King Lir of Erin had four young children who were cared for

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TALES OF THE ENCHANTED ISLANDS OF THE ATLANTIC

BY

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

TO

General Sir George Wentworth Higginson, K. C. B.

_Gyldernscroft, Marlow, England_

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, IN TOKEN OF KINDRED AND OF OLD FAMILY

FRIENDSHIPS, CORDIALLY PRESERVED INTO THE PRESENT GENERATION

THESE LEGENDS UNITE THE TWO SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC AND FORM A PART OF THE

COMMON HERITAGE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING RACE

Preface

Hawthorne in his _Wonder Book_ has described the beautiful Greek

myths and traditions, but no one has yet made similar use of the wondrous

tales that gathered for more than a thousand years about the islands of

the Atlantic deep. Although they are a part of the mythical period of

American history, these hazy legends were altogether disdained by the

earlier historians; indeed, George Bancroft made it a matter of actual

pride that the beginning of the American annals was bare and literal. But

in truth no national history has been less prosaic as to its earlier

traditions, because every visitor had to cross the sea to reach it, and

the sea has always been, by the mystery of its horizon, the fury of its

storms, and the variableness of the atmosphere above it, the foreordained

land of romance.

In all ages and with all sea-going races there has always been something

especially fascinating about an island amid the ocean. Its very existence

has for all explorers an air of magic. An island offers to us heights

rising from depths; it exhibits that which is most fixed beside that which

is most changeable, the fertile beside the barren, and safety after

danger. The ocean forever tends to encroach on the island, the island upon

the ocean. They exist side by side, friends yet enemies. The island

signifies safety in calm, and yet danger in storm; in a tempest the sailor

rejoices that he is not near it; even if previously bound for it, he puts

about and steers for the open sea. Often if he seeks it he cannot reach

it. The present writer spent a winter on the island of Fayal, and saw in a

storm a full-rigged ship drift through the harbor disabled, having lost

her anchors; and it was a week before she again made the port.

There are groups of islands scattered over the tropical ocean,

especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las

Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have

no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no

inhabitants but insects and reptiles--lizards, spiders, snakes,--with vast

tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and

the slime of the ocean. If there are any birds, it is the strange and

heavy penguin, the passing albatross, or the Mother Cary's chicken, which

has been called the humming bird of ocean, and here finds a place for its

young. By night these birds come for their repose; at earliest dawn they

take wing and hover over the sea, leaving the isle deserted. The only busy

or beautiful life which always surrounds it is that of a myriad species of

fish, of all forms and shapes, and often more gorgeous than any

butterflies in gold and scarlet and yellow.

Once set foot on such an island and you begin at once to understand the

legends of enchantment which ages have collected around such spots. Climb

to its heights, you seem at the masthead of some lonely vessel, kept

forever at sea. You feel as if no one but yourself had ever landed there;

and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see below you

in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked vessel,

encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable growth. No

matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to lie upon the

water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and swirl about it

--currents which are, at all tides and in the calmest weather, as dangerous

as any tempest, and which make compass untrustworthy and helm powerless.

It is to be remembered also that an island not only appears and disappears

upon the horizon in brighter or darker skies, but it varies its height and

shape, doubles itself in mirage, or looks as if broken asunder, divided

into two or three. Indeed the buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one such

island which he had visited, says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's

Enchanted Isle, for we having had a sight of it upon several points of the

compass, it appeared always in so many different forms; sometimes like a

ruined fortification; upon another point like a great city."

If much of this is true even now, it was far truer before the days of

Columbus, when men were constantly looking westward across the Atlantic,

and wondering what was beyond. In those days, when no one knew with

certainty whether the ocean they observed was a sea or a vast lake, it was

often called "The Sea of Darkness." A friend of the Latin poet, Ovid,

describing the first approach to this sea, says that as you sail out upon

it the day itself vanishes, and the world soon ends in perpetual

darkness:--

"Quo Ferimur? Ruit ipsa Dies, orbemque relictum

Ultima perpetuis claudit natura tenebris."

Nevertheless, it was the vague belief of many nations that the abodes of

the blest lay somewhere beyond it--in the "other world," a region half

earthly, half heavenly, whence the spirits of the departed could not cross

the water to return;--and so they were constantly imagining excursions

made by favored mortals to enchanted islands. To add to the confusion,

actual islands in the Atlantic were sometimes discovered and actually lost

again, as, for instance, the Canaries, which were reached and called the

Fortunate Isles a little before the Christian era, and were then lost to

sight for thirteen centuries ere being visited again.

The glamour of enchantment was naturally first attached by Europeans to

islands within sight of their own shores--Irish, Welsh, Breton, or

Spanish,--and then, as these islands became better known, men's

imaginations carried the mystery further out over the unknown western sea.

