of that small band 
 of poets and dreamers who write from no 
 other impulse than because they see and 
 dream in a reality so vivid that it is called 
 imagination. With him the imagination is in 
 truth the second-sight of the mind. Thus it 
 is that he lives with symbols, as unimaginative 
 natures live with facts. 
 
 Of his work might be said what in effect an 
 
 325
 
 " The Shadowy IVaters " 
 
 eminent critic said of Francois Millet, that he 
 is so intent upon the expression of poetry that 
 sometimes he prefers his ideas to his material, 
 that sometimes he dematerialises his ideas, 
 and suggests mystery instead of realising 
 beauty. 
 
 A symbolist stands in some danger here. 
 The obvious peril is a confusion of the spir- 
 itual beauty behind the symbol with the arbi- 
 trary expression of that spiritual beauty 
 through that particular symbol. There are 
 blind alleys and lost roads in symbolism, and 
 few of those who follow that loveliest trail 
 into " the undiscovered Edens " of Beauty 
 but sometimes lose themselves, and go after 
 shadows, and idly name the stars, and inhabit 
 planets with their own desires, putting their 
 vain dreams upon these unheeding children 
 of eternity. 
 
 Perhaps a truer wisdom is that which would 
 see the symbols in the facts, and the facts 
 translated from their material body to their 
 spiritual significance. It is the constant 
 reminder of the man who breaks stones to the 
 man who measures the stars, that he concerns 
 himself with remote speculations ; but the 
 star-gazer is also apt to forget that without 
 broken stones no road would be paven. And 
 I cannot but think that Mr. Yeats is a star- 
 
 326
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 gazer too reluctant to listen to the plaint of 
 those who break stones or are spiritually 
 dumb hewers of wood and drawers of water. 
 He does not always sing of things of beauty 
 and mystery as the things of beauty and mys- 
 tery are best sung, so that the least may un- 
 derstand ; but rather as those priests of Isis 
 who, when bidden to chant the Sun-Hymn to 
 the people, sang, beautifully, incomprehensi- 
 ble algebraical formulae. 
 
 "The Powers whose name and shape no living 
 
 creature knows 
 Have pulled the Immortal Rose: 
 And though the Seven Lights bowed in their 
 
 dance and wept, 
 The Polar Dragon slept. 
 His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep 
 
 to deep: 
 When will he wake from sleep?" 
 
 Or, again : 
 
 "We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore, 
 The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned 
 
 in dew. 
 Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to 
 
 you, 
 Master of the still stars and of the flaming door." 
 
 Or that strange poem of love with its fan- 
 tastic dream-beauty, beginning: 
 
 327
 
 " The Shadoivy IVaters " 
 
 'Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no 
 
 horns? 
 I have been changed to a hound with one red ear. ' ' 
 
 To some there is no need to explain " the 
 white deer with no horns," " the hound with 
 one red ear," " the boar without bristles, out 
 of the West " ; to some of the symbols of the 
 " Polar Dragon " and the " Immortal Rose " 
 stand evident. But these must be few : and 
 though in a sense all excelling poetry is 
 mystical, in the wider and not less true sense 
 it should be as water is, or as air is, or as 
 flame is. For it too is an elemental, being in 
 the spiritual life what wind is in the natural 
 life. 
 
 When the reader, unfamiliar with " the sig- 
 nature of symbol," shall read these and kin- 
 dred lines, will he not feel that this new priest 
 of the Sun should translate to a more human 
 key his too transcendental vision? What, he 
 will ask, is the Immortal Rose, and what the 
 Polar Dragon ? Who is the guardian of the 
 flaming door, and of what is it the portal? 
 If a Gael, he may have heard of the white 
 fawn that is Love, of the white hound that 
 is Death. Is it this symbol that lives anew 
 in the hound with one red ear, in the white 
 deer without horns? 
 
 328
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 For all who may not be able readily to 
 follow his honey of old wisdom, Mr. Yeats 
 has added notes. It would be more exact to 
 say that one-half of the book comprises the 
 prose equivalent of the verse. If all notes 
 afforded reading such as one may read here ! 
 Mr. Yeats turns round mentally and shows us 
 the other side, where the roots grow and the 
 fibres fill with sap, and how they grow to that 
 blossom we have already seen, and what the 
 sap is. In their kind, these notes have some- 
 thing of the charm of the poems which they 
 illuminate. Yet they should be superfluous. 
 It is not their presence that one objects to, 
 but their need. Poetry is an art which should 
 be as rigorously aloof from the explicative as 
 the art of painting is, or as sculpture is, or 
 music. When Mr. Yeats gives us work on a 
 larger scale, with a greater sweep, he will, let 
 us hope, remember that every purely esoteric 
 symbol is a vague image — and vagueness is 
 the inevitable defect against which the sym- 
 bolist has to contend. 
 
 But, when all is said that criticism is called 
 upon to say, what a lovely gift of music and 
 spiritual intensity and beauty is here. I have 
 an incalculable pleasure in this subtle magic 
 which creates so much loveliness out of a few 
 words. If, at times, the motive has triumphed 
 
 329
 
 " The Shadozvy Waters " 
 
 at the expense of the manner, it is rare that 
 music and meaning do not go in delectable 
 harmony. What lover of perfect verse but 
 could take keen pleasure in a little poem so 
 rose-like in its intricate symmetry as this : 
 
 "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, 
 Enwrought with golden and silver light; 
 The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 
 Of night and light and the half light ; 
 
 " I would spread the cloths under your feet; 
 But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 
 I have spread my dreams under your feet, 
 
 Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." 
 
 The nobler use of symbolism — which is but 
 an analogue of the soul's speech — gives a 
 strange spiritual intensity to these poems. 
 All do indeed live with an intense life, though 
 of conventional actuality they have little or 
 nothing. Some seem to be written in accord- 
 ance with " the magical tradition " ; some 
 conform to the complex legend of Celtic 
 mythology ; some have no other shape or as- 
 pect than their own, as they issued like moths 
 out of twilight, from the twilight of the poetic 
 imagination. All come 
 
 "from a more dream-heavy land, 
 A more dream-heavy hour than this";
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 and it is the infinite, because never wholly 
 to be overtaken, charm of these breaths — 
 breaths of the reeds of the spirit shaken in 
 that wind which comes out of the past of time 
 and the past of the heart — that, in them, we 
 too, as the poet himself, may hear " white 
 Beauty sighing." In no descriptive sense, but 
 in a deeper sense, this book is one of a small 
 company that are pioneers in that intimate 
 return to nature from which we may and do 
 expect so profound and beautiful a revelation. 
 For a few come with new vision, to reveal 
 what is so old, what is younger than all else, 
 and new always. 
 
 It is a return, that in some sense, if only 
 for solace and strength, all of us who feel life 
 acutely must make. 
 
 I remember an old Highland fisherman say- 
 ing to me once, when asked if he thought 
 God could ever tire : " I think He has the sea 
 in His right hand, and all the moors and hills 
 of the world in His left, and when He is 
 tired o' lookin' at the wickedness o' man. He 
 washes it out in the sea, an' then watches His 
 mercy like a soft shadow creepin* across the 
 moors an' hills." I do not profess to give 
 the exact words, for the old islander spoke in 
 Gaelic; but this is the drift of them. " It's all 
 obair an doill, the work of the blind," he 
 
 331
 
 " The Shadozi'y Waters " 
 
 added — meaning the vanity of the human 
 heart. And, recalHng this, I think that true 
 poets and all the silent kindred of poets must 
 often seek remote places, the loneliness of 
 hill or moor, must often Hsten to the desert 
 wind, to the whispering reeds, as a refuge 
 from the dull trouble of the habitual life ; 
 that so they, too, may take comfort from 
 the stealing forth of soft and kindly sha- 
 dow — symbol of natural rest and spiritual 
 re-birth. 
 
 A larger note is struck in " The Shadowy 
 Waters." In this dramatic poem — in this 
 poetic vision, told in verse cast in a dramatic 
 form — Mr. Yeats has forsaken the acute 
 emotion become lyrical for the lyrical thought 
 become continuous. It is not a drama, be- 
 cause it is a symbolical reflection of what is in 
 the poet's mind, rather than the architectonic 
 revelation of what his imagination has defi- 
 nitely shaped. It is not, strictly, a poetical 
 drama, even structurally, for action and 
 speech are subservient to the writer's en- 
 tranced vision of the symbolism of the action 
 and of the speech. It is one of those new 
 and strange utterances, so perplexing to many 
 minds, wherewith conventional methods are 
 used for novel, perturbing, sometimes bewil- 
 dering, at times bewildered, thought: one of 
 
 332
 
 " The Shadozvy Waters " 
 
 those dramas of the mind, best seen against 
 imagined tapestries, which reveal so much 
 more to us than do the common or fami- 
 liar tapestries, the dramas of the obvious, of 
 merely spectacular life. 
 
 I wonder how many who read this short 
 drama of a score pages understood straight- 
 way what they read? The personages are 
 mythical : even the famous name of Dectora 
 (or Dectera) does not indicate that lovely 
 queen with whose beauty old legend is fra- 
 grant : indeed, the poet has but taken the 
 anglicised name of Cuchulain's mother and 
 given it to an imaginary crowned woman out 
 of Lochlann. This Dechtire is not a king's 
 bride seeking a new kingdom, but the symbol 
 or image of the Desire in the poet's heart, in 
 the hearts of poets. And Forgael, what is he? 
 A Gaelic prince, weary of songs and women 
 and war, a lost king with a forgotten king- 
 dom ? Yes, but more : is he not the inap- 
 peasable Ideal that calls to the Desire that is 
 in our heart ; but, having won it, and led it 
 from sha<lowy lands across shadowy waters 
 till the grey wave is all that is left of the 
 visible world, will not lift it up nor wed it 
 unless it will relinquish its own Hame — unless, 
 in a word, the beautiful mcjrtal shall put on 
 immortality, shall leave the warmth and the 
 
 333
 
 " The Shadozvy Waters " 
 
 dream for a perhaps too stellar radiance, a 
 certitude too divinely impassive? 
 
