I chose one of my shop-lads, who was about twelve years old, and

invited Vincenzio Romoli again; and we also took a certain Agnolino

Gaddi, who was a very intimate friend of both. When we came once more

to the place appointed, the necromancer made just the same

preparations, attended by the same and even more impressive details.

Then he introduced us into the circle, which he had reconstructed with

art more admirable and yet more wondrous ceremonies. Afterwards he

appointed my friend Vincenzio to the ordering of the perfumes and the

fire, and with him Agnolino Gaddi. He next placed in my hand the

pentacle, which he bid me turn toward the points he indicated, and

under the pentacle I held the little boy, my workman. Now the

necromancer began to utter those awful invocations, calling by name on

multitudes of demons who are captains of their legions, and these he

summoned by the virtue and potency of God, the Uncreated, Living, and

Eternal, in phrases of the Hebrew, and also of the Greek and Latin

tongues; insomuch that in a short space of time the whole Coliseum was

full of a hundredfold as many as had appeared upon the first occasion.

Vincenzio Romoli, together with Agnolino, tended the fire and heaped

on quantities of precious perfumes. At the advice of the necromancer I

again demanded to be reunited with Angelica. The sorcerer turned to me

and said, "Hear you what they have replied--that in the space of one

month you will be where she is?" Then once more he prayed me to stand

firm by him, because the legions were a thousandfold more than he had

summoned, and were the most dangerous of all the denizens of hell; and

now that they had settled what I asked, it behoved us to be civil to

them and dismiss them gently. On the other side, the boy, who was

beneath the pentacle, shrieked out in terror that a million of the

fiercest men were swarming round and threatening us. He said moreover

that four huge giants had appeared, who were striving to force their

way inside the circle. Meanwhile the necromancer, trembling with fear,

kept doing his best with mild and soft persuasions to dismiss them.

Vincenzio Romoli, who quaked like an aspen-leaf, looked after the

perfumes. Though I was quite as frightened as the rest of them, I

tried to show it less, and inspired them all with marvelous courage;

but the truth is that I had given myself up for dead when I saw the

terror of the necromancer. The boy had stuck his head between his

knees, exclaiming, "This is how I will meet death, for we are

certainly dead men." Again I said to him, "These creatures are all

inferior to us, and what you see is only smoke and shadow; so then

raise your eyes." When he had raised them he cried out, "The whole

Coliseum is in flames, and the fire is advancing on us;" then covering

his face with his hands, he groaned again that he was dead, and that

he could not endure the sight longer. The necromancer appealed for my

support, entreating me to stand firm by him, and to have asafetida

flung upon the coals; so I turned to Vincenzio Romoli, and told him to

make the fumigation at once. While uttering these words I looked at

Agnolino Gaddi, whose eyes were starting from their sockets in his

terror, and who was more than half dead, and said to him, "Agnolo, in

time and place like this we must not yield to fright, but do the

utmost to bestir ourselves; therefore up at once, and fling a handful

of that asafetida upon the fire."... The boy, roused by that great

stench and noise, lifted his face a little, and hearing me laugh, he

plucked up courage, and said the devils were taking to flight

tempestuously. So we abode thus until the matin bells began to sound.

Then the boy told us again that but few remained, and those were at a

distance. When the necromancer had concluded his ceremonies he put off

his wizard's robe, and packed up a great bundle of books which he had

brought with him; then all together we issued with him from the

circle, huddling as close as we could to one another, especially the

boy, who had got into the middle, and taken the necromancer by his

gown and me by the cloak. All the while that we were going toward our

houses in the Banchi he kept saying that two of the devils he had seen

in the Coliseum were gamboling in front of us, skipping now along the

roofs and now upon the ground. The necromancer assured me that often

as he had entered magic circles, he had never met with such a serious

affair as this. He also tried to persuade me to assist him in

consecrating a book, by means of which we should extract immeasurable

wealth, since we could call up fiends to show us where treasures were,

whereof the earth is full; and after this wise we should become the

richest of mankind: love affairs like mine were nothing but vanities

and follies without consequence. I replied that if I were a Latin

scholar I should be very willing to do what he suggested. He continued

to persuade me by arguing that Latin scholarship was of no importance,

and that if he wanted, he could have found plenty of good Latinists;

but that he had never met with a man of soul so firm as mine, and that

I ought to follow his counsel. Engaged in this conversation, we

reached our homes, and each one of us dreamed all that night of

devils.

As we were in the habit of meeting daily, the necromancer kept urging

me to join in his adventure. Accordingly I asked him how long it would

take, and where we should have to go. To this he answered that we

might get through with it in less than a month, and that the most

suitable locality for the purpose was the hill country of Norcia: a

master of his in the art had indeed consecrated such a book quite

close to Rome, at a place called the Badia di Farfa; but he had met

with some difficulties there, which would not occur in the mountains

of Norcia: the peasants also of that district are people to be

trusted, and have some practice in these matters, so that at a pinch

they are able to render valuable assistance.

This priestly sorcerer moved me so by his persuasions that I was well

disposed to comply with his request; but I said I wanted first to

finish the medals I was making for the Pope. I had confided what I was

doing about them to him alone, begging him to keep my secret. At the

same time I never stopped asking him if he believed that I should be

reunited to my Sicilian Angelica at the time appointed; for the date

was drawing near, and I thought it singular that I heard nothing about

her. The necromancer told me that it was quite certain I should find

myself where she was, since the devils never break their word when

they promise, as they did on that occasion; but he bade me keep my

eyes open and be on the lookout against some accident which might

happen to me in that connection, and put restraint upon myself to

endure somewhat against my inclination, for he could discern a great

and imminent danger in it: well would it be for me if I went with him

to consecrate the book, since this would avert the peril that menaced

me and would make us both most fortunate.

I was beginning to hanker after the adventure more than he did; but I

said that a certain Maestro Giovanni of Castel Bolognese had just come

to Rome, very ingenious in the art of making medals of the sort I made

in steel, and that I thirsted for nothing more than to compete with

him and take the world by storm with some great masterpiece, which I

hoped would annihilate all those enemies of mine by the force of

genius and not the sword. The sorcerer on his side went on urging,

"Nay, prithee, Benvenuto, come with me and shun a great disaster which

I see impending over you." However, I had made my mind up, come what

would, to finish my medal, and we were now approaching the end of the

month. I was so absorbed and enamored by my work that I thought no

more about Angelica or anything of that kind, but gave my whole self

up to it.