The line of legend gradually extended itself till it formed an imaginary

chart for Columbus; the aged astronomer, Toscanelli, for instance,

suggesting to him the advantage of making the supposed island of Antillia

a half-way station; just as it was proposed, long centuries after, to find

a station for the ocean telegraph in the equally imaginary island of

Jacquet, which has only lately disappeared from the charts. With every

step in knowledge the line of fancied stopping-places rearranged itself,

the fictitious names flitting from place to place on the maps, and

sometimes duplicating themselves. Where the tradition itself has vanished

we find that the names with which it associated itself are still assigned,

as in case of Brazil and the Antilles, to wholly different localities.

The order of the tales in the present work follows roughly the order of

development, giving first the legends which kept near the European shore,

and then those which, like St. Brandan's or Antillia, were assigned to the

open sea or, like Norumbega or the Isle of Demons, to the very coast of

America. Every tale in this book bears reference to some actual legend,

followed more or less closely, and the authorities for each will be found

carefully given in the appendix for such readers as may care to follow the

subject farther. It must be remembered that some of these imaginary

islands actually remained on the charts of the British admiralty until

within a century. If even the exact science of geographers retained them

thus long, surely romance should embalm them forever.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Contents

I. The Story of Atlantis

II. Taliessin of the Radiant Brow

III. The Swan-Children of Lir

IV. Usheen in the Island of Youth

V. Bran the Blessed

VI. The Castle of the Active Door

VII. Merlin the Enchanter

VIII. Sir Lancelot of the Lake

IX. The Half-Man

X. King Arthur at Avalon

XI. Maelduin's Voyage

XII. The Voyage of St. Brandan

XIII. Kirwan's Search for Hy-Brasail

XIV. The Isle of Satan's Hand

XV. Antillia, the Island of the Seven Cities

XVI. Harald the Viking

XVII. The Search for Norumbega

XVIII. The Guardians of the St. Lawrence

XIX. The Island of Demons

XX. Bimini and the Fountain of Youth

_Notes_

I

THE STORY OF ATLANTIS

The Greek sage Socrates, when he was but a boy minding his father's

goats, used to lie on the grass under the myrtle trees; and, while the

goats grazed around him, he loved to read over and over the story which

Solon, the law-giver and poet, wrote down for the great-grandfather of

Socrates, and which Solon had always meant to make into a poem, though he

died without doing it. But this was briefly what he wrote in prose:--

"I, Solon, was never in my life so surprised as when I went to Egypt for

instruction in my youth, and there, in the temple of Sais, saw an aged

priest who told me of the island of Atlantis, which was sunk in the sea

thousands of years ago. He said that in the division of the earth the gods

agreed that the god Poseidon, or Neptune, should have, as his share, this

great island which then lay in the ocean west of the Mediterranean Sea,

and was larger than all Asia. There was a mortal maiden there whom

Poseidon wished to marry, and to secure her he surrounded the valley where

she dwelt with three rings of sea and two of land so that no one could

enter; and he made underground springs, with water hot or cold, and

supplied all things needful to the life of man. Here he lived with her for

many years, and they had ten sons; and these sons divided the island among

them and had many children, who dwelt there for more than a thousand

years. They had mines of gold and silver, and pastures for elephants, and

many fragrant plants. They erected palaces and dug canals; and they built

their temples of white, red, and black stone, and covered them with gold

and silver. In these were statues of gold, especially one of the god

Poseidon driving six winged horses. He was so large as to touch the roof

with his head, and had a hundred water-nymphs around him, riding on

dolphins. The islanders had also baths and gardens and sea-walls, and they

had twelve hundred ships and ten thousand chariots. All this was in the

royal city alone, and the people were friendly and good and

well-affectioned towards all. But as time went on they grew less so, and

they did not obey the laws, so that they offended heaven. In a single day

and night the island disappeared and sank beneath the sea; and this is why

the sea in that region grew so impassable and impenetrable, because there

is a quantity of shallow mud in the way, and this was caused by the

sinking of a single vast island."

"This is the tale," said Solon, "which the old Egyptian priest told to

me." And Solon's tale was read by Socrates, the boy, as he lay in the

grass; and he told it to his friends after he grew up, as is written in

his dialogues recorded by his disciple, Plato. And though this great

island of Atlantis has never been seen again, yet a great many smaller

islands have been found in the Atlantic Ocean, and they have sometimes

been lost to sight and found again.

There is, also, in this ocean a vast tract of floating seaweed, called by

sailors the Sargasso Sea,--covering a region as large as France,--and this

has been thought by many to mark the place of a sunken island. There are

also many islands, such as the Azores, which have been supposed at

different times to be fragments of Atlantis; and besides all this, the

remains of the vanished island have been looked for in all parts of the

world. Some writers have thought it was in Sweden, others in Spitzbergen,

others in Africa, in Palestine, in America. Since the depth of the

Atlantic has been more thoroughly sounded, a few writers have maintained

that the inequalities of its floor show some traces of the submerged

Atlantis, but the general opinion of men of science is quite the other

way. The visible Atlantic islands are all, or almost all, they say, of

volcanic origin; and though there are ridges in the bottom of the ocean,

they do not connect the continents.