 Many an one, besides Dectora, who has 
 relinquished all for the divine dream of im- 
 perishable and perfect love, has, at the last, 
 cried out in the extreme bitterness of a new 
 dismay : 
 
 "Where are these bought? Where are the holy 
 woods 
 That can change love to imperishable fire? 
 O ! I would break this net the gods have woven 
 Of voices and of dreams." 
 
 It is the cry, not of Dectora only, but of all 
 women, nay, of all who through dream and 
 passion love to the extreme : 
 
 "Beloved, 
 
 We will escape 
 
 The nets the gods have woven and our own hearts, 
 And will find out valleys and woods and meadows 
 To wander in"; 
 
 and it is the answer of that inexorable Ideal 
 which echoes in : 
 
 "All that know love among the winds of the world 
 Have found it like the froth upon the ale." 
 
 Not the plea of one shaken heart but of all 
 the troubled hearts of mortal love is uttered, 
 
 334
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 when Dectora suddenly cries passionately to 
 Forgael : 
 
 ' ' Love was not made for darkness and the winds 
 That blow when heaven and earth are withering, 
 For love is kind and happy. O come with me! 
 Look on this body and this heavy hair ; 
 A stream has told me they are beautiful. 
 The gods hate happiness and weave their nets 
 Out of their hatred"; 
 
 and when her oiysterious lover abruptly bids 
 her farewell, and tells her to seek Aibric, who 
 loves her also, and with him go back to her 
 lost and regretted land, it is not Forgael only 
 that speaks, but again that inexorable Ideal 
 which will not temporise, which offers but 
 wind and shadow and yet demands all that 
 clinging hands and turning feet are loth to 
 leave. And the tragic pity of that final word 
 is, that it always comes too late for the man 
 or woman who would turn again to the be- 
 loved and mortal : 
 
 "I should wander 
 Amid the darkness, now that all my stars 
 Have fallen and my sun and moon gone out." 
 
 Shall we have this visionary love, with its 
 terrible renunciations, or the light in loved 
 eyes, the touch of hands, the whisper in the 
 
 335
 
 " The Sliadozvy Waters " 
 
 shadow? Dectora is a woman and knows 
 but one love : 
 
 "The love I know is hidden in these hands 
 That I would mix with yours, and in this 
 
 hair 
 That I would shed like twilight over you." 
 
 Forgael is not a man but a spirit, for to him 
 love is idle as the unfolding of a rainbow, the 
 colour of a moment on the grey eternities : 
 
 "The love of all under the light of the sun 
 Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope. 
 And bodily tenderness ' ' ; 
 
 and he adds (alas, the cold radiance of pre- 
 cious stones after the glow and flame of that 
 little infinite trouble in the dark, the human 
 heart) 
 
 "but love is made 
 Imperishable fire under the boughs 
 Of chrysoberyl and beryl and chrysolite 
 And chrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx." 
 
 It is lovely rhetoric, but the heart's silence 
 is more eloquent. " The Shadowy Waters " 
 has a continual loveliness. Many lines dwell 
 with one : 
 
 "already 
 
 The cloudy waters and the glimmering winds 
 
 Have covered them."
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 Many passages sink into the mind as dews 
 sink through the dusk : 
 
 "The pale hound and the deer wander forever 
 Among the winds and waters; and when they pass 
 The mountain of the gods, the unappeasable gods 
 Cover their faces with their hair and weep. 
 They lure us to the streams where the world 
 ends ' ' — 
 
 Or 
 
 "Crumbled away 
 The grass and the blue shadow on the stream 
 And the pale blossom" — 
 
 "With a sound 
 I had woven of the sleep that is in pools, 
 Among great trees, and in the wings of owls" — 
 
 Or: 
 
 " he who longs 
 
 For happier love but finds unhappiness, 
 And falls among the dreams the drowsy gods 
 Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world, 
 And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh." 
 
 In his syniboHcal and mythological allu- 
 sions, Mr. Yeats is again, as in " The Wind 
 among the Reeds," at times too esoteric, at 
 times too vague. One may speak the tongue 
 of angels, but the accent nnist be human and 
 familiar. Nor will the critical reader be blind 
 
 337
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 to the overuse of certain words : " winds and 
 waters," " the pale hound," " heart's desire," 
 and others, come too readily from Mr. Yeats's 
 generally so heedful art. Mannerism begets 
 disillusion when it becomes a common use, 
 as when in close conjunction Mr. Yeats 
 thrice uses a favourite, but at best dubious 
 epithet, druid, uses it as an adjective for 
 " mystic " or kindred word : " a druid va- 
 pour," " druid moons," " with druid apple- 
 wood." It has contagion, for a day or two 
 ago I saw in a paper an allusion to " the 
 druid spell of Mr. Yeats's poetry, its druid 
 lights and shadows." I can understand a 
 druid spell, though " druidic " is the tit word: 
 but not druid lights and shadows. 
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " does not yield all 
 its beauty at once. It is Hke that flower which 
 Moan, a dark queen of the Hidden People, 
 showed to Cuchulain in his madness : a flower 
 of a pale hue and faint fragrance, which every 
 day disclosed a richer hue, the colour of a 
 moment, or that loosed, passing as a moth's 
 wing, a new fragrance. It is the story of a 
 dream, of a symbolic vision ; but its enchant- 
 ment lies in its subtly beautiful interpretation 
 of a dream that is not of one mind but of many 
 minds, of a vision that has not sustained one 
 heart's desire only but the desire of many 
 
 338
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 hearts in the troubled congregation of men 
 and women. 
 
 The miscarriage which awaits the pioneer 
 lurks in the probable failure between theory 
 and fulfilment. Mr. Yeats has written care- 
 fully concerning dramatic ideals and the Cel- 
 tic Theatre : but he has not yet seemed ex- 
 plicit to the reader eager to sympathise with 
 both, nor has his published dramatic work 
 fulfilled the desired end. Like so many of us, 
 he mistakes sometimes the gossamer drama 
 woven inwardly of the wind of the spirit and 
 the light of the imagination, for the tangible 
 drama woven to represent adequately the 
 things of the imagination and the spirit. He 
 thinks in light and dreams in shadow, but 
 forgets that the translation of these into 
 thought made visible must be as explicit as 
 the translation of the wind's cry on the wave 
 or murmur among the leaves, when through 
 a formal and exact notation the musician 
 would convey the mystery of the one and the 
 troubled deeps of the other. Hitherto, he has 
 stood overmuch by the inner sureties of the 
 loom of thought : now, if he has to achieve 
 what he has in aim, he must study the out- 
 ward weaving of the web, the external as- 
 pect of the woven dream, with not less care- 
 ful heed, with careful, careful art. In " The 
 
 339
 
 " The Shadozcy Waters " ' 
 
 Land of Heart's Desire," in " Countess Cath- 
 leen," in "The Shadowy Waters," he does 
 not convince dramatically. In these he per- 
 suades. It may be the finer way for the 
 imagination: to persuade by the thing seen, 
 rather than by the thing shown. But it is 
 not, the way accepted of Drama, which has 
 to be achieved by methods of illusion other 
 than those of cadence and colour. Mr. Yeats 
 seems to ignore that the particular method of 
 illusion demanded by the Drama necessitates 
 both an acceptance of certain conventions, 
 and an avoidance of certain scenic imagina- 
 tive realities inept as visible scenic actualities. 
 " The Countess Cathleen " ranks first in what 
 he has done in dramatic form, a play of great 
 beauty, and whose repeated public perform- 
 ance delighted those who saw it. Yet it is 
 impossible not to feel that something is want- 
 ing. This want is not of the obvious : we do 
 not mean that it should be longer or shorter, 
 swifter or slower, more humorous or more 
 tragic, more wrought in poetry or sustained 
 in prose. We take it as it is, and judge it 
 for its shape and colour, its own life, its spirit, 
 its aim. It is, then, that below the charm of 
 the verse we are aware of a lack. It is not 
 that the thought is slight, though it is not 
 strenuous or deep ; or that the phrase is in- 
 
 340
 
 " The Shadozcy Waters " 
 
 adequate in suggestion; or that unrealities 
 wave conflicting plumes among the ordered 
 march of the words, though insurgent unre- 
 alities there are at moments, and rebel insin- 
 cerities, unconscious traitors no doubt. But 
 something is lacking; as in a still, breathless 
 wood we miss the lifting airs that are the 
 wind. And the wind whose airs Mr. Yeats 
 does not yet command is the wind of the dra- 
 matic spirit. He does not think, shape, re- 
 veal dramatically. This is as obvious in his 
 dramatic poems as in his tales. A dramatic 
 conception of an event or a linked sequence 
 of events is not enough : there must be a dra- 
 matic vision of the coherent and actual con- 
 gregation of the symbols in which that con- 
 ception is to be made unique and visible : 
 there must, further, be that faculty of mental 
 economy which can use the few words only, 
 the slight detail, which can relinquish the 
 literary idea for the visible actuality : and 
 there must be the power to distinguish be- 
 tween the method of illusion that lies with 
 reverie and inward vision, and the method of 
 illusion that lies with concentrated thought 
 and its immediate expression, with their de- 
 monstration in the visible. 
 