BENVENUTO LOSES SELF-CONTROL UNDER SEVERE PROVOCATION

From the 'Memoirs': Symonds's Translation

It happened one day, close on the hours of vespers, that I had to go,

at an unusual time for me, from my house to my workshop; for I ought

to say that the latter was in the Banchi, while I lived behind the

Banchi, and went rarely to the shop; all my business there I left in

the hands of my partner, Felice. Having stayed a short while in the

workshop, I remembered that I had to say something to Alessandro del

Bene. So I arose, and when I reached the Banchi, I met a man called

Ser Benedetto, who was a great friend of mine. He was a notary, born

in Florence, son of a blind man who said prayers about the streets for

alms, and a Sienese by race. This Ser Benedetto had been very many

years at Naples; afterwards he had settled in Rome, where he

transacted business for some Sienese merchants of the Chigi. My

partner had over and over again asked him for some moneys which were

due for certain little rings confided to Ser Benedetto. That very day,

meeting him in the Banchi, he demanded his money rather roughly, as

his wont was. Benedetto was walking with his masters, and they,

annoyed by the interruption, scolded him sharply, saying they would be

served by somebody else, in order not to have to listen to such

barking.

Ser Benedetto did the best he could to excuse himself, swore that he

had paid the goldsmith, and said he had no power to curb the rage of

madmen. The Sienese took his words ill, and dismissed him on the spot.

Leaving them, he ran like an arrow to my shop, probably to take

revenge upon Felice. It chanced that just in the middle of the street

we met. I, who had heard nothing of the matter, greeted him most

kindly, according to my custom, to which courtesy he replied with

insults. Then what the sorcerer had said flashed all at once upon my

mind; and bridling myself as well as I was able, in the way he bade

me, I answered:--

"Good brother Benedetto, don't fly into a rage with me, for I have

done you no harm, nor do I know anything about these affairs of yours.

Please go and finish what you have to do with Felice. He is quite

capable of giving you a proper answer; but inasmuch as I know nothing

about it, you are wrong to abuse me in this way, especially as you are

well aware that I am not the man to put up with insults."

He retorted that I knew everything, and that he was the man to make me

bear a heavier load than that, and that Felice and I were two great

rascals. By this time a crowd had gathered round to hear the quarrel.

Provoked by his ugly words, I stooped and took up a lump of mud--for

it had rained--and hurled it with a quick and unpremeditated movement

at his face. He ducked his head, so that the mud hit him in the middle

of the skull. There was a stone in it with several sharp angles, one

of which striking him, he fell stunned like a dead man; whereupon all

the bystanders, seeing the great quantity of blood, judged that he was

really dead.

While he was still lying on the ground, and people were preparing to

carry him away, Pompeo the jeweler passed by. The Pope had sent for

him to give orders about some jewels. Seeing the fellow in such a

miserable plight, he asked who had struck him; on which they told him,

"Benvenuto did it, but the stupid creature brought it down upon

himself." No sooner had Pompeo reached the Pope than he began to

speak: "Most blessed Father, Benvenuto has this very moment murdered

Tobbia; I saw it with my own eyes." On this the Pope in a fury ordered

the Governor, who was in the presence, to take and hang me at once in

the place where the homicide had been committed; adding that he must

do all he could to catch me, and not appear again before him until he

had hanged me.

CELTIC LITERATURE

BY WILLIAM SHARP AND ERNEST RHYS

The widespread and deepening contemporary interest in Celtic

literature is primarily due to four distinct influences. The

publication (followed by its world-wide repute and the bitterest

literary controversy of modern days) of Macpherson's 'Ossian' comes

first. There is no inorganic development in art, whether the art of

words or any other: in the fundamental sense, there is no accident.

It is a mistake therefore to speak of Macpherson's 'Ossian' as a

startling meteor which flashed across the world of literature, a brief

apparition out of a void into which it has returned, leaving only a

mass of debris to testify to its actuality and bygone splendor: a

mistake, for this famous production was indirectly but closely related

to another literary influence, the publication of Bishop Percy's

celebrated 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.' In art there is no

room for accidents: for art is an organic development, and the most

seemingly arbitrary variations are inevitable or at least natural.

After Macpherson's 'Ossian' the next important influence is the

'Mabinogion,' as retold in English from the early Welsh originals by

Lady Charlotte Guest. The influence, as well as the inherent beauty

and interest, of each of these famous productions will be dealt with

later in these volumes.

'Ossian' and the 'Mabinogion' afforded a new standpoint. The two

heralds of the treasure we have inherited in this Celtic literature of

the past were Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. Renan by his treatise

on 'La Poesie des Races Celtiques,' and later Matthew Arnold by his

essay on 'Celtic Literature,' accomplished an almost inestimable

service. Everything that has been done since is but a variation along

the lines indicated by these two great critics; and with this result,

that it is already a commonplace to say we have in the Celtic

literature of the past not only an almost inexhaustible mine of

beauty, but the material for a new and vivid Anglo-Celtic literature

of the imagination.

In the ensuing brief sketch of some of the main features of this

subject, at once so fascinating and so important, no attempt is made

to do other than to interest, and perhaps allure further, the general

reader. For convenience's sake, this brief paper may be divided into

four sections:--Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish.

I--IRISH

"From what dragon's teeth, and when sown, sprang forth this warlike

crop?" asks Mr. Standish O'Grady, writing in his 'History of Ireland'

of the host of famous heroic men and women whose names have come

down to us from the antique periods of the Gael. "Out of the ground

they start," he tells us, "the armies of her demigods and

champions,--beautiful heroic forms,--in the North the Red Branch, in

the South the Ernai or Clan Dega, in the West Queen Meave and her

champions, in the Southeast that mysterious half-red Meave and her

martial grooms!"

A wonderful world! that heroic Ireland, the old Ireland of Queen Meave

and Cuculain, which only now for the first time is become at all a

possible region for the most of us. It is due to the remarkable modern

band of Irish writers and scholars represented by Mr. O'Grady in the

one category, and his older namesake, Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady of

the 'Silva Gadelica,' in the other, that this literature is at last

unsealed for those readers who have no Gaelic equipment to aid them.

With their aid Queen Meave emerges into new life in poetry and

romance; Cuculain is seen fighting afresh his ancient battles; and St.