At any rate, this was the original story of Atlantis, and the legends

which follow in these pages have doubtless all grown, more or less, out of

this first tale which Socrates told.

II

TALIESSIN OF THE RADIANT BROW

In times past there were enchanted islands in the Atlantic Ocean, off the

coast of Wales, and even now the fishermen sometimes think they see them.

On one of these there lived a man named Tegid Voel and his wife called

Cardiwen. They had a son, the ugliest boy in the world, and Cardiwen

formed a plan to make him more attractive by teaching him all possible

wisdom. She was a great magician and resolved to boil a large caldron full

of knowledge for her son, so that he might know all things and be able to

predict all that was to happen. Then she thought people would value him in

spite of his ugliness. But she knew that the caldron must burn a year and

a day without ceasing, until three blessed drops of the water of knowledge

were obtained from it; and those three drops would give all the wisdom she

wanted.

So she put a boy named Gwion to stir the caldron and a blind man named

Morda to feed the fire; and made them promise never to let it cease

boiling for a year and a day. She herself kept gathering magic herbs and

putting them into it. One day when the year was nearly over, it chanced

that three drops of the liquor flew out of the caldron and fell on the

finger of Gwion. They were fiery hot, and he put his finger to his mouth,

and the instant he tasted them he knew that they were the enchanted drops

for which so much trouble had been taken. By their magic he at once

foresaw all that was to come, and especially that Cardiwen the enchantress

would never forgive him.

Then Gwion fled. The caldron burst in two, and all the liquor flowed

forth, poisoning some horses which drank it. These horses belonged to a

king named Gwyddno. Cardiwen came in and saw all the toil of the whole

year lost. Seizing a stick of wood, she struck the blind man Morda

fiercely on the head, but he said, "I am innocent. It was not I who did

it." "True," said Cardiwen; "it was the boy Gwion who robbed me;" and she

rushed to pursue him. He saw her and fled, changing into a hare; but she

became a greyhound and followed him. Running to the water, he became a

fish; but she became another and chased him below the waves. He turned

himself into a bird, when she became a hawk and gave him no rest in the

sky. Just as she swooped on him, he espied a pile of winnowed wheat on the

floor of a barn, and dropping upon it, he became one of the wheat-grains.

Changing herself into a high-crested black hen, Cardiwen scratched him up

and swallowed him, when he changed at last into a boy again and was so

beautiful that she could not kill him outright, but wrapped him in a

leathern bag and cast him into the sea, committing him to the mercy of

God. This was on the twenty-ninth of April.

Now Gwyddno had a weir for catching fish on the sea-strand near his

castle, and every day in May he was wont to take a hundred pounds' worth

of fish. He had a son named Elphin, who was always poor and unsuccessful,

but that year the father had given the son leave to draw all the fish from

the weir, to see if good luck would ever befall him and give him something

with which to begin the world.

When Elphin went next to draw the weir, the man who had charge of it said

in pity, "Thou art always unlucky; there is nothing in the weir but a

leathern bag, which is caught on one of the poles." "How do we know," said

Elphin, "that it may not contain the value of a hundred pounds?" Taking up

the bag and opening it, the man saw the forehead of the boy and said to

Elphin, "Behold, what a radiant brow" (Taliessin). "Let him be called

Taliessin," said Elphin. Then he lifted the boy and placed him sorrowfully

behind him; and made his horse amble gently, that before had been

trotting, and carried him as softly as if he had been sitting in the

easiest chair in the world, and the boy of the radiant brow made a song to

Elphin as they went along.

"Never in Gwyddno's weir

Was there such good luck as this night.

Fair Elphin, dry thy cheeks!

Being too sad will not avail,

Although thou thinkest thou hast no gain.

Too much grief will bring thee no good;

Nor doubt the miracles of the Almighty:

Although I am but little, I am highly gifted.

From seas, and from mountains,

And from the depths of rivers,

God brings wealth to the fortunate man.

Elphin of lively qualities,

Thy resolution is unmanly:

Thou must not be oversorrowful:

Better to trust in God than to forebode ill.

Weak and small as I am,

On the foaming beach of the ocean,

In the day of trouble I shall be

Of more service to thee than three hundred salmon.

Elphin of notable qualities,

Be not displeased at thy misfortune:

Although reclined thus weak in my bag,

There lies a virtue in my tongue.

While I continue thy protector

Thou hast not much to fear."

Then Elphin asked him, "Art thou man or spirit?" And in answer the boy

sang to him this tale of his flight from the woman:--

"I have fled with vigor, I have fled as a frog,

I have fled in the semblance of a crow scarcely finding rest;

I have fled vehemently, I have fled as a chain of lightning,

I have fled as a roe into an entangled thicket;

I have fled as a wolf-cub, I have fled as a wolf in the wilderness,

I have fled as a fox used to many swift bounds and quirks;

I have fled as a martin, which did not avail;

I have fled as a squirrel that vainly hides,

I have fled as a stag's antler, of ruddy course,

I have fled as an iron in a glowing fire,

I have fled as a spear-head, of woe to such as have a wish for it;

I have fled as a fierce bull bitterly fighting,

I have fled as a bristly boar seen in a ravine,

I have fled as a white grain of pure wheat;

Into a dark leathern bag I was thrown,

And on a boundless sea I was sent adrift;

Which was to me an omen of being tenderly nursed,

And the Lord God then set me at liberty."