 The flaw in Mr. Yeats's dramatic work 
 seems to me to he just this, that he is not 
 
 341
 
 " The Shadozvy IVaters " 
 
 primarily a dramatist. That he can write a 
 beautiful dramatic poem is evident in " The 
 Shadowy Waters ": that he can write a beau- 
 tiful poetic drama is evident in " The Coun- 
 tess Cathleen ": that he can transmute into 
 dramatic form the essential spirit of poetry 
 is evident in " The Land of Heart's Desire." 
 But these are not dramas in the sense that 
 they are the outward and actual representa- 
 tion, through men and women and the actual 
 world, of the dreams and thoughts and ideas 
 of which men and women and the actual 
 world are the shadows and vivid phantoms. 
 It is not the visible, the dramatic interpreta- 
 tion that Mr. Yeats gives us, but the woven 
 shape and colour of his dreams. " The Sha- 
 dowy Waters " is a vision related as a dra- 
 matic poem : it could have been related in 
 dramatic prose, or in the continuous linked 
 prose of reverie, or in the deftly entangled 
 prose of dialogue, or in the mirroring lucidi- 
 ties of the prose of narrative. We are glad 
 of it as it stands: we may consider that it 
 could not appeal to us more finely in an- 
 other form. But it has not inevitableness. 
 Even in the one drama more nearly suited for 
 external representation which Mr. Yeats has 
 written, there are spiritual truths, symbols, 
 images which are as foreign voices crying for 
 
 342
 
 " The Shadowy Waters " 
 
 interpretation : images, symbols, and truths 
 which, in their reahty to him, he has forgot- 
 ten are, to others, unrelated voices, wander- 
 ing shapes, the idle loveliness of stars falling 
 from abyss to abyss. 
 
 And yet since I have re-read " The Sha- 
 dowy Waters " I believe that Mr. Yeats may 
 give us, may at least lead us towards a signal 
 compromise that shall be almost a new art ; 
 a new art perhaps. He may find the way 
 where the dreaming spirit and the shaping 
 mind are not two companions but one tra- 
 veller: he may stoop by a well we have not 
 seen, and hear the forgotten voice of Connla, 
 and out of old wisdom fashion newly a new 
 thing. In words already quoted, 
 
 " dramas of the mind there are, 
 Best seen against imagined tapestries," 
 
 and it may well be that, in a day of outworn 
 conventions, many of us may turn gladly 
 from the scenic illusions of the stage-car- 
 penter, and the palpable illusions of the 
 playwright, to the ever-new illusions of the 
 dreaming mind, woven in a new intense dra- 
 matic reality against " imagined tapestries " 
 as real, and as near, as the crude symbols of 
 painted b(jards and stereotyped phrase in 
 which we still have a receding pleasure. 
 
 343
 
 NOTE 
 
 This essay was published before the issue of Mr. 
 Yeats's recent dramatic ventures, "The King's 
 Threshold," "On Baile's Strand," and other short 
 Irish dramas of old and of to-day, of unchanging 
 Ireland. My commentary on his work must be read 
 as applying to what, at the time of its writing, Mr. 
 Yeats had published.
 
 Stranger. "And what help can there be from one 
 who sees not?" 
 
 CEdipus. ' ' In all that I speak there shall be sight." 
 — CEdipus at Kolonos. 
 
 "But . . . have you asked for that teaching through 
 which the unheard is heard, the unthought is thought, 
 the unknown is known f"— The Chandogya U pant- 
 shad, vi.
 
 A TRIAD 
 
 In the thirty-second Triad of the " Mys- 
 tery of the Bards " it is said that when the 
 soul inherits Gwynnfyd, that is to say, Happi- 
 ness, three supreme gifts — once, long ago, its 
 crown, but long, long ago, lost — will be re- 
 stored to it. And these three things are, we 
 are told in this Triad, primitive genius, primi- 
 tive love, and primitive memory. 
 
 No doubt there have been many interpreta- 
 tions of these triads. It is not easy to say of 
 one quality what it is ; nor what another may 
 stand for; nor what the third may indicate. 
 What is meant by genius, and what by primi- 
 tive genius? And what love is primitive love, 
 and between whom, and at what altar lit, and 
 under what star a creature of joyous or ma- 
 lign life? And what is primitive memory, 
 and of what is it the energy ; of the mind, 
 called into brief life, like a match lit in the 
 wind ; or of the racial spirit, that lives upon 
 the nerves as the aerial spirits of old legend 
 live upon the beauty anrl fragrance of flowers 
 and grasses ; or of the soul, that has so much 
 
 347
 
 A Triad 
 
 to recollect in its single transient passage be- 
 fore it can gather again the sound and colour 
 of its earlier migrations, and so far to travel 
 along this dim road of vicissitude before it 
 can meet the shining brows of the forgotten 
 children of beauty and wonder, who were 
 with us, once? 
 
 In the " Roman de Merlin," when that son 
 of earth and fire is wooed in spiritual ecstasy 
 by the mysterious Radiance, this Triad is re- 
 called in the words : " J'eclaire la partie im- 
 mortelle de ton ame . . . je serai ta Force, ta 
 Muse, et ton Genie." 
 
 But I think the unknown Druid meant 
 more than this. I think more is meant than 
 an original possessing spirit, a daemon or 
 genius; than a first love, burning with the 
 white flame of purity and inspiration ; than a 
 divinity born of the passion that desires and 
 the will that achieves. 
 
 For I think that nowhere, in any age, in 
 any faith, is there a finer spiritual promise 
 than what this Triad holds. If we be sure of 
 these things, we need not trouble about any 
 other. To remember, with the remembrance 
 of the soul ; to love, in the ecstasy of the 
 morning of the world ; to enter into the genius 
 of the earth, to be at one with every breath 
 of life, to share every separate rapture; to 
 
 348
 
 A Triad 
 
 see thought like flame, and life like clear 
 water, and death like the shifting shadows of 
 clouds ; to be an eddy in that clear, swift flow- 
 ing water; to be a flame of thought, shaken 
 like a plume of fire before the mirrors of a 
 myriad minds, or to descend like fiery snow 
 into their hills and valleys — and yet never to 
 be lost, never to be drowned in light or fire, 
 eternally errant yet ever at the call of the 
 Herdsman — that, indeed, is to live back into 
 the life that was, and to live on into life 
 that is. 
 
 To be possessed by primitive genius. That 
 would be to arise each morning with the won- 
 der of a child awaking, for the first time, by 
 the sea, or among great mountains, or in a 
 forest roofed with wandering cloud and in- 
 habited by a whispering wind. It would be 
 to arise, too, with the heart of a woman 
 suddenly knowing all things because of her 
 shaken heart. It would be to arise with the 
 spirit of youth, proud as a young eagle star- 
 ing across the dominions of the sun or upon 
 the green lands and grey seas far below. It 
 would be to arise with the thrill and longing 
 of the poet, with the ecstasy of the seer, with 
 the uplifted silence of the visionary. It would 
 be to arise with the instinctive gladness of 
 every child of the bushes, of every little one 
 
 349
 
 A Triad 
 
 of the grass; of the salmon leaping in the 
 sunlit linn ; of the swallow and the wild bee, 
 of the lark in the blue pastures of the air. Do 
 not the creatures of an hour rejoice in wheel- 
 ing their grey mazes in the green shadows of 
 boughs? It would be to share the rapture. 
 We have forgotten that; we have forgotten 
 rapture. The communion of life! To breathe 
 once more in a common joy! To feel the 
 brotherhood of life, from the blossom on the 
 bough to the grey silence of old hills; from 
 the least of the blind offspring of the earth to 
 the greatest of the winged children of the four 
 winds ; from the wild lives that lurk and are 
 afraid to the fearless lives that openly re- 
 joice ; from the stilled lives that do not move, 
 the hill-rock and the sea-caverned coral, to 
 the wild swan of the arctic wave or the swal- 
 lows that with white breast and purple wing 
 thrid an ever-moving maze from the Hebrid 
 Isles to where the Nile narrows in tufted 
 reed and floating nenuphar. To feel thus, 
 with the thrill of conscious oneness, rejoic- 
 ingly ; as children of one mother, nestlings of 
 one brood; and, thus feeling, to perceive and 
 be at one with the secret springs of the in- 
 ward life, in caverned thought and image- 
 building dream, and of the life made visible 
 in motion, colour, and form — this would be 
 
 350
 
 "A Triad 
 
 to know the primitive genius, to be possessed 
 by it, to be of the genii of the morning. 
 
 But without love, rapture would be a cold 
 flame. Lovely are the fires of the sea, and 
 lovelier the fainting opal and pale rose of the 
 shaken aurora ; but the red warmth of a 
 hearth-side is even more near to the soul as 
 well as dearer to the body. This is an old 
 wisdom, indeed, but the Druid of the Triad 
 had thought and dreamed deeply before he 
 placed this white greatness of love second in 
 the trinity of the beatitudes. It was not of 
 the commoner loves he dreamed ; but of love. 
 The cushat loves his mate of the cedar branch 
 and the greenness, and the wolf leaping in the 
 starlight answers the howl of the she-wolf, 
 and even the scattered clan of the lapwing 
 and the seamew have their faithful compan- 
 ionships by the moor-orchis and where the 
 wrack-flower swims. But these are loves, not 
 love. It is so great a thing that the wings of 
 sunrise and sunset do not enclose it, and the 
 stars are eddies of dust behind its feet ; and 
 yet this immortal can be claspt between the 
 shaken flames of two hearts, and meshed in the 
 subtle nets of dreams. It has many raiments, 
 many faces. The mother bends low and 
 kisses it, the friend clasps its hand, husband 
 and wife uplift it, lovers worship it, the just 
 
 351
 
 A Triad 
 
 uphold it, great minds and deep natures 
 breathe it as a common air, the pure of heart 
 inhabit it. And, of old, it was even now as 
 with the pure of heart. It was a habitation. 
 The soul dwelled in it, as light in water, as 
 rhythm in light, as vibration in sound. Primi- 
 tive genius beheld the world in wonder ; when 
 it was wedded to primitive love, it looked 
 through the rainbow of a new passion and a 
 new joy, and knew that beyond the rapture of 
 things seen with the eye was the throbbing 
 world of things not seen but known, of things 
 not held but felt, of things not measured in 
 surety but treasured in hope. With love, 
 coming to one and all with each new dawn as 
 wind and light come, the heavens were opened 
 and the world stood disclosed in a new beauty. 
 To the enchantment had come music. 
 