Patrick encounters again the primitive Ossian: all these, fortunately,

are now as much within the reach of an American audience as their

classic prototypes in Homer or in the northern sagas. These few more

familiar names, out of the vast number which threaten confusion in the

old Irish romances and bardic books, may serve as clues in the

perplexing labyrinth of a subject which seems at first so difficult to

penetrate. Take Queen Meave, for instance: how do we arrive at her

place and story, so early in the centuries? She belongs to the second

great cycle of Irish legendary history, in which she has Cuculain,

Conor mac Nessa, Fergus, and Deirdre, as companions in romance. In

this cycle the dramatic centre is the fierce interminable war between

Connaught and Ulster, brought about by the treacherous murder of the

sons of Usnach. The story of their tragic end, and of the melancholy

death of Deirdre, is one of the most moving in all Irish tradition.

But the master-romance of the cycle is not that of Deirdre, but of

Queen Meave and her foray in quest of the famous bull of Louth; a tale

familiar in Irish under its title of 'The Cattle-spoiling of Cooley.'

If one is tired of the modern world and its literary interpretations,

its self-conscious fictions and impressionistic poetry, one cannot do

better than dive deep into the past, where Queen Meave marches in

half-barbaric splendor and beauty across the stage of the ancient

Eri, which was approximately contemporaneous with the birth of

Christ. That was the time when the Red Branch mustered in the north

its heroic array of warriors, descendants of Ir, the son of Milesius;

and of the Red Branch came Cuculain the mighty. Connaught, the Ireland

west of the Shannon, was Queen Meave's patrimony, where still lived

the chief remnant of the prehistoric Firbolgs, the race that once

fought with the gods themselves. And we have still to supply the

mid-Ireland, with Tara as capital, and Cairbre as king; the Leinster

of that day, subject to Finn and Far-Cu; and the Munster, subject to

Lok and Eocha, with the children of Conairy Mor the Beautiful, too,

ranging the south in their fullness of power. The colors to be got out

of this Celtic antiquity, the spirit of life that surges in its

romantic annals, the fine fury of its heroes, the beauty and

picturesqueness of its women, combine to make a story that only an

Ireland of the first century could have inspired, and that only an

Ireland of the sixth to the ninth century could have written.

Throughout Celtic history, the sixth century is for many reasons a

climacteric period. In Irish literature, we reach about the year 575 a

first point to which we can refer approximately the more conscious

operation of its genius. Then it was that it made its first open claim

to something like a national recognition. At the famous conclave of

that year, held at Druimceta, it attained an almost academic position

and organization. In this conclave, the then king of the Scottish

Gaels, the leading King of the Irish, and St. Columcill, assisted at

the deliberations which decided the _caste_ and privileges of the

_Illuminati_. There seem to have been three grades: the first, a

pseudo-Druidic order, the _Gradh Ecna_; the second, one of law-makers

and lawyers; the third, the Bardic order, the _Gradh Fili_, the poets

being termed _File_ in Irish. Of the many degrees to which the poets

or _File_ could attain, the highest (as in the other grades, of

_Ecna_, "Wisdom," and of _Fene_, "Law") was the _Ollave_, or Doctor.

These doctors of literature, so to call them, were already the

continuators of a great tradition, especially in poetry. They had to

carry, written only in their heads, an immense body of bardic and

religious legendary history and philosophy. And inasmuch as they were

the sole depositories of this profound and occult learning, to say

nothing of those heroic tales and romances in which the Celtic people

so delighted, they received high honor wherever they went. When the

chief poet, the ollave, or doctor of poetry, arrived, in his

weather-beaten cloak of dark crimson trimmed with white feathers,

accompanied by his little band of disciples, at some chieftain's

house, he was received with signal hospitality and treated to the best

his host could afford.

While literature was still oral, it is clear that despite the care

used in its preservation in the bardic schools, it could not be

maintained with the absolute accuracy of a written or a printed text.

The remoter the historical matter to be remembered, the less likely

was it to be preserved, _literatim et verbatim_, without those little

liberties of the imagination which the Celtic word-master of earlier

ages was always ready to take. Thus the first cycle of Irish legendary

history, dating back many centuries before the Christian era,--the

primitive and mythological cycle,--allows full license to the

imagination, working upon a basis of semi-barbaric tradition, with a

mixture in it of nature-myths and remotest history. Both because of

the extent and the extreme difficulty of the materials afforded by

this cycle in the study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the

Celtic races, its stories will always form a great hunting-ground for

Celtic students. We learn from it how the Nemedians were overtaken by

the Fomorians and fought with them, almost to extermination, on Tory

Island, escaping then to the south of Europe, particularly to Greece;

and a couple of centuries later returned, under their new name of the

Firbolgs. The Nemedians meanwhile supplied similarly a recrudescent

race, the Tuatha De Danann, of whom came the Dagda,--the all-king,

almost the Zeus of ancient Ireland. The same cycle supplies us also

with the mythical types correspondent to those of the Greek mythology:

_e. g._, Ogmuir, the Irish Heracles; Lug or Lugh, the Apollo; Diancea,

the Esculapius; Manannan, the Neptune; and so forth. We have also

Bridget, the Goddess of Poetry, the Gaelic Muse, and the first and

foremost of the many illustrious Brians of Gaelic story. Later critics

differ ingeniously about the precise origins and significations of

many of these prehistoric figures. Our own conjecture is, and it lays

claim to no great originality or finality, that we have in this Danann

cycle an all-but inextricable commixture of primitive nature-myths and

folk-tales brought by the Milesian and pre-Milesian immigrants from

the Aryan cradle in the East, together with a certain addition of

confused history relating to the earliest adventures of the new-come

races upon Irish ground. But such as this traditional cycle was, it

provided the background for the much later second cycle, of which we

have already spoken, and which bears the Red Branch aloft as a sign.

In sight of the Red Branch, the darker part of the journey is over;

and the mists of mythology only form the veil shutting out all but the

mere human foreground.

We have spoken so far of two cycles--the Mythological, whose

chronology is a matter for further criticism to decide; the Heroic, or

Red Branch, which we place at the beginning of the Christian era.

Now we come to a third cycle: the "Fenian" named after Finn Mac Cool,

according to most Irish writers; the "Ossianic" named after Ossian,

Finn's famous son, according to most Scotch. We need only speak of it

here of course on its purely Irish side and from the Fenian aspect, as

the reader will find it fully dealt with under its Ossianic aspect

elsewhere. The heroes of this cycle, if we accept their historical

existence in Ireland, lived from the second to the fourth centuries of

the Christian era. Art, his grandson Cormac, and Cormac's son,

Cairbre; Cool, his son Finn, and King Goll: these, with Owen Mor and

many another, fill the Fenian romances with their fierce and

picturesque pursuit of destiny and death. They only await the hand of

that predestined shaper into final and positive and modernly

intelligible form of the confused romances which treat of their

doings, to add a new epic to the larger literature which has the Old

World for its text and the New World for its interpreter.