Then Elphin came with Taliessin to the house of his father, and Gwyddno

asked him if he had a good haul at the fish-weir. "I have something better

than fish." "What is that?" asked the father. "I have a bard," said

Elphin. "Alas, what will he profit thee?" said Gwyddno, to which Taliessin

replied, "He will profit him more than the weir ever profited thee." Said

Gwyddno, "Art thou able to speak, and thou so little?" Then Taliessin

said, "I am better able to speak than thou to question me."

From this time Elphin always prospered, and he and his wife cared for

Taliessin tenderly and lovingly, and the boy dwelt with him until he was

thirteen years old, when Elphin went to make a Christmas visit to his

uncle Maelgwyn, who was a great king and held open court. There were four

and twenty bards there, and all proclaimed that no king had a wife so

beautiful as the queen, or a bard so wise as the twenty-four, who all

agreed upon this decision. Elphin said, on the contrary, that it was he

himself who had the most beautiful wife and the wisest bard, and for this

he was thrown into prison. Taliessin learning this, set forth from home to

visit the palace and free his adoptive father, Elphin.

In those days it was the custom of kings to sit in the hall and dine in

royal state with lords and bards about them who should keep proclaiming

the greatness and glory of the king and his knights. Taliessin placed

himself in a quiet corner, waiting for the four and twenty bards to pass,

and as each one passed by, Taliessin made an ugly face, and gave a sound

with his finger on his lips, thus, "Blerwm, Blerwm." Each bard went by and

bowed himself before the king, but instead of beginning to chant his

praises, could only play "Blerwm, Blerwm" on the lips, as the boy had

done. The king was amazed and thought they must be intoxicated, so he sent

one of his lords to them, telling them to behave themselves and remember

where they were. Twice and thrice he told them, but they could only repeat

the same foolishness, until at last the king ordered one of his squires to

give a blow to the chief bard, and the squire struck him a blow with a

broom, so that he fell back on his seat. Then he arose and knelt before

the king, and said, "Oh, honorable king, be it known unto your grace that

it is not from too much drinking that we are dumb, but through the

influence of a spirit which sits in the corner yonder in the form of a

child." Then the king bade a squire to bring Taliessin before him, and he

asked the boy who he was. He answered:--

"Primary chief bard I am to Elphin,

And my original country is the region of the summer stars;

I am a wonder whose origin is not known;

I have been fostered in the land of the Deity,

I have been teacher to all intelligences,

I am able to instruct the whole universe.

I was originally little Gwion,

And at length I am Taliessin."

Then the king and his nobles wondered much, for they had never heard the

like from a boy so young. The king then called his wisest bard to answer

Taliessin, but he could only play "Blerwm" on his lips as before, and

each of the king's four and twenty bards tried in the same way and could

do nothing more. Then the king bade Taliessin sing again, and he began:--

"Discover thou what is

The strong creature from before the flood,

Without flesh, without bone,

Without vein, without blood,

Without head, without feet;

It will neither be older nor younger

Than at the beginning;

Great God! how the sea whitens

When first it comes!

Great are its gusts

When it comes from the south;

Great are its evaporations

When it strikes on coasts.

It is in the field, it is in the wood,

Without hand and without foot,

Without signs of old age,

It is also so wide,

As the surface of the earth;

And it was not born,

Nor was it seen.

It will cause consternation

Wherever God willeth.

On sea and on land

It neither sees, nor is seen.

Its course is devious,

And will not come when desired.

On land and on sea

It is indispensable.

It is without equal,

It is many-sided;

It is not confined,

It is incomparable;

It comes from four quarters;

It is noxious, it is beneficial;

It is yonder, it is here;

It will decompose,

But it will not repair the injury;

It will not suffer for its doings,

Seeing it is blameless.

One Being has prepared it,

Out of all creatures,

By a tremendous blast,

To wreak vengeance

On Maelgwyn Gwynedd."

And while he was thus singing his verse near the door, there came

suddenly a mighty storm of wind, so that the king and all his nobles

thought the castle would fall on their heads. They saw that Taliessin had

not merely been singing the song of the wind, but seemed to have power to

command it. Then the king hastily ordered that Elphin should be brought

from his dungeon and placed before Taliessin, and the chains came loose

from his feet, and he was set free.

As they rode away from the court, the king and his courtiers rode with

them, and Taliessin bade Elphin propose a race with the king's horses.

Four and twenty horses were chosen, and Taliessin got four and twenty

twigs of holly which he had burnt black, and he ordered the youth who was

to ride Elphin's horse to let all the others set off before him, and bade

him as he overtook each horse to strike him with a holly twig and throw it

down. Then he had him watch where his own horse should stumble and throw

down his cap at the place. The race being won, Taliessin brought his

master to the spot where the cap lay; and put workmen to dig a hole there.