 To recapture these — primitive genius, 
 primitive love ! Might not the Druid of yes- 
 terday or to-day think there was no further 
 crown for the rejoicing spirit? And yet, as- 
 suredly, it was from the unplumed depth of 
 knowledge which we call intuition that the 
 seer of the Triad placed primitive memory as 
 the third and chief of the stars in the spiritual 
 crown. For Genius, which is the rejoicing 
 spirit of the world, could not see beyond its 
 own radiance of life; and Love, which is at 
 
 352
 
 A Triad 
 
 once the little shaken flame in a single heart 
 and the shoreless fire of immortality, could 
 not with its mortal eyes see beyond death ; 
 but Memory — mother of all art, overlord of 
 destiny, the Word of humanity — she sits 
 apart. She looks down upon the whirling of 
 the wheels of chance and the dust of empires ; 
 she remembers the Sons of the Morning; she 
 holds the clues of all interpretation. Sitting 
 at the throne of Life, she has seen the pas- 
 sage of the divine multitude; many gods have 
 gone by her; she has stood by the starry 
 graves of great deities. Like love, she is an 
 Eternal, and incommensurable, and yet can 
 whisper in a sleeper's ear or lie tranced in a 
 dreamer's mind. She has all songs on her 
 lips, all music in the touch of her hands, all 
 desires in her eyes, all hopes in her breath, all 
 joys and all sorrows, all faiths and all des- 
 pairs. It is she who gives joy to genius, and 
 a pulse to love; she knows the secret roads; 
 wisdom is the star upon her brows. 
 
 Primitive genius, primitive love, primitive 
 memory ; what are these phantoms of the 
 dreaming mind? 
 
 So will many say. For, they will add, 
 where, in any age, in any record of any age, 
 in any dream, even, of the estates of man, did 
 the soul rejoice in this genius, travail in this 
 
 353
 
 A Triad 
 
 sacred love, crown itself as a god with this 
 diadem of omniscient light? 
 
 I do not know. I have not read of any. 
 But I think the soul knows. I think the soul 
 remembers. I think that intuition is divine 
 and unshakable. I think, if we can fill the 
 ruined palaces of the mind with the wind of 
 immortality and the light of the eternal — not 
 forgetting that the symbol is but the shadow 
 of the reality, and that into no symbol can 
 the inconceivable be translated — that we may 
 doubt these unstable temples served by blind 
 votaries rather than the spirit which Eternity 
 breathes and Immortality bestows. 
 
 I think we have travelled a long way, and 
 have forgotten much, and continually forget 
 more and more. The secret road of the soul 
 is a long road. When, at last, we turn, look- 
 ing backward so as at last to go forward, we 
 shall see a long way off the forsaken homes 
 of joy, and above these our inheritance be- 
 hold the stars of our spiritual youth. 
 
 354
 
 THE ANCIENT BEAUTY 
 
 "Sogna, sogna, mia cara anima! Tutto 
 Tutto sari come al tempo lontano." 
 Poema Paradisaco. 
 
 Little girl, when you grow to maidhood and 
 womanhood, it is a hope of mine that you 
 will love these old legendary tales, of which 
 the tale of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna is 
 one. Before you read this time-sweet story 
 of great love you will come to the story of 
 Fionnula and her brothers, because the Tale 
 of the Children of Lir, or the Tale of the 
 Four Swans as it is sometimes called, is first 
 among the old beautiful stories for the delight 
 of those standing in or passing beyond child- 
 hood. For a thousand years Gaelic youth has 
 loved and wept over it. By many fires, by 
 lonely seas, in hill-glcns ... in the great 
 straths where of old was no change but the 
 changing colour of season following season 
 and where no strangers came save birth and 
 
 Dedicatory introduction for an American reprint 
 of my versions of the old fiaelic tales of Deirdrd and 
 the Sons of Usna and The (Children of Lir. 
 
 355
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 death, but where the deer now have their 
 wilderness or vast flocks browse where the 
 smoke of crofts and homesteads rose . . . 
 from generation to generation children, and 
 maids and youths keeping children's hearts, 
 have had their lives deepened in love and de- 
 votion, because of this tale of endurance no- 
 ble to the end, and of patience so great that 
 the heart aches at the thought of it. You will 
 hear much of the other virtues, dear : but do 
 not forget these, which are so great, the stars 
 of Christ . . . endurance and patience. It 
 may help you to remember if you read of 
 them in verse, as has been written in beauty: 
 
 "Endurance is the noblest quality 
 And Patience all the passion of great hearts." 
 
 But. when you are older, I think there will 
 be no tale on the high lift of love, of heroic 
 love, to move you more than that now retold 
 for you here, out of the dim beautiful past 
 whose shadows sleep, in lengthening fans of 
 twilight, across the sunset-lands of the ima- 
 gination. 
 
 In all the regions of the Gael throughout 
 Scotland, and in every isle, from Arran and 
 I slay in the south to lona in the west and 
 Tiree in mid-sea and the Outer Hebrides, 
 there is no story of the old far-off days so 
 
 356
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 well known as that of Deirdre. In some 
 places she is called Darthool, or Dartuil, or 
 Darthray, or Darrathray (the last I have 
 heard once only), but Deirdre is the one name 
 common to all the Gaels; and in Ireland to 
 this day there is not a cowherd who has not 
 heard of that queenly name. 
 
 Her beauty filled the old world of the Gael 
 with a sweet, wonderful, and abiding rumour. 
 The name of Deirdre has been as a lamp to 
 a thousand poets. In a land of heroes and 
 brave and beautiful women, how shall one 
 name survive? Yet to this day and for ever, 
 men will remember Deirdre, the torch of 
 men's thoughts, and Grainne whom Diarmid 
 loved and died for, and Maev who ruled 
 mightily, and Fand whose white feet trod 
 faery dew, and many another. For Beauty 
 is the most unforgettable thing in the world, 
 and though of it a few perish, and the myriad 
 dies unknowing and uncaring, beneath it the 
 nations of men move as beneath their pilgrim 
 star. Therefore he who adds to the beauty 
 of the world is of the sons of God. He who 
 destroys or debases beauty is of the darkness, 
 and shall have darkness for his reward. 
 
 The day will come when you will find a 
 subtle enchantment in these names. They 
 will bring you a lost music, a lost world, and 
 
 3.S7
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 imperishable beauty. You will dwell with 
 them, till you love Deirdre as did the sons of 
 Usna, and would die for her, or live to see 
 her starry eyes ; till you look longingly upon 
 the Grainne of your dreams, and cry as 
 Diarmid did, when he asked her, as death 
 menaced them, if even yet she would go 
 back, and she answered that she would not: 
 " Then go forward, O Grainne ! " 
 
 Empires become drifted sand, and the 
 queens of great loveliness are dust on the 
 wind. They shall not come again, towered 
 cities of sand, palaces built upon the sea, roses 
 of beauty that blossomed for an hour on the 
 wind that is ever silently and swiftly moving 
 out of darkness and turning a sunlit wing 
 and then silently and swiftly moving into 
 darkness again. But the wind is changeless 
 in divine continual advent, and the sunlit 
 wing is that immortal radiance we call Beauty, 
 which we see as the mirage hung upon the 
 brows of Life. In that mirage Death is but 
 a beautiful phantom walking among rainbows 
 and white flowers ; and the poets of the world 
 — who have ever been in love with Love and 
 Death, which in the deep sense are one — look 
 into that lovely mystery and see again the 
 towers and palaces of white nameless cities, 
 and hear the rejoicing of flutes and clarions, 
 
 358
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 and see banners upon the wind and armies 
 marching, and the loveHness of great queens 
 of beauty, and gather dreams and inspiration 
 there, and come again and bow down before 
 the eternal Phantom in the heart of all of us. 
 
 For wisdom reneweth herself in beauty. 
 
 It will not suffice that you care for these 
 beautiful old tales as one cares for a flower 
 that one plucks by the wayside, that one 
 gathers at whim and idly discards. It will 
 not suffice to like them as we like something 
 which amuses us for a moment, a fantasy at 
 a theatre, a light air lightly played or a song 
 lifting itself from twilights of silence, this 
 painted idyll of what was never was, this fa- 
 cile romance of the obvious or the impossible. 
 These are things of pleasantry, and are good, 
 or may be good, each in its kind : but they are 
 not the things of the heart's desire, nor images 
 of what the soul longs for and thirsts for. 
 
 But will you find anything of that which 
 the soul longs for and thirsts for, will you 
 find any unshaken or wavering image of your 
 heart's desire, in the telling of an old tale? 
 Many will ask that; some incredulously, 
 some scornfully, some indifferently. 
 
 Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is of least mo- 
 ment what is in the tale : it is of moment what 
 atmosphere of ideal beauty has remained with 
 
 359
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 it out of the mind of the dreamer who shaped 
 it, out of the love of generations for whom it 
 has been full of a perpetual sweet newness as 
 of summer-dawn, for whom it has been as 
 fresh as moon-dew glistering on banks of 
 thyme along old grassy ways. And it is of 
 supreme moment what we ourselves bring: 
 what every reader who would know the en- 
 chantment must bring, what you, dear, if you 
 would know the enchantment, must bring. 
 
 Let me for a moment tell you something 
 that bears upon what I say. Long ago, one 
 of the old forgotten gods, the god of enchant- 
 ment and illusion, made a glory of loveliness, 
 a glory of sound, and a glory of delight. Then 
 he watched seven mortals approach in turn. 
 Three saw in it no loveliness, heard in it no 
 ecstasy, caught from it no rapture. Of three 
 others, one knew an inexplicable delight, and 
 took away the wonder and the memory to be 
 his while he lived: and one heard an ecstasy 
 of sound, and went away rapt, and forgetting 
 all things because of that dream and passion 
 not seen but heard : and the third looked on 
 that loveliness, and ever after his fellows 
 spoke of him as one made insane by impossi- 
 ble dreams, though he had that in his life 
 which rose in a white flame, and quenched his 
 thirst at wells of the spirit, and rejoiced con- 
 
 360
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 tinually. ' But of the seven one only saw the 
 glory as the god of enchantment and illusion 
 had made it, seeing in it the spirit that is 
 Beauty, and hearing in it the soul of Music, 
 and uplifted by it to the rapture that is the 
 passion of delight. And lest that evil Destiny 
 which puts dust upon dreams, and silence 
 upon sweet airs, and still songs, and makes 
 the hand idle, and the mind an eddying leaf, 
 and the spirit as foam upon the sea, should 
 take from this dreamer what he had won, the 
 god of enchantment and illusion gave the man 
 a broken heart, and a mind filled with the 
 sighing of weariness, and sorrow to be his 
 secret friend and the silence upon his pillow 
 by night. 
 
 I have told you this to help you to under- 
 stand that it is what we bring to the enchant- 
 ment that matters more than what the en- 
 chantment may disclose. And, when you 
 have been kissed by sorrow — may the darker 
 veiled Dread pass you, dear — you will under- 
 stand why the seventh dreamer who looked 
 upon the secret wonder was of the few whom 
 the gods touch with the hands, of the chosen 
 keepers and guardians of the immortal fire. 
 
 No, it will not suffice that you care for 
 them as a flower plucked by the wayside, as 
 a pleasure gathered in idleness, to be for- 
 
 361
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 gotten when gathered. You must come to 
 these old tales to seek and to find the surviv- 
 ing beauty of gathered dreams and a silent 
 world, the immortality of ideals treasured 
 once, forgotten now. I do not say, I would 
 not have you believe, for I do not so think, 
 that all the old ideals of beauty have stolen 
 away from the world, as twilight retreats 
 from the grass in the pale greenness of dawns. 
 But some have gone, or are changed, and we 
 do not know them : and some have dimmed. 
 And, at least I think so, some are so rare 
 now as to be seen only in a few hearts, like 
 the star in a woodland pool seen among slim 
 spears of reed. One does not look into many 
 enchanted hearts in that uncertain wandering 
 of ours between the lighting and the ashes of 
 the brief fire which we come to unknowingly, 
 and careles.sly tend, and regret with unavail- 
 ing tears, and leave, cold. And I ... I shall 
 have bent above the fading warmth, and have 
 risen at last, cold, and gone away, when that 
 little wondering heart of yours shall have be- 
 come a woman's heart : and so I do not know 
 whether, if I were to look in it, I should see 
 beyond the shaken reeds of the mind the 
 depth-held star of the old passion of beauty, 
 the old longing, the old enchantment. But I 
 hope so. 
 
 362
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 And so, if, carrying a heart such as I hope 
 for you and believe is yours, Uttle one, you 
 will bring with you the enchanted secret, the 
 enchantment in your mind, and look into that 
 dim, beautiful enchantment of the past — of a 
 world that ended, that changed long ago, and 
 whose light endures as the travelling light of 
 a star may immeasurably survive the star — 
 I know you will find a compelling beauty 
 in these old tales of the Gael, a beauty of 
 thought against which to lay your thought, a 
 beauty of dream against which to lay your 
 dream, a beauty of desire against which to 
 lay your desire. For they are more than tales 
 of beauty, than tales of wonder. They are 
 the dreams of the enchanted spirit of man, 
 achieved in beauty. Shall the day come when 
 the tale of Deirdre shall be no more told, 
 when in the firelight moist eyes shall not 
 deepen at the sorrows of Fionnula and her 
 swan-brothers, when men's hearts and wom- 
 en's hearts shall not be quickened by the tale 
 of Ailinn and Baile Honeymouth, when the 
 madness of Cuchulain shall not trouble, when 
 the love of Emer shall not be the very fra- 
 grance of great love, when the song of Nianih 
 shall not enchant? 
 
 If so, it is not merely beautiful children of 
 legend we shall lose, not the lovely raiment.
 
 The Ancient Beauty 
 
 but the very beauty and love themselves, the 
 love of beauty, the love of love, the old won- 
 dering ecstasy, the lost upliftedness, which 
 once were an ancestral possession in an old, 
 simple, primitive way, and now, or in that 
 way, are no more ours, but are changed for 
 us, as rainbows are changed upon the brows 
 of cloud. 
 
 So, little one, come in time to love these 
 things of beauty. Lay your child's heart that 
 is made of morning joy and evening longing 
 to that mother-heart: and when you gather 
 years, as now you gather the little white clan 
 of the grass, it shall be well with you. And 
 you, too, when your time is come, and you 
 in turn pass on the mystery of life to another 
 who will look up from your breast with eyes 
 of still wonder and slowly shaping thought, 
 forget not to tell that other to lay its child's 
 heart of morning joy and evening longing 
 against a more ancient and dream-filled heart 
 than that of any woman, that mother-heart of 
 which I speak to you, the Heart of Beauty. 
 
 364
 
 THE WINGED DESTINY
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 In tragic drama it is authenticity of emotion 
 and not authenticity of episode that matters. 
 It is of lesser moment whether the theme be 
 imaginary, or historically of this country or 
 of that, or of this age or of another age. 
 What does matter is the veritable action of 
 the elemental emotions, and primarily the 
 emotion of the inevitableness of destiny and 
 the emotion of tragical loveliness. One does 
 not need to know the Scandinavian story of 
 Gunhild, or the Arthurian story of Tristran 
 and Yseult, or the Gaelic story of Deirdre and 
 the Sons of Usna, in order to know the mys- 
 tery and the silent arrivals of destiny, or to 
 know the emotion of sorrow at the passage 
 of beauty. These emotions are not the pro- 
 perties of drama, which is but a fowler snaring 
 them in a net. These deep elementals are the 
 obscure chorus which plays upon the silent 
 flutes, upon the nerves wherein the soul sits 
 enmeshed. They have their own savage or 
 
 t>7
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 divine energy, and the man of the woods and 
 the dark girl of the canebrakes know them 
 with the same bowed suspense or uplifted 
 lamentation or joy as do the men and women 
 who have great names and to whom the lords 
 of the imagination have given immortality. 
 
 Many kings have desired, and the gods for- 
 bidden. Concobar has but lain down where 
 Caesars have fallen and Pharaohs closed im- 
 perial eyes, and many satraps and many ty- 
 rants have bent before the wind. All old men 
 who in strength and passion rise up against 
 the bitterness of destiny are the kindred of 
 Lear: those who have kept love as the crown 
 of years, and seen it go from them like a 
 wreath of sand, are of the kin of Concobar. 
 There is not one Lear only, or one Concobar, 
 in the vast stage of life : but a multitude of 
 men who ask, in the dark hour of the Winged 
 Destiny, Am I in truth a king? or who, in- 
 credulous, whisper, Love is dead, Love the 
 immortal is dead! 
 
 The tradition of accursed famihes is not the 
 fantasy of one dramatist or of one country or 
 of one time. The Oresteia of Aischylos is no 
 more than a tragic fugue wherein one hears 
 the cries of uncountable threnodies. The 
 doom of the clan of Usna is not less veiled 
 in terror and perpetuated in fatality than the 
 
 368
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 doom of the Atredai: and even " The Fall of 
 the House of Ussher " is but a single note of 
 the same ancient mystery over which Sopho- 
 cles brooded in the lamentations which eddy 
 like mournful winds around the House of 
 Labdacus. 
 
 Whether the poet turn to the tragedy 
 of the Theban dynasty, wherein Laios and 
 lokaste and Oidipus move like children of 
 fire in a wood doomed to flame; or to the 
 tragedy of the Achaian dynasty wherein Pe- 
 lops and Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaos, 
 Helen and Iphigeneia, Klytaimnestra prophe- 
 sying and the prophet Kalchas, are like 
 shadowy figures, crowned with terror and 
 beauty, on the verge of a dark sea where the 
 menace of an obscure wind is continually 
 heard beyond the enchanted shore ; or to the 
 tragedy of Lear weeping, where all kingship 
 seems as a crown left in the desert to become 
 the spoil of the adder or a pillow for wander- 
 ing dust ; or to the Celtic tragedy of the 
 House of Fionn, where Derniid and Grania, 
 where Oisin and Malveen, are like the winds 
 and the waters, the rains and the lamentations 
 of the hills: or to that other and less familiar 
 Gaelic tragedy, where an old king knows 
 madness because of garnered love spilt and 
 wasted, and where a lamp of deathless beauty 
 
 3^
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 shines like a beacon, and where heroes die as 
 leaves fall, and where a wind of prophesying 
 is like the sound of dark birds flying over 
 dark trees in the darkness of forgotten woods 
 — whether one turn to these, or to the doom 
 of the House of Malatesta, or to the doom of 
 the House of Macbeth, or to the doom of the 
 House of Ravenswood, one turns in vain if 
 he be blind and deaf to the same elemental 
 forces as they move through the blood that 
 has to-day's warmth in it, that are the same 
 powers, though they be known of the obscure 
 and the silent, and are committed like wander- 
 ing flame to the torch of a ballad as well as to 
 the starry march of the compelling words of 
 genius ; are of the same dominion, though 
 that be in the shaken hearts of islesfolk and 
 mountaineers, and not with kings in Myke- 
 nai, or by the thrones of Tamburlaine and 
 Aurungzebe, or with great lords and broken 
 nobles and thanes. 
 