These three great cycles of Irish romance by no means exhaust the

wealth of story, still lurking _perdu_ in old MSS. or in rare and

rarely read works. Some of these additional tales have already reached

American readers under modern retellings or poetic interpretations;

such as, _e. g._, 'The Voyage of Maeldune', retold memorably, and

differently enough, in flowing hexametrical periods by Tennyson:--

"And we came to the Isle of Shouting; we landed; a score of wild

birds

Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words;

Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices pealed,

The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field,

And the men dropt dead in the valleys, and half of the cattle went

lame,

And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into

flame;

And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew,

Till they shouted along with the shouting, and seized one another

and slew;

But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not

stay,

And we left the dead to the birds, and we sailed with our wounded

away."

Tennyson took his version from Joyce's 'Early Celtic Romances'. In

this volume we have, among other legendary romances, five or six of

the most wonderful or moving tales in Celtic or any other literature.

Three of these are--The Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin', comprising

'The Fate of the Children of Usna' (or 'Deirdre'); 'The Fate of the

Children of Lir'; and 'The Fate of the Children of Tuirenn'. The names

of the three others are 'The Voyage of Maeldun' (the oldest copy of

which is dated 1100), 'The Pursuit of Dermot and Grania', and 'Ossian

in the Land of Youth'. Of these perhaps the story of 'Deirdre' is the

best known, and American readers may be referred to the fine epical

version by Dr. Robert D. Joyce ('Deirdre'), published some years ago

by Roberts Brothers of Boston. Two brief examples of the short

episodical narratives which make up the marvelous 'Voyage of Maeldun'

may be cited here,--'The Miller of Hell' and 'Signs of Home,' the

latter giving the return of the Celtic Ulysses and his companions.

THE MILLER OF HELL

The next island they came to, which was not far off from the last, had

a large mill on it; and near the door stood the miller, a huge-bodied,

strong, burly man. They saw numberless crowds of men and horses laden

with corn coming towards the mill; and when their corn was ground they

went away towards the west. Great herds of all kinds of cattle covered

the plain as far as the eye could reach, and among them many wagons,

laden with every kind of wealth that is produced on the ridge of the

world. All these the miller put into the mouth of his mill to be

ground; and all as they came forth went westward.

Maeldun and his people now spoke to the miller, and asked him the name

of the mill, and the meaning of all they had seen on the island. And

he, turning quickly towards them, replied in a few words:--

"This mill is called the Mill of Inver-tre-Kenand, and I am the Miller

of Hell. All the corn and all the riches of the world that men are

dissatisfied with, or which they complain of in any way, are sent here

to be ground; and also every precious article and every kind of wealth

which men try to conceal from God. All these I grind in the Mill of

Inver-tre-Kenand and send them away afterwards to the west."

He spoke no more, but turned round and busied himself again with his

mill. And the voyagers, with much wonder and awe in their hearts, went

to their curragh and sailed away.

SIGNS OF HOME

Soon after they saw a beautiful verdant island, with herds of oxen,

cows, and sheep browsing all over its hills and valleys; but no houses

nor inhabitants to be seen. And they rested some time on this island

and ate the flesh of the cows and sheep.

One day while they were standing on a hill a large falcon flew by; and

two of the crew, who happened to look closely at him, cried out in the

hearing of Maeldun:--

"See that falcon! he is surely like the falcons of Erin!"

"Watch him closely," cried Maeldun, "and observe exactly in what

direction he is flying."

And they saw that he flew to the southeast, without turning or

wavering.

They went on board at once; and having unmoored, they sailed to the

southeast after the falcon. After rowing the whole day, they sighted

land in the dusk of the evening, which seemed to them like the land of

Erin.

* * * * *

Of all the books of the kind published since Macpherson's 'Ossian,'

Lady Charlotte Guest's 'Mabinogion,' and Villemarque's 'Barzaz-Breiz,'

this collection of Dr. Joyce's has had the most marked influence. It

consists of eleven tales, and was the first readable collection of the

old Gaelic prose romances published in English. So far as the general

public is concerned, Dr. Joyce's method is unquestionably the best. "A

translation," he says, "may either follow the very words, or reproduce

the life and spirit, of the original; but no translation can do both.

If you render word for word, you lose the spirit; if you wish to give

the spirit and manner, you must depart from the exact words and frame

your own phrases. I have chosen this latter course. My translation

follows the original closely enough in narrative and incident; but so

far as mere phraseology is concerned, I have used the English language

freely, not allowing myself to be trammeled by too close an adherence

to the very words of the text. The originals are in general simple in

style; and I have done my best to render them into simple, homely,

plain English. In short, I have tried to tell the stories as I

conceive the old Shenachies themselves would have told them if they

had used English instead of Gaelic."

Another characteristic and admirably edited translation of one of

these miscellaneous stories that lie outside the three cycles of Irish

romance is 'The Vision of Mac Cougleime,' which we owe to Dr. Kuno

Meyer (London: Nutt).

Among the legendary Celtic romances is the short but beautiful and

characteristic account of Ossian's expedition to the Isle of the Blest

or the Land of Youth, and his subsequent return as an old and decrepit

man--in a word, the Celtic Rip Van Winkle. This legend not only

underlies all the spiritual romances of Celtic Ireland and Scotland,

but has profoundly appealed to the imagination of the whole complex

English race of to-day, whether under the badge of the rose, the

thistle, the shamrock, or the leek, whether under the banner of the

United Kingdom or that of the Stars and Stripes.

OISIN IN TIRNANOGE;

or

THE LAST OF THE FENI

[According to an ancient legend, Finn's son Oisin, the hero

poet, survived to the time of St. Patrick, two hundred years

(the legend makes it three hundred) after the other Feni. On a

certain occasion, when the saint asked him how he had lived to

such a great age, the old hero related his story, of which the

following is the close.]

I lived in the Land of Youth more than three hundred years; but it

appeared to me that only three years had passed since the day I parted

from my friends. At the end of that time I began to have a longing

desire to see my father Finn and all my old companions, and I asked

leave of Niam and of the king to visit Erin. The king gave permission,

and Niam said:--

"I will give consent, though I feel sorrow in my heart, for I fear

much you will never return to me."