When they had dug deeply enough they found a caldron full of gold, and

Taliessin said, "Elphin, this is my payment to thee for having taken me

from the water and reared me until now." And on this spot stands a pool of

water until this day.

III

THE SWAN-CHILDREN OF LIR

King Lir of Erin had four young children who were cared for tenderly at

first by their stepmother, the new queen; but there came a time when she

grew jealous of the love their father bore them, and resolved that she

would endure it no longer. Sometimes there was murder in her heart, but

she could not bear the thought of that wickedness, and she resolved at

last to choose another way to rid herself of them. One day she took them

to drive in her chariot:--Finola, who was eight years old, with her three

younger brothers,--Aodh, Fiacre, and little Conn, still a baby. They were

beautiful children, the legend says, with skins white and soft as swans'

feathers, and with large blue eyes and very sweet voices. Reaching a lake,

she told them that they might bathe in the clear water; but so soon as

they were in it she struck them with a fairy wand,--for she was of the

race of the Druids, who had magical power,--and she turned them into four

beautiful snow-white swans. But they still had human voices, and Finola

said to her, "This wicked deed of thine shall be punished, for the doom

that awaits thee will surely be worse than ours." Then Finola asked, "How

long shall we be in the shape of swans?" "For three hundred years," said

the woman, "on smooth Lake Darvra; then three hundred years on the sea of

Moyle" (this being the sea between Ireland and Scotland); "and then three

hundred years at Inis Glora, in the Great Western Sea" (this was a rocky

island in the Atlantic). "Until the Tailkenn (St. Patrick) shall come to

Ireland and bring the Christian faith, and until you hear the Christian

bell, you shall not be freed. Neither your power nor mine can now bring

you back to human shape; but you shall keep your human reason and your

Gaelic speech, and you shall sing music so sweet that all who hear it

shall gladly listen."

She left them, and ere long their father, King Lir, came to the shore and

heard their singing. He asked how they came to have human voices. "We are

thy four children," said Finola, "changed into swans by our stepmother's

jealousy." "Then come and live with me," said her sorrowing father. "We

are not permitted to leave the lake," she said, "or live with our people

any more. But we are allowed to dwell together and to keep our reason and

our speech, and to sing sweet music to you." Then they sang, and the king

and all his followers were at first amazed and then lulled to sleep.

Then King Lir returned and met the cruel stepmother at her father's

palace. When her father, King Bove, was told what she had done, he was hot

with anger. "This wicked deed," he said, "shall bring severer punishment

on thee than on the innocent children, for their suffering shall end, but

thine never shall." Then King Bove asked her what form of existence would

be most terrible to her. She replied, "That of a demon of the air." "Be it

so," said her father, who had also Druidical power. He struck her with his

wand, and she became a bat, and flew away with a scream, and the legend

says, "She is still a demon of the air and shall be a demon of the air

until the end of time."

After this, the people of all the races that were in Erin used to come

and encamp by the lake and listen to the swans. The happy were made

happier by the song, and those who were in grief or illness or pain forgot

their sorrows and were lulled to rest. There was peace in all that region,

while war and tumult filled other lands. Vast changes took place in three

centuries--towers and castles rose and fell, villages were built and

destroyed, generations were born and died;--and still the swan-children

lived and sang, until at the end of three hundred years they flew away, as

was decreed, to the stormy sea of Moyle; and from that time it was made a

law that no one should kill a swan in Erin.

Beside the sea of Moyle they found no longer the peaceful and wooded

shores they had known, but only steep and rocky coasts and a wild, wild

sea. There came a great storm one night, and the swans knew that they

could not keep together, so they resolved that if separated they would

meet at a rock called Carricknarone. Finola reached there first, and took

her brothers under her wings, all wet, shivering, and exhausted. Many such

nights followed, and in one terrible winter storm, when they nestled

together on Carricknarone, the water froze into solid ice around them, and

their feet and wings were so frozen to the rock that when they moved they

left the skin of their feet, the quills of their wings, and the feathers

of their breasts clinging there. When the ice melted, and they swam out

into the sea, their bodies smarted with pain until the feathers grew once

more.

One day they saw a glittering troop of horsemen approaching along the

shore and knew that they were their own kindred, though from far

generations back, the Dedannen or Fairy Host. They greeted each other with

joy, for the Fairy Host had been sent to seek for the swans; and on

returning to their chiefs they narrated what had passed, and the chiefs

said, "We cannot help them, but we are glad they are living; and we know

that at last the enchantment will be broken and that they will be freed

from their sorrows." So passed their lives until Finola sang, one day,

"The Second Woe has passed--the second period of three hundred years,"

when they flew out on the broad ocean, as was decreed, and went to the

island of Inis Glora. There they spent the next three hundred years, amid

yet wilder storms and yet colder winds. No more the peaceful shepherds and

living neighbors were around them; but often the sailor and fisherman, in

his little coracle, saw the white gleam of their wings or heard the sweet

notes of their song and knew that the children of Lir were near.