 The poet, the dramatist, is not able — is not 
 yet able — to express in beauty and convey in 
 symbol the visible energy of these emotions 
 without resort to the artifice of men and 
 women set in array, with harmonious and 
 arbitrary speech given to them, and a back- 
 ground of illusion made unreal by being 
 made emphatic. 
 
 370
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 If one were to express the passion of re- 
 morse under the signal of a Voice lamenting, 
 or the passion of tears under the signal of a 
 Cry, and be content to give no name to these 
 protagonists and to deny them the back- 
 ground of history or legend : and were to 
 unite them in the sequence of significant and 
 essential things which is drama in action, but 
 in a sequence of suggestion and symbol rather 
 than of statement and pageant : he would be 
 told that he had mistaken the method of lyri- 
 cal music passing into musical drama for 
 the method of verbal emotion passing into 
 poetic drama. But that is too subtle a dream 
 for realisation to seem possible yet, save for 
 those who, hungering after the wild honey 
 of the mind and thirsting for the remoter 
 springs, foresee a time when the imagination 
 shall lay aside words and pigments and clay, 
 as raiment needless during the festivals of the 
 spirit, and express itself in the thoughts which 
 inhabit words — as light inhabits water or as 
 greenness inhabits grass. 
 
 But so long as the imagination dwells in 
 the accepted convention that imposes upon 
 us the use of events which chime to the bells 
 of the past, and the use of names which are at 
 once congruous and traditional ... in this 
 convention of episode and phrase in the con- 
 
 371
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 cert of action and suspense ... it will be 
 well ever and again to turn to those ancestral 
 themes of destiny past which so many genera- 
 tions have slipt like sea-going winds over 
 pastures, and upon which the thoughts of 
 many minds have fallen in secret dews. I do 
 not say, for I do not so think, that there might 
 not be drama as moving whether it deal with 
 the event of to-day and the accent of the hour 
 as with a remote accent recovered and with 
 remote event. But, to many minds, there 
 must always be a supreme attraction in great 
 themes of the drama of destiny as familiar to 
 us as the tales of faerie and wonder to the 
 mind of childhood. The mind, however, need 
 not be bondager to formal tradition. I know 
 one who can evoke modern dramatic scenes 
 by the mere iterance of the great musical 
 names of the imagination. . . . Menelaos, 
 Helen, Klytaimnestra, Andromache, Kassan- 
 dra, Orestes, Blind Oidipus, Elektra, Kreusa, 
 and the like. This is not because these names 
 are in themselves esoteric symbols, or are 
 built of letters of revelation as the fabled 
 tower of Ys was built of evocatory letters 
 made of wind and water, of brownness of 
 earth, of greenness of grass, and of dew, all 
 of which the druids held in the hollows of the 
 five vowels. And here, he says, is his delight. 
 
 372
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 " For I do not live only in the past, but in the 
 present, in these dramas of the mind. The 
 names stand for the elemental passions, and 
 I can come to them through my own gates 
 of to-day as well as through the ancient por- 
 tals of Aischylos or Sophocles or Euripides : 
 and for background I prefer the flame-light 
 and the sound of the wind to any of the crude 
 illusions of stagecraft." 
 
 It is no doubt in this attitude that Racine, 
 so French in the accent of his classical ge- 
 nius, looked at the old drama which was his 
 inspiration ; that Mr. Swinburne and Mr. 
 Bridges, so English in the accent of their 
 genius, have looked at it ; that Etchegaray, 
 in Spain, looked at it before he produced his 
 troubled modern Elektra which is so remote 
 in shapcn thought and coloured semblance 
 from the colour and idea of its prototype ; 
 that Gabriele D'Annunzio looked at it before 
 he became obsessed with the old terrible idea 
 of the tangled feet of Destiny, so that a tuft 
 of grass might withhold or a breath from 
 stirred dust empoison, and wrote that most 
 perturbing of all modern dramas. La Citta 
 Mnrta. 
 
 That sense of the fatality which may have 
 become native to certain localities where 
 Destiny has been fulfilled, which is the funda- 
 
 373
 
 The JJ^i)igcd Destiny 
 
 mental idea of La Citta Morta, has been felt 
 by others also of our day. Readers of Walter 
 Pater's " Apollo in Picardy," for example, 
 will remember how when the Prior Saint- 
 Jean was about to be transferred to " the wild 
 lands " where lay the " Obedience " of Notre- 
 Dame-de-Pratis, he was warned by the old 
 Abbot to take heed of his ways when he was 
 come to that place — for " the mere contact of 
 one's feet with soil might change one." Else- 
 where the same writer reminds us how the 
 Greeks had a special word for the Fate which 
 accompanied one who will come to a violent 
 end, how the common Destinies of men, 
 M.olpa, Mocrac, accompany all men indiffer- 
 ently ; but K.rip, the extraordinary Destiny, 
 one's Doom, has a scent for distant blood- 
 shedding — " and, to be in at a sanguinary 
 death, one of their number came forth to the 
 very cradle, followed persistently all the way, 
 over the waves, through powder and shot, 
 through the rose-gardens; — where not? 
 Looking back, one might trace the red foot- 
 steps all along, side by side." 
 
 This sense of a doom which is not only 
 an implacable personal fatality but can be a 
 terrible and incomprehensible Fate which will 
 involve innocent and guilty, a whole house, a 
 whole clan, a race even, which will even eni- 
 
 374
 
 TJie Winged Destiny 
 
 bitter the wind, add a more cruel and relent- 
 less terror to the sea, which, most appalling 
 of all, will tangle its trailing threads in the 
 roots of grass and in the green life of flower 
 and weed, because, there, that was once ac- 
 complished which was the sowing of seed or 
 the reaping of whirlwind — this sense finds 
 expression in a deep and terrifying sigh 
 throughout literature, from the fierce singers 
 of Israel to the last Gaeli<: rhapsode, from the 
 first of the dramatists of destiny even to the 
 latest. 
 
 II 
 
 There is no inherent reason why a poet of 
 to-day should not overtake the same themes 
 as Aischylos overtook from Phrynicus, and 
 Sophocles from Aischylos, and Euripides 
 from all three. The difficulty is not in the 
 remoteness of the theme, still less in the es- 
 sential substance. It is in the mistaken idea 
 that the ancient formal method is inevitable, 
 and in the mistaken idea that a theme sus- 
 tained on essential and elemental things and 
 therefore independent of uni(|ue circtunstance 
 can be exhausted by the flashing upon it of 
 one great light. Kassandra and Helen and 
 Iphigeneia . . . they live: they are not dead 
 
 375
 
 The ll'utycd Destiny 
 
 It is not the themes that have receded but 
 the imaginations that have quailed. 
 
 Merely to parody the Greek tragedians, by 
 taking a great theme and putting one's pre- 
 sumption and weakness beside it — that is 
 another thing altogether. One hesitates, 
 after Shelley and Robert Browning, after Mr. 
 Swinburne and Mr. Robert Bridges, to say 
 that no modern English poet has achieved a 
 play with a Greek heart ... no play written 
 as a nineteenth century Sophocles or Euripi- 
 des or Agathon would have written it. Even 
 on Prometheus Unbound and Atalanta in 
 Calydon, even on Erechtheus, the Gothic 
 genius of the North has laid a touch as deli- 
 cate as frost yet as durable as fire on the 
 brows of immemorial rock. Perhaps the 
 plays of Mr. Bridges are more truly classical 
 than any modern drama since Racine. But 
 their flame is fiame seen in a mirror: we see 
 the glow, we are intellectually warmed by it, 
 but we do not feel it . . . our minds only, 
 not our hearts that should burn, our nerves 
 that should thrill, respond. 
 
 The reason, I do not doubt, is mainly a 
 psychical rather than an intellectual diffi- 
 culty. It is the indwelling spirit and not the 
 magnetic mind that is wayward and eager to 
 evade the compelling wand of the imagina- 
 
 376
 
 The IVingcd Destiny 
 
 tion. For the spirit is not under the spell 
 of tradition. It wishes to go its own way. 
 Tradition says, if you would write of the 
 slaying of Klytaimnestra you must present a 
 recognisable Elektra and a recognisable 
 Orestes and Dioskoroi against a recognisable 
 background: but to the spirit Elektra and 
 Orestes are simply abstract terms of the 
 theatre of the imagination, the Dioskoroi are 
 august powers, winnowers of fate, and the 
 old Greek background is but a remembered 
 semblance of a living stage that is not to- 
 day what it was yesterday or shall be to- 
 morrow, and yet is ever in essentials the 
 same. 
 