I replied that I would surely return, and that she need not feel any

doubt or dread, for that the white steed knew the way, and would bring

me back in safety. Then she addressed me in these words, which seemed

very strange to me:--

"I will not refuse this request, though your journey afflicts me with

great grief and fear. Erin is not now as it was when you left it. The

great king Finn and his Feni are all gone; and you will find, instead

of them, a holy father and hosts of priests and saints. Now, think

well on what I say to you, and keep my words in your mind. If once you

alight from the white steed, you will never come back to me. Again I

warn you, if you place your feet on the green sod in Erin, you will

never return to this lovely land. A third time, O Oisin, my beloved

husband, a third time I say to you, if you alight from the white steed

you will never see me again."

I promised that I would faithfully attend to her words, and that I

would not alight from the white steed. Then as I looked into her

gentle face and marked her grief, my heart was weighed down with

sadness, and my tears flowed plentifully; but even so, my mind was

bent on coming back to Erin.

When I had mounted the white steed, he galloped straight toward the

shore. We moved as swiftly as before over the clear sea. The wind

overtook the waves and we overtook the wind, so that we straightway

left the Land of Youth behind; and we passed by many islands and

cities till at length we landed on the green shores of Erin.

As I traveled on through the country, I looked closely around me; but

I scarcely knew the old places, for everything seemed strangely

altered. I saw no sign of Finn and his host, and I began to dread that

Niam's saying was coming true. At length I espied at a distance a

company of little men and women,[A] all mounted on horses as small

as themselves; and when I came near, they greeted me kindly and

courteously. They looked at me with wonder and curiosity, and they

marveled much at my great size and at the beauty and majesty of my

person.

[A] The gigantic race of the Feni had all passed away, and

Erin was now inhabited by people who looked very small in

Oisin's eyes.

I asked them about Finn and the Feni; whether they were still living,

or if any sudden disaster had swept them away. And one replied:--

"We have heard of the hero Finn, who ruled the Feni of Erin in times

of old, and who never had an equal for bravery and wisdom. The poets

of the Gaels have written many books concerning his deeds and the

deeds of the Feni, which we cannot now relate; but they are all gone

long since, for they lived many ages ago. We have heard also, and we

have seen it written in very old books, that Finn had a son named

Oisin. Now this Oisin went with a young fairy maiden to Tirnanoge, and

his father and his friends sorrowed greatly after him and sought him

long; but he was never seen again."

When I heard all this I was filled with amazement, and my heart grew

heavy with great sorrow. I silently turned my steed away from the

wondering people, and set forward straightway for Allen of the mighty

deeds, on the broad green plains of Leinster. It was a miserable

journey to me; and though my mind, being full of sadness at all I saw

and heard, forecasted further sorrows, I was grieved more than ever

when I reached Allen. For there indeed I found the hill deserted and

lonely, and my father's palace all in ruins and overgrown with grass

and weeds.

I turned slowly away, and afterwards fared through the land in every

direction in search of my friends. But I met only crowds of little

people, all strangers, who gazed on me with wonder; and none knew me.

I visited every place throughout the country where I knew the Feni had

lived; but I found their houses all like Allen, solitary and in ruins.

At length I came to Glenasmole,[B] where many a time I had hunted in

days of old with the Feni, and there I saw a crowd of people in the

glen. As soon as they saw me, one of them came forward and said:--

[B] Glenasmole, a fine valley about seven miles south of

Dublin, through which the river Dodder flows.

"Come to us, thou mighty hero, and help us out of our strait; for thou

art a man of vast strength."

I went to them, and found a number of men trying in vain to raise a

large flat stone. It was half lifted from the ground; but those who

were under it were not strong enough either to raise it further or to

free themselves from its weight. And they were in great distress, and

on the point of being crushed to death.

I thought it a shameful thing that so many men should be unable to

lift this stone, which Oscar, if he were alive, would take in his

right hand and fling over the heads of the feeble crowd. After I had

looked a little while, I stooped forward and seized the flag with one

hand; and putting forth my strength, I flung it seven perches from its

place, and relieved the little men. But with the great strain the

golden saddle-girth broke, and bounding forward to keep myself from

falling, I suddenly came to the ground on my two feet.

The moment the white steed felt himself free, he shook himself and

neighed. Then, starting off with the speed of a cloud-shadow on a

March day, he left me standing helpless and sorrowful. Instantly a

woeful change came over me: the sight of my eyes began to fade, the

ruddy beauty of my face fled, I lost all my strength, and I fell to

the earth, a poor withered old man, blind and wrinkled and feeble.

The white steed was never seen again. I never recovered my sight, my

youth, or my strength; and I have lived in this manner, sorrowing

without ceasing for my gentle golden-haired wife Niam, and thinking

ever of my father Finn, and of the lost companions of my youth.

* * * * *

Between these romances and the first definite Christian writings the

numerous Ossianic colloquies and narrative poems, and the Irish

Annals, form the connecting links. The Ossianic poetry, even where it

is specially Irish in character, we have elected to leave aside for

the present, for reasons already given; but it must be remembered that

they form a very important section in themselves, and amount in Irish

alone to some fifty thousand lines, even on a fairly moderate

computation.

Turning to the Annals, we are confronted at once by that extraordinary

repository of Irish lore, history, and legend known as 'The Annals of

the Four Masters.' This remarkable testament of the Irish genius was

due primarily to the zeal and energy of Michael O'Clery, born at

Donegal about 1580--the last of a long line of scholars. Having become

a Franciscan, in his conventual calling he was living far away from

his native soil, at St. Anthony's monastery in Louvain. But there he

had another Donegal man, AEdh the son of Bhaird (Ward), for fellow

worker; and the two together formed the idea of collecting and putting

into permanent form the valuable MS. flotsam of old Irish literature

which in earlier days, wandering in their own land, they had found

drifting insecurely hither and thither. The plan they proposed was for

O'Clery to get leave of absence and return to Ireland, there to roam

up and down the land, collecting and copying every valuable MS. he

could lay hands on; then transmitting the copy to his co-worker in

Louvain. AEdh son of Ward died too soon to carry out fully his part of

the undertaking: but another Irish Franciscan, Father Colgan, took up

the task; and it was he who gave the book its present title, 'The

Annals of the Four Masters,' calling it after the four men who chiefly

collaborated in the work, viz., Michael O'Clery, Farfassa O'Mulconry,

Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duigenan. The Annals, thus

laboriously brought to a triumphant close, carry history back to the

Deluge, and down to the years contemporary with their compilers and

authors, and the early part of the seventeenth century. "There is no

event of Irish history," says Dr. Hyde, "from the birth of Christ to

the beginning of the seventeenth century, that the first inquiry of

the student will not be--What do the Four Masters say about it?" The

Annals indeed present in their curiously epitomized and synchronized

pages the concentrated essence of thousands of the confused MSS. which

the Four Masters collated, sifted, and interpreted with consummate art

and intelligence. They wrote, we may add, in an archaic, almost

cryptic style, full of bardic euphemisms and other difficulties; so

that it is fortunate even for Celtic scholars that O'Donovan's seven

great volumes, in his quarto edition, present the text with an

accompanying English translation.