But the time came when the nine hundred years of banishment were ended,

and they might fly back to their father's old home, Finnahà. Flying for

days above the sea, they alighted at the palace once so well known, but

everything was changed by time--even the walls of their father's palace

were crumbled and rain-washed. So sad was the sight that they remained one

day only, and flew back to Inis Glora, thinking that if they must be

forever solitary, they would live where they had lived last, not where

they had been reared.

One May morning, as the children of Lir floated in the air around the

island of Inis Glora, they heard a faint bell sounding across the eastern

sea. The mist lifted, and they saw afar off, beyond the waves, a vision of

a stately white-robed priest, with attendants around him on the Irish

shore. They knew that it must be St. Patrick, the Tailkenn, or Tonsured

One, who was bringing, as had been so long promised, Christianity to

Ireland. Sailing through the air, above the blue sea, towards their native

coast, they heard the bell once more, now near and distinct, and they knew

that all evil spirits were fleeing away, and that their own hopes were to

be fulfilled. As they approached the land, St. Patrick stretched his hand

and said, "Children of Lir, you may tread your native land again." And the

sweet swan-sister, Finola, said, "If we tread our native land, it can only

be to die, after our life of nine centuries. Baptize us while we are yet

living." When they touched the shore, the weight of all those centuries

fell upon them; they resumed their human bodies, but they appeared old and

pale and wrinkled. Then St. Patrick baptized them, and they died; but,

even as he did so, a change swiftly came over them; and they lay side by

side, once more children, in their white night-clothes, as when their

father Lir, long centuries ago, had kissed them at evening and seen their

blue eyes close in sleep and had touched with gentle hand their white

foreheads and their golden hair. Their time of sorrow was ended and their

last swan-song was sung; but the cruel stepmother seems yet to survive in

her bat-like shape, and a single glance at her weird and malicious little

face will lead us to doubt whether she has yet fully atoned for her sin.

IV

USHEEN IN THE ISLAND OF YOUTH

The old Celtic hero and poet Usheen or Oisin, whose supposed songs are

known in English as those of Ossian, lived to a great old age, surviving

all others of the race of the Feni, to which he belonged; and he was asked

in his last years what had given him such length of life. This is the tale

he told:--

After the fatal battle of Gavra, in which most of the Feni were killed,

Usheen and his father, the king, and some of the survivors of the battle

were hunting the deer with their dogs, when they met a maiden riding on a

slender white horse with hoofs of gold, and with a golden crescent between

his ears. The maiden's hair was of the color of citron and was gathered in

a silver band; and she was clad in a white garment embroidered with

strange devices. She asked them why they rode slowly and seemed sad, and

not like other hunters; and they replied that it was because of the death

of their friends and the ruin of their race. When they asked her in turn

whence she came, and why, and whether she was married, she replied that

she had never had a lover or a husband, but that she had crossed the sea

for the love of the great hero and bard Usheen, whom she had never seen.

Then Usheen was overcome with love for her, but she said that to wed her

he must follow her across the sea to the Island of Perpetual Youth. There

he would have a hundred horses and a hundred sheep and a hundred silken

robes, a hundred swords, a hundred bows, and a hundred youths to follow

him; while she would have a hundred maidens to wait on her. But how, he

asked, was he to reach this island? He was to mount her horse and ride

behind her. So he did this, and the slender white horse, not feeling his

weight, dashed across the waves of the ocean, which did not yield beneath

his tread. They galloped across the very sea, and the maiden, whose name

was Niam, sang to him as they rode, and this so enchantingly that he

scarcely knew whether hours passed or days. Sometimes deer ran by them

over the water, followed by red-eared hounds in full chase; sometimes a

maiden holding up an apple of gold; sometimes a beautiful youth; but they

themselves rode on always westward.

At last they drew near an island which was not, Niam said, the island

they were seeking; but it was one where a beautiful princess was kept

under a spell until some defender should slay a cruel giant who held her

under enchantment until she should either wed him or furnish a defender.

The youth Usheen, being an Irishman and not easily frightened, naturally

offered his services as defender, and they waited three days and nights to

carry on the conflict. He had fought at home--so the legend says--with

wild boars, with foreign invaders, and with enchanters, but he never had

quite so severe a contest as with this giant; but after he had cut off his

opponent's head and had been healed with precious balm by the beautiful

princess, he buried the giant's body in a deep grave and placed above it a

great stone engraved in the Ogham alphabet--in which all the letters are

given in straight lines.

After this he and Niam again mounted the white steed and galloped away

over the waves. Niam was again singing, when soft music began to be heard

in the distance, as if in the centre of the setting sun. They drew nearer

and nearer to a shore where the very trees trembled with the multitude of

birds that sang upon them; and when they reached the shore, Niam gave one

note of song, and a band of youths and maidens came rushing towards them

and embraced them with eagerness. Then they too sang, and as they did it,

one brought to Usheen a harp of silver and bade him sing of earthly joys.