 Ill 
 
 We are, I believe, turning towards a new 
 theatre. The theatre of Ibsen, and all it 
 stands for, is become outworn as a compell- 
 ing influence. Its inherent tendency to dem- 
 onstrate intellectually from a series of incon- 
 trovertible material facts is not adequate for 
 those who would see in the drama the means 
 to demonstrate symbolically from a seciuence 
 of intuitive perception. A subtle French 
 critic, writing of the theatre of Ibsen, appre- 
 ciates it as a theatre more negative than posi- 
 
 377
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 tive, more revolutionary than foundational, 
 more intellectual than religious. " A ce the- 
 atre amer et sec," he adds, " I'ame moderne ne 
 peut etancher toutes ses soifs d'infini et d'ab- 
 solu." 
 
 I think that, there, the right thing is said, 
 as well as the significant indication given. 
 " More intellectual than religious " : that is, 
 more congruous with the method of the mir- 
 ror that gathers and reveals certain facets of 
 the spirit, than with the spirit who as in a 
 glass darkly looks into the mirror. " More 
 intellectual than religious " : that is, more 
 persuaded by the sight that reveals the vis- 
 ible than by the vision that perceives what 
 materially is not visible. " At this bitter and 
 parched theatre of the intellect, the modem 
 soul cannot quench its thirst for the infinite 
 and absolute " : and that is the reason, alone 
 adequate, why to-day the minds of men are 
 turning to a new drama, wherein thoughts 
 and ideas and intuitions shall play a more 
 significant part than the acted similitudes of 
 the lesser emotions that are not so much the 
 incalculable life of the soul as the conditioned 
 energies of the body. The Psychic drama 
 shall not be less nervous : but the emotional 
 energy shall be along the nerves of the spirit, 
 which sees beneath and above and beyond, 
 
 378
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 rather than merely along the nerves of the 
 material life, which sees only that which is in 
 the line of sight. 
 
 And as I have written elsewhere, it may 
 well be that, in a day of outworn conventions, 
 many of us are ready to turn gladly from 
 the scenic illusions of the stage-carpenter and 
 the palpable illusions of the playwright, to 
 the ever-new illusions of the dreaming mind, 
 woven in a new intense dramatic reality 
 against imagined tapestries 
 
 . . . dream-coloured dramas of the mind 
 Best seen against imagined tapestries . . . 
 
 against revealing shadows and tragic glooms 
 and radiances as real, and as near, as the 
 crude symbols of painted boards and stereo- 
 typed phrase in which we still have a reced- 
 ing pleasure. 
 
 I think the profoundest utterance I know, 
 witnessing to the fundamentally psychical na- 
 ture of the drama, is a phrase of Chateau- 
 briand which I came upon recently in Book v. 
 of his Mcmoires ..." to recover the desert 
 I took refuge in the theatre." The whole ef- 
 fort of a civilisation become aniemic and dis-. 
 illusioned must be to " recover the desert." 
 That is a central truth, perceived now of 
 many who are still the few. This great wri- 
 
 .379
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 ter knew that in the theatre de I'ame lay the 
 subtlest and most searching means for the 
 imagination to compel reality to dreams, to 
 compel actuality to vision, to compel to the 
 symbolic congregation of words the be- 
 wildered throng of wandering and illusive 
 thoughts and ideas. By " the desert " he 
 meant that wilderness, that actual or symbolic 
 solitude, to which the creative imagination 
 goes as the curlew to the wastes or as the 
 mew to foam and wind. 
 
 Other writers speak of " nature " and " soli- 
 tude " as though regarding them as sanctua- 
 ries where the passions may, like the wild 
 falcons, cover their faces with their wings, 
 and be still. Chateaubriand was of those few 
 who look upon the solitudes of nature as en- 
 chanted lands, where terror walks with beauty, 
 and where one sees on the dew the marks of 
 invisible and hurrying feet. He was of those 
 who looked upon solitude as, of old, anchor- 
 ites looked upon waste places whete the vul- 
 ture had her eyrie and the hyena wailed and 
 in desolate twilights the lioness filled the dark 
 with the hunger of her young. " Be upon 
 your guard against solitude: the great pas- 
 sions are solitary, and to transport them to 
 the desert is to restore them to their tri- 
 umph." 
 
 380
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 IV 
 
 It is in " the desert," whether in the wilder- 
 ness of the unpeopled waste or in that of the 
 mind where the imagination wanders like a 
 lonely hunter on the trail of the obscure and 
 the unknown, that the whisper of Destiny is 
 supremely audible. It is on the eddying air. 
 It is in the sigh of the grass. The green 
 branch whispers it. It is in the brown leaf, on 
 the grey wind. 
 
 When we are companioned or are in 
 crowds, when we are in the fellowship of our 
 illusions, when we can banish " the desert," 
 shut out the wilderness, we turn from this 
 perturbing thought, this Idea, so vast and 
 menacing. We talk lightly, then, of the fa- 
 tality of things. Our egotisms, even, feed on 
 the ground-flame : we speak of " the fatality 
 that made me do this " ; " my usual fate that 
 has brought this about " ; " there is a fatality 
 in this date, in that number, in the inevitable 
 event, in what has occurred." If we speak of 
 Fate, it is as an omnipresent force, indifferent 
 at best, jealous it may be, perhaps hostile, 
 even malign. But oftenest we disguise Des- 
 tiny in Luck, and feel as safe in the use of the 
 subterfuge as we feel uneasy in that of the 
 sinister thing for which it stands. 
 
 381
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 It is only when we turn to imaginative lit- 
 erature, to the drama in particular, that we 
 can hear Destiny as a theme, as a present 
 reality. To many minds it is a solace, a wall, 
 rather, behind their weakness, that " a force 
 greater than ourselves " is responsible for 
 vicissitude, misfortune, miscarriage, circum- 
 stance, temperament even, even mien of mind 
 and body. It is not we, they say, but Des- 
 tiny who willed it so. For many others, who 
 would refuse this confusion of the invited, 
 the what but compelled fatalities, with the 
 obscure Destiny which works afar off, at long 
 range, behind many years it may be, perhaps 
 even a generation or more, many generations 
 even, and whose slow, inevitable workings are 
 as relentless as they are inscrutable, there is a 
 " fatalism " hardly less disastrous. They will 
 not admit the feeble plea of the weak, but in 
 their hearts they say " our best shall be set at 
 nought, our strength shall avail nothing, in 
 the end." It is only when we turn aside from 
 the shifting images which make up the phan- 
 tasmagoria of life, and look, though it be as 
 in a glass darkly, into our own hearts, that 
 we may have an imagination of the Winged 
 Destiny: that spiritual force which is at once 
 as remote from us, as far above us, as the 
 dancing fires of the Pleiades, and yet in which 
 
 382
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 we have our being and by which we are con- 
 trolled and toward which we inevitably move, 
 even as our little world with all our universe 
 about it and beyond it moves orderly to the 
 incalculable rein of one of these little danc- 
 ing fires. 
 
 In life, as in that pictorial show of life in 
 flashing or dimmed mirrors which we call 
 drama, or poetry, or this or that art, there is 
 no arbitrary destiny so omnipotent that the 
 soul cannot proudly meet it, none, it may be, 
 that the soul cannot overcome. But, alas, it 
 is not the soul that is called upon to meet 
 Fate, as we call the terrible logic of rhythmic 
 order, but our distempered selves, and our 
 frail wills, and our vain, impossible dreams. 
 
 V 
 
 It is easy, then, by the illusions of the 
 imagination, to avoid the dread shadow. Man 
 has shaped and coloured many beautiful 
 dreams, as much, perhaps, to elude this sha- 
 dow as to create enchantment. Is it not for 
 this, in so great a part, that he has taken the 
 sigh of the sea and the cadence of the wind 
 and the murmur of the leaf, and lamentations 
 and delight and whispers, and made Music; 
 
 383
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 that he has taken from the silent flower and 
 wave-haunted shell, and wrought so the co- 
 lour and sound of verse ; that he has surprised 
 the secret of light and shade, and the secret 
 of the columnar suspense of the cypress in 
 moonlight or the single image of life sil- 
 houetted against dawn or sunglow, and the se- 
 cret of the sombre avenues of pine-forest at 
 sunset or moon rise, and the secret of the 
 swaying branch and the blue smoke of woods 
 and the wave of the sea, and created paint- 
 ing and sculpture and architecture and the 
 dance ? 
 
 But below all art there is an austere whis- 
 per: How would it be with you, O Soul, in 
 the wilderness ; how would it be with you 
 alone there, naked amid the great silence and 
 before the eternal shadow, and with no least 
 of your illusions to hide the one or inhabit 
 the other? It is here, in this spiritual wilder- 
 ness, whether of an actual or symbolical des- 
 ert, that the soul may know the mystery of 
 the Winged Destiny. No poor fatalities wan- 
 der here: here Fate herself does not reach, 
 but leans brooding on the silent horizon. 
 
 Long ago, to Delphi, where that recovered 
 memory sleeps beneath the " Shining Rocks " 
 and dreams from the slopes of Parnassos to 
 the meeting of the seas, a sculptor came who 
 
 384
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 had fashioned a beautiful image which trou- 
 bled all who looked upon it. His master, 
 Agathon, had made a statue, and some called 
 it Eros and some Destiny. But now the 
 younger man's work was held to be more 
 beautiful, to be strange and beautiful to dis- 
 quietude, to trouble the soul. Some thought 
 it to be Anteros. In that day, in sculpture, 
 only the Son of Ouranos and Aphrodite 
 knew the symbolic beauty of wings. This 
 winged one, was he that most ancient and 
 dread god, imaged in changeless youth, Eros? 
 Or was he that mysterious otherself, or a 
 sombre brother, son of one older than Oura- 
 nos, Anteros? 
 