The more one compares the great work of the Four Masters with other

succeeding works of the same historical order, the more one sees how

great was the effect upon Irish literature of the growth of Christian

influence. St. Patrick's are the world-wide name and fame which most

clearly mark the early Christian history of Ireland, when the new

divine creed entered into the land and confronted the Celtic paganism.

Many are the exquisite legends of St. Patrick, often so naively and so

tenderly told; with glimmerings here and there already of the humor

which we connect so much with the Irish temper of mind, and which

received probably its greatest stimulus when an Irishman of earlier

times wished, in all courtesy, to reconcile his old fighting instincts

with the Christian gentleness and self-sacrifice. This as it may be,

the hagiology of the mediaeval Irishman is in delightful contrast to

the tales of battle and foray in the three great cycles of early

romance. As for St. Patrick, the legendary and apocryphal literature

that centres about him amounts in verse and prose to an immense bulk.

Much of this matter has of course very small historical value; but it

may be conceded that Patrick's traditional role as a law-maker and

reviser, in connection with the revision of the Brehon Law, deserves

serious attention. Similarly, though we do not accept more than a

small part of the poems attributed to him as really his, there is

enough to show him a poet, as well as a great teacher and preacher and

lawgiver. What is most to the purpose, perhaps, is that he made his

life a poem; so that the mediaeval scribes can hardly speak of him

without adorning and beautifying the tale they have to tell. Less

known but hardly less interesting is St. Columcill, whom Dr. Hyde

claims "to have been, both in his failings and his virtues, the most

typical of Irishmen; at once sentimental and impulsive, an eminent

type of the race he came from." Dr. Hyde goes on to relate, in

illustration of this, the tale of the heron in Iona:--When "he saw the

bird flying across the water from the direction of Ireland, and

alighting half frozen with cold and faint with flight upon the rocky

coast there, he sent out one of his monks to go round the island and

warm and cherish and feed the bird; 'because,' said he weeping, 'it

has come from the land I shall never see on earth again!'" Surely one

of the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of

the lament of the Celt in exile!

The Lives of the Saints form altogether a most important and

characteristic section of Irish literature. Even when composed in

Latin, they remain so saturated with Celtic feeling and coloring that

they may fairly be counted among Irish books. Dr. Hyde names several

Latin lives of St. Patrick alone, ascribed to St. Benignus, St. Ultan,

St. Eleran, and others of his later followers. Of St. Columcill (St.

Columba), one of the fullest, written in Irish in the sixteenth

century, was compiled at Lifford under the direction of Manus

O'Donnell, Prince of Tirconnell; though Adamnan's Latin life of the

Saint is the most important book on the subject, written as it was

only a hundred years after the death of Columba, and by one who was

his spiritual successor as Abbot of Iona.

The Danish invasion of Ireland, lasting from the ninth to the eleventh

centuries, draws a red line across the history of its literature.

During that troubled period many of the most priceless of its MSS.

were destroyed, and violent disruptions threatened every phase of

learning. However, the old impulse of the sixth century still lived;

and we find in the tenth, Cormac, Bishop of Cashel, first among a

redoubtable band of men of letters and men of affairs who strove

successfully to maintain the Irish spirit. Cormac's 'Glossary' is the

oldest book of its kind, and invaluable as a monument; and the reputed

poems of Gorm'ly, his betrothed bride, whom he never married, and

whose tale is a sad and strange one, form in their different ways an

extremely characteristic expression of the Irish literature of the

time.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the older Irish romances

multiplied themselves and begat new ones in the most astonishing way.

'The Book of Leinster' mentions one hundred and eighty-one tales, duly

classified: Love-tales, Battle-tales, Tales of Travel, Forays, Feasts,

Visions, Tragedies, etc. What we have called the doctors of literature

devoted themselves henceforth more to prose than to poetry, and poetry

fell more and more into the hands of those who wrote not for the elect

but for the people.

There was no new development of Irish poetry, such as there was of

Welsh poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The bardic

schools, which did so much for Irish poetry from the sixth century to

the seventeenth, insisted upon its conventions to a degree that was

excessive. Geoffrey Keating, who carried on his great work at the same

time as the Four Masters, in the first half of the seventeenth

century, and who was a poet as well as a historian, still used the

bardic prosody, and wrote some delightful poems by its rules; but he

lent his influence to aid the new liberty in prose and verse that

Irish literature was learning. Keating's name is of first-rate

importance in its record, for this very reason. He was the first

really to conceive of Irish literature as a literature for the people,

and not only for the elect. He was the first to do this; and partly

because he did it, he was the last great landmark in the larger Gaelic

literature of Ireland. His 'History of Ireland,' the result of an

enforced retirement from preaching, was, says Dr. Hyde, "the most

popular book ever written in Irish." He marks too the transition, as

we pointed out, from the old bardic tradition in Irish poetry. After

his coming the bards threw away their superfluous prosody and wrote

for the people, and became poets indeed, instead of the most ingenious

of schoolmen. The result was the remarkable body of Irish poetry which

belongs to the last three centuries, and which contains many of the

characteristics of folk-song and culture poetry, in a most tuneful and

idiosyncratic fashion quite its own. Let us listen again to Dr. Hyde

on this point:--

"What the popular ballads of the folk had been like prior to

the seventeenth century we have no means of knowing. No

scribe would demean his learned pen by committing them to

paper; but from that date down to the beginning of the

present century the bards--the great houses being

fallen--turned instinctively to the general public, and threw

behind them the metres that required so many years of study

in the schools, and dropped at a stroke several thousand

words which no one understood except the great chiefs or

those trained by the poets, while they broke out into

beautiful but at the same time intelligible verse, which no

one who has once heard and learned is likely to forget. This

is to my mind the real glory of the modern Irish nation; this

is the sweetest creation of Gaelic literature; this is the

truest note of the enchanting Irish siren, and he who has

once heard it and remains deaf to its charm has neither heart

for song nor soul for music. The Gaelic poetry of the last

two centuries is the most sensuous attempt to convey music in

words ever made by man. It is absolutely impossible to convey

the lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection

of harmony in another language."