He found himself chanting, as he thought, with peculiar spirit and melody,

but as he told them of human joys they kept still and began to weep, till

at last one of them seized the silver harp and flung it away into a pool

of water, saying, "It is the saddest harp in all the world."

Then he forgot all the human joys which seemed to those happy people only

as sorrows compared with their own; and he dwelt with them thenceforward

in perpetual youth. For a hundred years he chased the deer and went

fishing in strangely carved boats and joined in the athletic sports of the

young men; for a hundred years the gentle Niam was his wife.

But one day, when Usheen was by the beach, there floated to his feet what

seemed a wooden staff, and he drew it from the waves. It was the battered

fragment of a warrior's lance. The blood stains of war were still on it,

and as he looked at it he recalled the old days of the Feni, the wars and

tumult of his youth; and how he had outlived his tribe and all had passed

away. Niam came softly to him and rested against his shoulder, but it did

not soothe his pain, and he heard one of the young men watching him say to

another, "The human sadness has come back into his eyes." The people

around stood watching him, all sharing his sorrow, and knowing that his

time of happiness was over and that he would go back among men. So indeed

it was; Niam and Usheen mounted the white steed again and galloped away

over the sea, but she had warned him when they mounted that he must never

dismount for an instant, for that if he once touched the earth, she and

the steed would vanish forever, that his youth too would disappear, and

that he would be left alone on earth--an old man whose whole generation

had vanished.

They passed, as before, over the sea; the same visions hovered around

them, youths and maidens and animals of the chase; they passed by many

islands, and at last reached the shore of Erin again. As they travelled

over its plains and among its hills, Oisin looked in vain for his old

companions. A little people had taken their place,--small men and women,

mounted on horses as small;--and these people gazed in wonder at the

mighty Usheen. "We have heard," they said, "of the hero Finn, and the

poets have written many tales of him and of his people, the Feni. We have

read in old books that he had a son Usheen who went away with a fairy

maiden; but he was never seen again, and there is no race of the Feni

left." Yet refusing to believe this, and always looking round for the

people whom he had known and loved of old, he thought within himself that

perhaps the Feni were not to be seen because they were hunting fierce

wolves by night, as they used to do in his boyhood, and that they were

therefore sleeping in the daytime; but again an old man said to him, "The

Feni are dead." Then he remembered that it was a hundred years, and that

his very race had perished, and he turned with contempt on the little men

and their little horses. Three hundred of them as he rode by were trying

to lift a vast stone, but they staggered under its weight, and at last

fell and lay beneath it; then leaning from his saddle Usheen lifted the

stone with one hand and flung it five yards. But with the strain the

saddle girth broke, and Usheen came to the ground; the white steed shook

himself and neighed, then galloped away, bearing Niam with him, and Usheen

lay with all his strength gone from him--a feeble old man. The Island of

Youth could only be known by those who dwelt always within it, and those

mortals who had once left it could dwell there no more.

V

BRAN THE BLESSED

The mighty king Bran, a being of gigantic size, sat one day on the cliffs

of his island in the Atlantic Ocean, near to Hades and the Gates of Night,

when he saw ships sailing towards him and sent men to ask what they were.

They were a fleet sent by Matholweh, the king of Ireland, who had sent to

ask for Branwen, Bran's sister, as his wife. Without moving from his rock

Bran bid the monarch land, and sent Branwen back with him as queen.

But there came a time when Branwen was ill-treated at the palace; they

sent her into the kitchen and made her cook for the court, and they caused

the butcher to come every day (after he had cut up the meat) and give her

a blow on the ear. They also drew up all their boats on the shore for

three years, that she might not send for her brother. But she reared a

starling in the cover of the kneading-trough, taught it to speak, and told

it how to find her brother; and then she wrote a letter describing her

sorrows and bound it to the bird's wing, and it flew to the island and

alighted on Bran's shoulder, "ruffling its feathers" (says the Welsh

legend) "so that the letter was seen, and they knew that the bird had been

reared in a domestic manner." Then Bran resolved to cross the sea, but he

had to wade through the water, as no ship had yet been built large enough

to hold him; and he carried all his musicians (pipers) on his shoulders.

As he approached the Irish shore, men ran to the king, saying that they

had seen a forest on the sea, where there never before had been a tree,

and that they had also seen a mountain which moved. Then the king asked

Branwen, the queen, what it could be. She answered, "These are the men of

the Island of the Mighty, who have come hither to protect me." "What is

the forest?" they asked. "The yards and masts of ships." "What mountain is

that by the side of the ships?" "It is Bran my brother, coming to the

shoal water and rising." "What is the lofty ridge with the lake on each

side?" "That is his nose," she said, "and the two lakes are his fierce

eyes."