 Men wondered, for no one could say. The 
 sculptor had suddenly laid aside life when he 
 laid aside the chisel. He was a man of deep 
 meanings, they knew. When, a year before, 
 in the city of Athena, .Xgathon had made for 
 a Thracian prince his statue of Destiny, that 
 image had been a woman, but with the brows 
 and mien of .'\thena herself. Only, the down- 
 looking eyes were all but closed. This other 
 Destiny was a youth, they saw, but with up- 
 lifted face, and eyes looking out through time 
 and change and circumstance: young, yet with 
 weight of deep thought on the brows: serene, 
 yet somehow appalling, as though a most an- 
 
 385
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 cient presence out of eternity looked from the 
 newly carven marble. He was winged too, 
 with great wings, as though he had come from 
 afar, and was but a moment earth-lit. They 
 would have acclaimed Anteros, but that the 
 sculptor's handman said the statue was of The 
 Winged Destiny. Long afterward, the wan- 
 dering priest of an obscure faith, preaching 
 before what had been the great Pythian fane, 
 told his hearers that Agathon had meant Nem- 
 esis, the Following Fate: but that this other 
 pagan dreamer, whose glory was now safe at 
 Delphi, meant a deeper mystery, the Follow- 
 ing Love. The stern Mistress of the veiled 
 eyes was Retribution : the Divine Youth was 
 Redemption. The one was born of Man and 
 the Spirit of Time : the other was born of 
 God and the Spirit of Eternity. 
 
 VI 
 
 I, too, in common doubtless with many of 
 my readers, have thus pondered often, and 
 perplexedly, this problem of destiny in the 
 uses of the imagination, above all in tragic 
 drama, and the deeper and more complicated 
 problem of destiny in life. The more I have 
 thought, the more it is borne in upon me that, 
 
 386
 
 The JVingcd Destiny 
 
 in its final expression, the secret of Destiny 
 must be sought within, in the interior life: in 
 a word, that Destiny, as we commonly under- 
 stand it, is but the vague term of a quaUty of 
 spiritual energy, and not the designation of an 
 immutable and inevitable force. I turned with 
 eagerness, as doubtless many another turned, 
 to M. Maeterlinck's La Sagesse et la Destince, 
 when that remarkable book was published ; to 
 find there a solution of, or at least a signal 
 clue to the heart of the mystery. But, amid 
 much that is beautiful and no little that is 
 significant in interpretation and direction, I 
 found nothing uttered with the authenticity of 
 one who has put away visions because he has 
 attained the source of visions, nothing re- 
 vealed in the signature of the absolute. That 
 fine book, indeed, in itself knows a continual 
 hesitancy in nomenclature even, for the author 
 speaks now of " le Destin " and now of " la 
 Destinee," apparently by the one meaning that 
 immaterial and secret and divine manifesta- 
 tion which we call Fate, the incommensurable 
 vision and irresistible will of the Unknown ; 
 and, by the other, that material and obvious 
 and mortal scr|ucncc of circumstance which 
 we indicate in I'atality. 
 
 It is clear that he found ; it is clear, I think, 
 that each of us, pondering individually this 
 
 387
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 problem, must find ; it is possible that of old 
 the Greek tragedians, those masters of illu- 
 sion in the eternal drama of our mortal 
 " yea " and the immortal " nay," found, and 
 more intimately than we have found . . . the 
 same distinction which, soon or late, con- 
 fronts every thinker : the distinction between 
 the Destiny, or the Fate, which compels 
 through the invisible and the untraceable, and 
 the lesser destiny or fatality, which from 
 without allures, or from within impels the 
 overmastering throng of recognised or recog- 
 nisable forces and influences, the things of our 
 inheritance, of our creation, the things of our 
 passions, the things of our desire. 
 
 But, surely, there is a further reach than 
 this for the questing rhind. In Destiny itself 
 — in that great, abstract, overwhelming mys- 
 tery of Fate, sitting as one enthroned above 
 the turmoil of the lesser destinies of time 
 and circumstance and the unceasing mael- 
 strom of the myriad inextricable fatalities — 
 are there not two mighty forces at work? Is 
 there not the sombre and inscrutable Genius 
 of this world, which weaves with time and 
 races and empires, with life and death and 
 change, and in the weft of whose web our 
 swift-passing age, our race, our history, are 
 no more than vivid gleams for a moment 
 
 388
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 turned to the light? And is there not also a 
 Winged Destiny, a Creature of the Eternal, 
 inhabiting infinitude, so vast and incommen- 
 surable that no eye can perceive, no imagina- 
 tion limn, no thought overtake, and yet that 
 can descend upon your soul or mine as dew 
 upon blades of grass, as wind among the mul- 
 titudinous leaves, as the voice of sea and for- 
 est that can rise to the silence of mountain- 
 brows or sink in whispers through the silence 
 of a child's sleep ? — a Destiny that has no con- 
 cern with crowns and empires and the proud 
 dreams of men, but only with the soul, that 
 flitting shadow, more intangible than dew, yet 
 whose breath shall see the wasting of hills 
 and the drought of oceans. 
 
 It is because I believe there is, in Fate, 
 first the destiny which we make and invite, 
 and name fatality : and above it the Destiny 
 which calls to us as a tide calling in the night, 
 and to which we respond from within, as 
 creatures that must inevitably go with that 
 tide, whether we know it or believe in it or 
 ignore it, but yet who on that tide may com- 
 pel our own way, and avoid the whirlpool, and 
 attain the fortunate shores: and, beyond this, 
 the Winged Destiny, whicli leans from Eter- 
 nity into Time, and whispers to the soul 
 through symbol and intuition the inconceivable 
 
 389
 
 The Winged Destiny 
 
 mystery of the divine silence — it is because of 
 this behef that I have placed these few words 
 at the end of this book. 
 
 For, throughout, there breathes in it, I hope, 
 not only the faith in the things which the 
 spirit may compel and dreams achieve; not 
 only the belief that the secret of redemption, 
 alike for the individual, the generation, and 
 the race, lies in the well in each heart and not 
 in the clouds that float on the dim horizons 
 of the mind of man ; but also the belief, the 
 faith, that for each of us, for all, there is the 
 Winged Destiny, the Shepherd with whom, in 
 the dark hour, we must go at last, to whose 
 call we must answer when the familiar pas- 
 sions and desires and longings are as dust on 
 the wind, and only that remains which so lit- 
 tle we consider, only that little shaken flame 
 of the spirit, which is yet of the things that 
 do not pass, which is of the things immortal. 
 
 390
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE TO FIRST 
 EDITION 
 
 As explained in the text, the short paper called 
 "Celtic" has already appeared in book-form {The 
 Divine Adventure: lona, etc.), and is now, with the 
 courteous consent of Messrs. Chapman and Hall, 
 reprinted in its completed state, as the second of the 
 three papers collectively entitled "For the Beauty 
 of an Idea." The present first part of this disser- 
 tation on the Celtic destiny appeared (without cer- 
 tain revisions and added matter) as a foreword to 
 an American reprint of the "Celtic" essay (Mr. 
 Mosher, Portland, Maine). Of "The Sunset of Old 
 Tales" series, one or two are printed for the first 
 time ; others, under the same general title, appeared 
 in The Fortnightly Review, where, also, respectively 
 at a later and at an earlier date, have appeared "The 
 Woman at the Crossways" and (Section III.) "The 
 Four Winds of Eirinn." "The Wayfarer" is re- 
 printed from Cosmopolis. Of "The Children of 
 Water" series, "Maya" is printed for the first time; 
 five appeared in The Contemporary Review, and "The 
 Lynn of Dreams" in Mr. Mosher's reprint of By Sun- 
 down Shores (from The Divine Adventure volume) ; 
 while "Sorrow on the Wind" (as also from Section 
 III., "A Triad" and "Ailccn") first appeared in 
 Country Life. 
 
 In the third section ("Anima Celtica"), "The 
 Shadowy Waters" (under the title "The Later
 
 Bibliographical Note to First Edition 
 
 Work of Mr. Yeats"), and part of "The Gaelic 
 Heart," have appeared in The North American Re- 
 view. "Seumas" is reprinted from the American 
 volume, By Sundown Shores, already alluded to. 
 "The Gael and His Heritage" appeared in The Nine- 
 teenth Century for November, 1900. "The Ancient 
 Beauty" formed the introduction to the American 
 (Mr. Mosher's) edition of my retold version of the 
 old tale of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna; and a 
 portion of the earlier part of The Winged Destiny 
 (since revised and adapted), appeared as an intro- 
 ductory note on "Fatality in Tragic Drama," to 
 Mr. Mosher's American edition of my drama, The 
 House of Usna. F. M. 
 
 392
 
 NOTE 
 
 BY MRS. WILLIAM SHARP 
 
 The first edition of The Winged Destiny was pub- 
 lished in 1904 (the second in 1905), by Messrs. Chap- 
 man and Hall. Into the present edition two "stud- 
 ies" have been added: i. " The Awakening of Angus 
 Og," from the volume of Spiritual Tales (P. Geddes 
 and Colleagues, 1897, and David Nutt, 1904), contrib- 
 uted originally to the winter number of The Ever- 
 green (P. Geddes & Col., 1896), a quarterly edited for 
 one year by William Sharp. 2. "The Two Old Songs 
 of May," which appeared in the Academy in 1905. 
 "The Wayfarer" was written for Cosmopolis, June, 
 1898; in 1904 a revised version, prepared for The 
 Winged Destiny, was published separately by Mr. 
 Mosher in 1906, and it was prefaced with a sonnet 
 written by Mr. Alfred Noyes. This "In Memoriam" 
 sonnet, through the courtesy of Mr. Noyes, will be 
 found at the end of Vol. VII. of this authorized edi- 
 tion of the writings of William Sharp, under the 
 pseudonym of " Fiona Macleod." 
 
 393
 
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