Discounting what we will in the natural enthusiasm of one who has

devoted himself heart and soul to the cause of the Gaelic tongue and

of Irish literature, quite enough remains to carry the contention for

the continuing interest of native Irish poetry after so many

centuries. That such a poetry and such a language should suddenly

decay after so noble and enriched a record in the past, is nothing

short of a tragedy in the history of tongues.

Dr. Hyde's own collection of the 'Love Songs of Connacht' is the best

example that American readers could possibly have of this Irish

poetry, the late flowering of so venerable and noble a tree. And with

this work, and some of the collections of the folk-tales still current

in Erse-speaking Ireland, made by Dr. Hyde, Mr. Jeremiah Curtin, and

Mr. Larminie, and Englished for us, we must bring this brief outline

of the Irish contribution to Celtic literature to a close. Its modern

interpretation is only now beginning to take its due place, let us

remember, both at the hands of its scholars and on the lips of its

poets. And if any reader should think the scholars still, after all we

have said, too difficult to follow, let us recommend them to turn to

the poems and tales of Mr. W. B. Yeats and to the romantic pages of

Mr. Standish O'Grady, the latest exponents in our more modern tongue

of that imagination, and that subtlety and energy of thought, which

are characteristically Irish.

Of the three great cycles of Gaelic literature, the third is the

(so-called) Ossianic. Of this cycle Finn (Fionn, Fingal) is the

central hero. The second great cycle is that which treats of the

heroes of the Ultonians, _i. e._, the Red Branch of Ulster; among this

cycle Cuculain (Cuchullin, Cohoolin, Coolin) is the supreme type. No

living writer has so well reconstructed the past for us as Mr.

Standish O'Grady has done, and nowhere is he so successful as in his

vivid and beautiful historical romance, of which Cuculain is the hero.

Of the famous "battle-prop of the valor and torch of the chivalry of

the Ultonians" Mr. O'Grady has given us an account which deserves to

pass into the fixed literature of our race. Apart from its vividness,

charm, and power, 'The Coming of Cuculain' affords a general idea of

the first great heroic cycle (its predecessor dealing entirely with

mythical or mythopoeic beings), and of primitive heroic life as

reflected in that literature. The excerpts selected are (1) the

opening of the romance, and (2) from the chapter telling how Cuculain

won his knighthood.

FROM 'THE COMING OF CUCULAIN'

I

The Red Branch feasted one night in their great hall at Emain Macha.

So vast was the hall that a man such as men are now, standing in the

centre and shouting his loudest, would not be heard at the

circumference; yet the low laughter of the King sitting at one end was

clearly audible to those who sat around the Champion at the other. The

sons of Dithorba made it, giants of the elder time, laboring there

under the shoutings of Macha and the roar of her sounding thongs. Its

length was a mile and nine furlongs and a cubit. With her brooch-pin

she plowed its outline upon the plain, and its breadth was not much

less. Trees such as earth nourished then upheld the mossy roof beneath

which feasted that heroic brood, the great-hearted children of Rury,

huge offsprings of the gods and giants of the dawn of time. For mighty

exceedingly were these men. At the noise of their running to battle

all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir trembled in his watery

halls; the roar of their brazen chariots reverberated from the solid

canopy of heaven, and their war-steeds drank rivers dry.

A vast murmur rose from the assembly, for like distant thunder or the

far-off murmuring of agitated waters was the continuous hum of their

blended conversation and laughter, while ever and anon, cleaving the

many-tongued confusion, uprose friendly voices, clearer and stronger

than battle trumpets, when one hero challenged another to drink,

wishing him victory and success, and his words rang round the hollow

dome. Innumerable candles, tall as spears, illuminated the scene. The

eyes of the heroes sparkled, and their faces, white and ruddy, beamed

with festal mirth and mutual affection. Their yellow hair shone. Their

banqueting attire, white and scarlet, glowed against the outer gloom.

Their round brooches and mantle-pins of gold or silver or golden

bronze, their drinking vessels and instruments of festivity, flashed

and glittered in the light. They rejoiced in their glory and their

might and in the inviolable amity in which they were knit together; a

host of comrades, a knot of heroic valor and affection, which no

strength or cunning, and no power seen or unseen, could ever release

or untie.

At one extremity of the vast hall, upon a raised seat, sat their young

king, Concobar Mac Nessa, slender, handsome, and upright. A canopy of

bronze, round as the bent sling of the Sun-god, the long-handed,

far-shooting son of Ethlend, encircled his head. At his right hand lay

a staff of silver. Far away at the other end of the hall, on a raised

seat, sat the Champion, Fergus Mac Roy, like a colossus. The stars and

clouds of night were round his head and shoulders, seen through the

wide and high entrance of the Dun, whose doors no man has ever seen

closed and barred. Aloft, suspended from the dim rafters, hung the

naked forms of great men clear against the dark dome, having the cords

of their slaughter around their necks and their white limbs splashed

with blood. Kings were they, who had murmured against the sovereignty

of the Red Branch. Through the wide doorway out of the night flew a

huge bird, black and gray, unseen; and soaring upwards sat upon the

rafters, its eyes like burning fire. It was the Mor Reega, or Great

Queen, the far-striding, terrible daughter of Iarnmas (Iron-Death).

Her voice was like the shouting of ten thousand men. Dear to her were

these heroes. More she rejoiced in them feasting than in the battle

prowess of the rest.

When supper was ended, their bard, in his singing-robes and girt

around the temples with a golden fillet, stood up and sang. He sang

how once a king of the Ultonians, having plunged into the sea-depths,

there slew a monster which had wrought much havoc amongst fishers and

seafaring men. The heroes attended to his song, leaning forward with

bright eyes. They applauded the song and the singer, and praised the

valor of the heroic man who had done the deed. Then the Champion

struck the table with his clenched hands and addressed the assembly.

Wrath and sorrow were in his voice. It resembled the brool of lions,

heard afar by seafaring men upon some savage shore on a still night.

