GREEN FIRE

A Romance

BY

FIONA MACLEOD

"While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew"

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO

ESCLARMOUNDO

"Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum."—Ovid

"There are those of us who would rather be with Cathal of the Woods, and be drunken with green fire, than gain the paradise of the holy Molios who banned him, if in that gain were to be heard no more the earth-sweet ancient song of the blood that is in the veins of youth....

"O green fire of life, pulse of the world! O Love, O Youth, O Dream of Dreams!

"The Annir Choille."

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST
The Birds of Angus Ogue

GREEN FIRE

BOOK FIRST

THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OGUE

CHAPTER I

EUCHARIS

Then, in the violet forest, all a-bourgeon, Eucharis said to me: "It is Spring."—Arthur Rimbaud.

After the dim purple bloom of a suspended spring, a green rhythm ran from larch to thorn, from lime to sycamore; spread from meadow to meadow, from copse to copse, from hedgerow to hedgerow. The blackthorn had already snowed upon the nettle-garths. In the obvious nests among the bare boughs of ash and beech the eggs of the blackbird were blue-green as the sky that March had bequeathed to April. For days past, when the breath of the equinox had surged out of the west, the missel-thrushes had bugled from the wind-swayed topmost branches of the tallest elms. Everywhere the green rhythm ran.

In every leaf that had uncurled there was a delicate bloom, that which is upon all things in the first hours of life. The spires of the grass were washed in a green, dewy light. Out of the brown earth a myriad living things thrust tiny green shafts, arrow-heads, bulbs, spheres, clusters. Along the pregnant soil keener ears than ours would have heard the stir of new life, the innumerous whisper of the bursting seed; and, in the wind itself, shepherding the shadow-chased