his say, but Oisín answers, "The music of the woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird, and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron." And Finn himself, when asked what was his most beloved music, said first that it was "the sharp whistling of the wind as it went through the uplifted spears of the seven battalions of the Fianna," and this was fitting for a hero to say. But when the poet in him spoke, he said his music was the crying of the sea-gull, and the noise of the waves, and the voice of the cuckoo when summer was at hand, and the washing of the sea against the shore, and of the tide when it met the river of the White Trout, and of the wind rushing through the cloud. And many other sayings of the same kind this charming and poetic folk has said concerning those sweet, strong sounds in Nature out of which the music of men was born.

Again, there is not much music in the Mythological Tales. Lugh, it is true, is a great harper, and the harp of the Dagda, into which he has bound his music, plays a music at whose sound all men laugh, and another so that all men weep, and another so enthralling that all fall asleep; and these three kinds of music are heard through all the Cycles of Tales. Yet when the old gods of the mythology became the Sidhe,^[7] the Fairy Host, they—having left their barbaric life behind—became great musicians. In every green hill where the tribes of fairy-land lived, sweet, wonderful music was heard all day—such music that no man could hear but he would leave all other music to listen to it, which "had in it sorrows that man has never felt, and joys for which man has no name, and it seemed as if he who heard it might break from time into eternity and be one of the immortals." And when Finn and his people lived, they, being in great harmony and union with the Sidhe, heard in many adventures with them their lovely music, and it became their own. Indeed, Finn, who had twelve musicians, had as their chief one of the Fairy Host who came to dwell with him, a little man who played airs so divine that all weariness and sorrow fled away. And from him Finn's musicians learnt a more enchanted art than they had known before. And so it came to pass that as in every fairy dwelling there was this divine art, so in every palace and chieftain's hall, and in every farm, there were harpers harping on their harps, and all the land was full of sweet sounds and airs—shaping in music, imaginative war, and sorrows, and joys, and aspiration. Nor has their music failed. Still in the west and south of Ireland, the peasant, returning home, hears, as the evening falls from the haunted hills, airs unknown before, or at midnight a wild triumphant song from the Fairy Host rushing by, or wakes with a dream melody in his heart. And these are played and sung next day to the folk sitting round the fire. Many who heard these mystic sounds became themselves the makers of melodies, and went about the land singing and making and playing from village to village and cabin to cabin, till the unwritten songs of Ireland were as numerous as they were various. Moore collected a hundred and twenty of them, but of late more than five hundred he knew not of have been secured from the people and from manuscripts for the pleasure of the world. And in them lives on the spirit of the Fianna, and the mystery of the Fairy Host, and the long sorrow and the fleeting joy of the wild weather in the heart of the Irish race.

As to the poetry of Ireland, that other Art which is illustrated in this book, so fully has it been dwelt on by many scholars and critics that it needs not be touched here other than lightly and briefly. The honour and dignity of the art of poetry goes back in Irish mythology to a dim antiquity. The ancient myth said that the nine hazels of wisdom grew round a deep spring beneath the sea, and the hazels were the hazels of inspiration and of poetry—so early in Ireland were inspiration and poetry made identical with wisdom. Seven streams of wisdom flowed from that fountain-head, and when they had fed the world returned to it again. And all the art-makers of mankind, and of all arts, have drunk of their waters. Five salmon in the spring ate of the hazel nuts, and some haunted the rivers of Ireland; and whosoever, like Finn, tasted the flesh of these immortal fish, was possessed of the wisdom which is inspiration and poetry. Such was the ancient Irish conception of the art of poetry.

It is always an art which grows slowly into any excellence, and it needs for such growth a quieter life than the Irish lived for many centuries. Poems appear but rarely in the mythological or heroic cycles, and are loosely scattered among the prose of the bardic tales. A few are of war, but they are chiefly dirges like the Song of Emer over the dead body of Cuchulain, or that of Deirdre over Naisi—pathetic wailings for lost love. There is an abrupt and pitiful pain in the brief songs of Fionnuala, but I fancy these were made and inserted in Christian times. Poetry was more at home among the Fianna. The conditions of life were easier; there was more leisure and more romance. And the other arts, which stimulate poetry, were more widely practised than in the earlier ages. Finn's Song to May, here translated, is of a good type, frank and observant, with a fresh air in it, and a fresh pleasure in its writing. I have no doubt that at this time began the lyric poetry of Ireland, and it reached, under Christian influences, a level of good, I can scarcely say excellent, work, at a time when no other lyrical poetry in any vernacular existed in Europe or the Islands. It was religious, mystic, and chiefly pathetic—prayers, hymns, dirges, regrets in exile, occasional stories of the saints whose legendary acts were mixed with pagan elements, and most of these were adorned with illustrations drawn from natural beauty or from the doings of birds and beasts—a great affection for whom is prominent in the Celtic nature. The Irish poets sent this lyric impulse into Iceland, Wales, and Scotland, and from Scotland into England; and the rise of English vernacular poetry instead of Latin in the seventh and eighth centuries is due to the impulse given by the Irish monasteries at Whitby and elsewhere in Northumbria. The first rude lyric songs of Cædmon were probably modelled on the hymns of Colman.

One would think that poetry, which arose so early in a nation's life, would have developed fully. But this was not the case in Ireland. No narrative, dramatic, didactic, or epic poetry of any importance arose, and many questions and answers might be made concerning this curious restriction of development. The most probable solution of this problem is that there was never enough peace in Ireland or continuity of national existence or unity, to allow of a continuous development of any one of the arts into all its forms. Irish poetry never advanced beyond the lyric. In that form it lasted all through the centuries; it lasts still at the present day, and Douglas Hyde has proved how much charm belongs to it in his book on the Love Songs of Connacht.

It has had a long, long history; it has passed through many phases; it has sung of love and sorrow, of national wars and hopes, of Ireland herself as the Queen of Sorrow, of exile regrets from alien shores, of rebellion, of hatred of England, of political strife, in ballads sung in the streets, of a thousand issues of daily life and death—but of world-wide affairs, of great passions and duties and fates evolving in epic or clashing in drama, of continuous human lives in narrative (except in prose), of the social life of cities or of philosophic thought enshrined in stately verse, it has not sung. What it may do in the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty poetry, lies on the knees of the gods. I wish it well, but such a development seems now too late. The Irish genius, if it