heart's infirmity;
Perchance—" "Oh! speed the hazard of those hours,"
He cried, "that blind the flame of low desire
In the white light of Love's transmuting fire."

  V Hard by the swift-winged star, the moth-like moon
Sheds golden dust on waves of day that ebb
Into the deep beyond life's wan lagoon.
The spider Night now spins his monstrous web,
And spots the dark with many a pale cocoon
Hung in his vaporous cave, whose phantoms creep
In visions round the heavy brain of sleep.

Yet one, among the sleepers, never turns
To ease his shoulder of the weight of night;
But with the shield of sweet oblivion spurns
Those wandering shafts that tease with sound and sight;
Till in a quiet, deep as kingly urns
In buried places, Ailill deadly lies,
Blind to the spreading signal of the skies.

Now the thick dark, that pressed Etain's calm face
Like softest wool, thins out, and moves, and lifts;
And like a memory's vague recovered trace
The silent world, looming through cloudy rifts,
Floats greyly on the grey abyss of space,
Then slowly forms, and stands at last in light
Built on the crumbled ruins of the night.

Soon on a cloud o'erhung with heliotrope
Day's harp is lifted, wire on golden wire;
And now great Dagda's burning fingers grope
From string to string, then reaching high and higher
Unto the utterance of some eager hope,
Break through the vibrant silences, and spring
Into one living voice of leaf and wing.

Somewhere the snipe now taps his tiny drum;
The moth goes fluttering upward from the heath;
And where no lightest foot unmarked may come,
The rabbit, tiptoe, plies his shiny teeth
On luscious herbage; and with strident hum
The yellow bees, blustering from flower to flower,
Scatter from dew-filled cups a sparkling shower.

The meadowsweet shakes out its feathery mass;
And rumorous winds, that stir the silent eaves,
Bearing abroad faint perfumes as they pass,
Thrill with some wondrous tale the fluttering leaves,
And whisper secretly along the grass
Where gossamers, for day's triumphal march,
Hang out from blade to blade their diamond arch.

Forth came Etain, and with a little cry
Scattered the councils of the feathery brood;
And faced unblenched the red sun's winkless eye
That hawk-like hung above the quivering wood;
And passed with stately step and head on high
Toward a secluded place—where one doth wait
Silent and imperturbable as fate.

Sweetly the wizard palms of morning sleek
Her brow with spells; and when a butterfly
Brushes with soft familiar wing her cheek,
Through the deep woods she hears a ghostly sigh,
As if a hidden god were fain to speak
An ancient ageless love that, fold by fold,
Wraps her with joy in throbbing arms of old.

Now is her sandalled foot upon the edge
Of a loud-leaping stream, that flings its damp
To cool the sorrel shaking on its ledge
Under the squirrel's pine, and in a swamp
Goes dumb among the heron-haunted sedge,
Where the swift kingfisher, a moment seen,
Flashes and fades, a flame of sudden green.

At length she stands within the appointed place,
Where leafy boughs in odorous dusk are blent.
But wherefore now across her trancéd face
Pass the quick fingers of bewilderment,
And doubt on doubt like shadows shadows chase?
Faintly she speaks, "Ailill I came to see.
Who art thou—for thou art yet art not he?"

From her soft eye no loosened glances tell
Desire or dread, to him whose cloudless gaze
Knows from what heights of old her footsteps fell
Out of clear light, into this web of days
And nights and mystery inscrutable,
And marks how in the calm of inner power
She moves unmoved to meet her destined hour.

"Etain," he whispered, and again, "Etain."
Such utter love went throbbing through her name
That nigh beyond her doubt her foot had gone;
Yet stood she wavering like a lonely flame
Outburning night, that feels the shake of dawn;
Then said, "Thy name, that doubt aside he cast?"
"Mider," he answered, "come for thee at last."

"Mider?" she echoed, "Mider?" and the sound
Smote upon hidden doors, and roused from sleep
Faint eyes that dreamed, vague hands that groped around
The thought behind her thought, and from the deep
Beneath her thought climbed upward, to the bound
Whose shadowy marge like midnight gloom is cast
Between the passing moment and the past.

Then Mider said, "For no poor worm's desire,
Nor aught of earth, thou comest, O beloved!
But for another's good thy thoughts conspire;
And far from self thy feet have hither moved
To the high purpose of the sacred fire
That burns thine upward path through joy and pain,
Through birth, through life, through death, to me again."

Then asked she all bewildered: "Who art thou
Whose eyes have read my soul?" And answered he,
"Thine am I by the immemorial vow
That made thee mine, beloved! eternally,
When for a bride-price, on thy peerless brow
I set a diadem beyond the worth
Of all the crowns of all the queens of earth."

Swiftly her thought divining, "Where, and when,
And wherefore parted, thou, beloved! shalt know.
That land which gleams in the rapt poet's ken,
Set in a sea that has no ebb or flow,
Beyond the spear-cast of the dreams of men,
Is mine, and from all changings far withdrawn
There spreads the realm of Mider—and Etain.

"And there we loved, till that Almighty Power
Who set the heavens wheeling with a nod,
Blew thee, a butterfly, from flower to flower,
Until beyond our realm, a splendid God
Knew thee and cherished in a blossomy bower,
And nightly thy fair form in purple laid,
And at thy side his couch of slumber made.

"But thee again the breath of tempest found,
And swept thee forth, and whirled from field to field,
And dashed thee where a roar of festal sound
Shook brazenly doffed helm and resting shield,
And flung thee in a cup that passed around
To one who drank it deep in bridal mirth—
And thou wert born a daughter of the earth.

"From year to year life's pleasures round thee played,
And fell behind the question of thine eyes
That searched the mysteries of leafy shade,
And the blue heron sailing in the skies
Cutting the silence with the rusty blade
His voice, and sought to spy the subtile might
That killed your gathered iris in a night.

"Ah, soon I saw sweet longing on thy face,
And love's compelling poppy on thy mouth,
And watched thee robe thy maiden blossoming grace
And dream a king came riding from the south;
Yet in thy sigh in Eochaidh's royal place,
Unseen I saw the waft of hidden wings
Set past these perishing substantial things.

"For thou wert born for love whose windless sail
Moves on great deeps beyond life's shallow range.
Love linked in flesh with failing flesh shall fail:
Love knit in thought with changing thought shall change,
Nor all desire against slow Time prevail;
For that old worm all dreams shall gnaw and rend,
And love that finds an end—itself shall end.

"Oh! not for thee the little irking