Then the people were terrified: there was yet a river for Bran to pass,

and they broke down the bridge which crossed it, but Bran laid himself

down and said, "Who will be a chief, let him be a bridge." Then his men

laid hurdles on his back, and the whole army crossed over; and that saying

of his became afterwards a proverb. Then the Irish resolved, in order to

appease the mighty visitor, to build him a house, because he had never

before had one that would hold him; and they decided to make the house

large enough to contain the two armies, one on each side. They accordingly

built this house, and there were a hundred pillars, and the builders

treacherously hung a leathern bag on each side of each pillar and put an

armed man inside of each, so that they could all rise by night and kill

the sleepers. But Bran's brother, who was a suspicious man, asked the

builders what was in the first bag. "Meal, good soul," they answered; and

he, putting his hand in, felt a man's head and crushed it with his mighty

fingers, and so with the next and the next and with the whole two hundred.

After this it did not take long to bring on a quarrel between the two

armies, and they fought all day.

After this great fight between the men of Ireland and the men of the

Isles of the Mighty there were but seven of these last who escaped,

besides their king Bran, who was wounded in the foot with a poisoned dart.

Then he knew that he should soon die, but he bade the seven men to cut off

his head and told them that they must always carry it with them--that it

would never decay and would always be able to speak and be pleasant

company for them. "A long time will you be on the road," he said. "In

Harlech you will feast seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing to you

all the while. And at the Island of Gwales you will dwell for fourscore

years, and you may remain there, bearing the head with you uncorrupted,

until you open the door that looks towards the mainland; and after you

have once opened that door you can stay no longer, but must set forth to

London to bury the head, leaving it there to look toward France."

So they went on to Harlech and there stopped to rest, and sat down to eat

and drink. And there came three birds, which began singing a certain song,

and all the songs they had ever heard were unpleasant compared with it;

and the songs seemed to them to be at a great distance from them, over the

sea, yet the notes were heard as distinctly as if they were close by; and

it is said that at this repast they continued seven years. At the close of

this time they went forth to an island in the sea called Gwales. There

they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the ocean and a spacious hall

built for them. They went into it and found two of its doors open, but the

third door, looking toward Cornwall, was closed. "See yonder," said their

leader Manawydan; "that is the door we may not open." And that night they

regaled themselves and were joyful. And of all they had seen of food laid

before them, and of all they had heard said, they remembered nothing;

neither of that, nor of any sorrow whatsoever. There they remained

fourscore years, unconscious of having ever spent a time more joyous and

mirthful. And they were not more weary than when first they came, neither

did they, any of them, know the time they had been there. It was not more

irksome for them to have the head with them, than if Bran the Blessed had

been with them himself. And because of these fourscore years, it was

called "The Entertaining of the Noble Head."

One day said Heilwyn the son of Gwyn, "Evil betide me, if I do not open

the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it." So he

opened the door and looked towards Cornwall. And when they had looked they

were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the

friends and companions they had ever lost, and of all the misery that had

befallen them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of

the fate of their lord. And because of their perturbation they could not

rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London. And they buried

the head in the White Mount.

The island called Gwales is supposed to be that now named Gresholm, eight

or ten miles off the coast of Pembrokeshire; and to this day the Welsh

sailors on that coast talk of the Green Meadows of Enchantment lying out

at sea west of them, and of men who had either landed on them or seen them

suddenly vanishing. Some of the people of Milford used to declare that

they could sometimes see the Green Islands of the fairies quite

distinctly; and they believed that the fairies went to and fro between

their islands and the shore through a subterranean gallery under the sea.

They used, indeed, to make purchases in the markets of Milford or

Langhorne, and this they did sometimes without being seen and always

without speaking, for they seemed to know the prices of the things they

wished to buy and always laid down the exact sum of money needed. And

indeed, how could the seven companions of the Enchanted Head have spent

eighty years of incessant feasting on an island of the sea, without

sometimes purchasing supplies from the mainland?

VI

THE CASTLE OF THE ACTIVE DOOR

Perfect is my chair in Caer Sidi;

Plague and age hurt not who's in it--

They know, Manawydan and Pryderi.

Three organs round a fire sing before it,

And about its points are ocean's streams

And the abundant well above it--

Sweeter than white wine the drink in it.

Peredur, the knight, rode through the wild woods of the Enchanted Island

until he arrived on clear ground outside the forest. Then he beheld a

castle on level ground in the middle of a meadow; and round the castle

flowed a stream, and inside the castle there were large and spacious halls

with great windows. Drawing nearer the castle, he saw it to be turning

more rapidly than any wind blows. On the ramparts he saw archers shooting

so vigorously that no armor would protect against them; there were also

men blowing horns so loud that the earth appeared to tremble; and at the

gates were lions, in iron chains, roaring so violently that one might

fancy that the castle and the woods were ready to be uprooted. Neither the

lions nor the warriors resisted Peredur, but he found a woman sitting by

the gate, who offered to carry him on her back to the hall. This was the

queen Rhiannon, who, having been accused of having caused the death of her

child, was sentenced to remain seven years sitting by the gate, to tell

her story to every one, and to offer to carry all strangers on her back

into the castle.