poetry was always by the margin of water." And the Salmon of Knowledge, the eating of which gave Finn his pre-eminence, swam in a green pool, still and deep, over which hung a rowan tree that shed its red berries on the stream. Lovely were the places whence Art and Knowledge came.

Then, as to all good landscape lovers, the beasts, birds, and insects of Nature were dear to these ancient people. One of the things Finn most cared for was not only his hounds, but the "blackbird singing on Letterlee"; and his song, on page 114, in the praise of May, tells us how keen was his observant eye for animal life and how much it delighted him. The same minute realisation of natural objects is illustrated in this book when King Iubdan explains to the servant the different characteristics of the trees of the forest, and the mystic elements that abide in them. It was a habit, even of Teutonic poets, to tell of the various trees and their uses in verse, and Spenser and Drayton have both done it in later times. But few of them have added, as the Irish story does, a spiritual element to their description, and made us think of malign or beneficent elements attached to them. The woodbine, and this is a strange fancy, is the king of the woods. The rowan is the tree of the magicians, and its berries are for poets. The bramble is inimical to man, the alder is full of witchcraft, and the elder is the wood of the horses of the fairies. Into every tree a spiritual power is infused; and the good lords of the forest are loved of men and birds and bees.

Thus the Irish love of nature led them to spiritualise, in another way than mythical, certain things in nature, and afterwards to humanise, up to a certain point, the noble implements wrought by human skill out of natural materials. And this is another element in all these stories, as it is in the folk-lore also of other lands. In the tale of the Sons of Turenn, the stones of the wayside tell to Lugh the story of the death of his father Kian, and the boat of Mananan, indwelt by a spirit, flies hither and thither over the seas, obeying the commands, even the thought, of its steersman. The soul of some famed spears is so hot for slaughter that, when it is not being used in battle, its point must stand in a bath of blood or of drowsy herbs, lest it should slay the host. The swords murmur and hiss and cry out for the battle; the shield of the hero hums louder and louder, vibrating for the encouragement of the warrior. Even the wheels of Cuchulain's chariot roar as they whirl into the fight. This partial life given to the weapons of war is not specially Celtic. Indeed, it is more common in Teutonic than in Celtic legend, and it seems probable that it was owing to the Norsemen that it was established in the Hero tales of Ireland.

This addition of life, or of some of the powers of life, to tree and well and boulder-stone, to river and lake and hill, and sword and spear, is common to all mythologies, but the special character of each nation or tribe modifies the form of the life-imputing stories. In Ireland the tree, the stream were not dwelt in by a separate living being, as in Grecian story; the half-living powers they had were given to them from without, by the gods, the demons, the fairies; and in the case of the weapons, the powers they had of act or sound arose from the impassioned thoughts and fierce emotions of their forger or their wielder, which, being intense, were magically transferred to them. The Celtic nature is too fond of reality, too impatient of illusion, to believe in an actual living spirit in inanimate things. At least, that is the case in the stories of the Hero and the Fenian Cycles.^[5]

What the Irish of the Heroic, and still more of the Fenian Cycle, did make in their imagination was a world, outside of themselves, of living spiritual beings, in whose actuality they fully believed, and in whom a great number of them still believe. A nation, if I may use this term, dwelt under the sea. Another dwelt in the far island of the ocean, the Isle of the Ever-Young. Another dwelt in the land, in the green hills and by the streams of Ireland; and these were the ancient gods who had now lost their dominion over the country, but lived on, with all their courtiers and warriors and beautiful women in a country underground. As time went on, their powers were dwarfed, and they became small of size, less beautiful, and in our modern times are less inclined to enter into the lives of men and women. But the Irish peasant still sees them flitting by his path in the evening light, or dancing on the meadow round the grassy mound, singing and playing strange melodies; or mourns for the child they have carried away to live with them and forget her people, or watches with fear his dreaming daughter who has been touched by them, and is never again quite a child of this earth, or quite of the common race of man.

These were the invisible lands and peoples of the Irish imagination; and they live in and out of many of the stories. Cuchulain is lured into a fairy-land, and lives for more than a year in love with Fand, Mananan's wife. Into another fairy-land, through zones of mist, Cormac, as is told here, was lured by Mananan, who now has left the sea to play on the land. Oisín, as I have already said, flies with Niam over the sea to the island of Eternal Youth. Etain, out of the immortal land, is born into an Irish girl and reclaimed and carried back to her native shore by Midir, a prince of the Fairy Host. Ethne, whose story also is here, has lived for all her youth in the court of Angus, deep in the hill beside the rushing of the Boyne.

These stories are but a few out of a great number of the loves and wars between the men and women of the human and the fairy races. Curiously enough, as the stories become less ancient, the relations between men and the fairies are more real, more close, even more affectionate. Finn and the Fianna seem to be almost in daily companionship with the fairy host—much nearer to them than the men of the Heroic Cycle are to the gods. They interchange love and music and battle and adventure with one another. They are, for the most part, excellent friends; and their intercourse suffers from no doubt. It is as real as the intercourse between Welsh and English on the Borderland.

There was nothing illusive, nothing merely imaginary, in these fairy worlds for the Irish hero or the Irish people. They believed the lands to be as real as their own, and the indwellers of fairyland to have like passions with themselves. Finn is not a bit surprised when Vivionn the giantess sits beside him on the hill, or Fergus when King Iubdan stands on his hand; or St Patrick when Ethne, out of fairyland, dies on his breast, or when he sees, at his spell, Cuchulain, dead some nine hundred years, come forth out of the dark gates of Sheol, high in his chariot, grasping his deadly spear, driven as of old by his well-loved charioteer, drawn by the immortal steeds through the mist, and finally talking of his deeds and claiming a place in the Christian heaven—a place that Patrick yields to him. The invisible worlds lived, loved, and thought around this visible world, and were, it seems, closer and more real to the Celtic than to other races.

But it was not only these agreeable and lovely folk in pleasant habitations whom the Irish made, but also spirits of another sort, of lesser powers and those chiefly malignant, having no fixed dwelling-place, homeless in the air and drifting with it, embodying the venomous and deadly elements of the earth and the angers and cruelty of the sea, and the hypocrisy of them all—demons, some of whom, like the stepmother of the children of Lir, have been changed from men or women because of wicked doings, but the most part born of the evil in Nature herself. They do what harm they can to innocent folk; they enter into, support, and direct—like Macbeth's