"Famous deeds," he said, "are not wrought now among the Red Branch. I

think we are all become women. I grow weary of these huntings in the

morning and mimic exercises of war, and this training of steeds and

careering of brazen chariots stained never with aught but dust and

mire, and these unearned feastings at night and vain applause of the

brave deeds of our forefathers. Come now, let us make an end of this.

Let us conquer Banba (Ireland) wholly in all her green borders, and

let the realms of Lir, which sustain no foot of man, be the limit of

her sovereignty. Let us gather the tributes of all Ireland, after many

battles and much warlike toil. Then more sweetly shall we drink, while

the bards chant our prowess. Once I knew a coward who boasted

endlessly about his forefathers, and at last my anger rose, and with a

flat hand I slew him in the middle of his speech, and paid no eric,

for he was nothing. We have the blood of heroes in our veins, and we

sit here nightly boasting about them: about Rury, whose name we bear;

and Macha the warrioress, who brought hither bound the sons of

Dithorba and made them rear this mighty Dun; and Kimbaoth son of

Fiontann; and my namesake Fergus, whose crooked mouth was no dishonor,

and the rest of our hero sires; and we consume the rents and tributes

of Ulster which they by their prowess conquered to us, and which flow

hither in abundance from every corner of the province. Valiant men too

will one day come hither and slay us as I slew that boaster, and here

in Emain Macha their bards will praise them. Then in the halls of our

dead shall we say to our sires, 'All that you got for us by your blood

and your sweat, that we have lost, and the glory of the Red Branch is

at an end.'"

That speech was pleasing to the Red Branch, and they cried out that

Fergus Mac Roy had spoken well. Then all at once, on a sudden

impulse, they sang the battle song of the Ultonians, and shouted for

the war so that the building quaked and rocked, and in the hall of the

weapons there was a clangor of falling shields, and men died that

night for extreme dread, so mightily shouted the Ultonians around

their king and around Fergus.

II

On the morrow there was a great hasting of the Red Branch on the plain

of the assemblies. It was May-day morning and the sun shone brightly,

but at first through radiant showers. The trees were putting forth

young buds; the wet grass sparkled. All the martial pomp and glory of

the Ultonians were exhibited that day. Their chariots and war-horses

ringed the plain. All the horses' heads were turned towards the centre

where were Concobar Mac Nessa and the chiefs of the Red Branch. The

plain flashed with gold, bronze, and steel, and glowed with the bright

mantles of the innumerable heroes, crimson and scarlet, blue, green,

or purple. The huge brooches on their breasts, of gold and silver or

gold-like bronze, were like resplendent wheels. Their long hair,

yellow for the most part, was bound with ornaments of gold. Great

truly were those men; their like has not come since upon the earth.

They were the heroes and demigods of the heroic age of Erin, champions

who feared naught beneath the sun; mightiest among the mighty, huge,

proud, and unconquerable, and loyal and affectionate beyond all

others; all of the blood of Ir, son of Milesius, the Clanna Rury of

great renown, rejoicing in their valor, their splendor, their peerless

king. Concobar had no crown. A plain circle of beaten gold girt his

broad temples. In the naked glory of his regal manhood he stood there

before them all, but even so a stranger would have swiftly discovered

the captain of the Red Branch; such was his stature, his bearing, such

his slow-turning, steady-gazing eyes and the majesty of his bearded

countenance. His countenance was long, broad above and narrow below,

his nose eminent, his beard bipartite, curling and auburn in hue, his

form without any blemish or imperfection....

"Let the tameless horses of Macha be harnessed to the chariot," cried

Concobar, "and let Laeg, son of the King of Gabra, drive them hither,

for those are the horses and that the chariot which shall be given

this day to Cuculain."

Then, son of Sualtam, how in thy guileless breast thy heart leaped

when thou heardest the thundering of the great war-car and the wild

neighing of the immortal steeds, as they broke from the dark stable

into the clear-shining light of day, and heard behind them the ancient

roaring of the brazen wheels, as in the days when they bore forth

Macha and her martial groom against the giants of old, and mightily

established in Eiria the Red Branch of the Ultonians! Soon they rushed

to view from the rear of Emain, speeding forth impetuously out of the

hollow-sounding ways of the city and the echoing palaces into the

open, and behind them in the great car green and gold, above the

many-twinkling wheels, the charioteer, with floating mantle, girt

round the temples with the gold fillet of his office, leaning

backwards and sideways as he labored to restrain their fury

unrestrainable: a gray long-maned steed, whale-bellied, broad-chested,

with mane like flying foam, under one silver yoke, and a black

lustrous tufty-maned steed under the other; such steeds as in power,

size, and beauty the earth never produced before and never will

produce again.

Like a hawk swooping along the face of a cliff when the wind is high;

or like the rush of March wind over the smooth plain; or like the

fleetness of the stag roused from his lair by the hounds and covering

his first field, was the rush of those steeds when they had broken

through the restraint of the charioteer, as though they galloped over

fiery flags; so that the earth shook and trembled with the velocity of

their motion, and all the time the great car brayed and shrieked as

the wheels of solid and glittering bronze went round, and strange

cries and exclamations were heard, for they were demons that had their

abode in that car.

The charioteer restrained the steeds before the assembly, but

nay-the-less a deep purr like the purr of a tiger proceeded from the

axle. Then the whole assembly lifted up their voices and shouted for

Cuculain, and he himself, Cuculain the son of Sualtam, sprang into his

chariot all armed, with a cry as of a warrior springing into his

chariot in the battle, and he stood erect and brandished his spears,

and the war sprites of the Gael shouted along with him; for the

Bocanahs and Bananahs and the Geniti Gluidi, the wild people of the

glens, and the demons of the air, roared around him, when first the

great warrior of the Gael, his battle-arms in his hands, stood

equipped for war in his chariot before all the warriors of his tribe,

the kings of the Clanna Rury and the people of the Emain Macha. Then

too there sounded from the Tec Brac the boom of shields and the

clashing of swords and the cries and shouting of the Tuatha Dee

Danann, who dwelt there perpetually; and Lu the long-handed, the

slayer of Balor, the destroyer of the Fornoroh, the immortal, the

invisible, the maker and the decorator of the firmament, whose hound

was the sun, and whose son the viewless wind, thundered from heaven

and bent his sling five-hued against the clouds; and the son of the

illimitable Lir in his mantle blue and green, foam-fringed, passed

through the assembly with a roar of far-off innumerable waters, and

the Mor Reega stood in the midst with a foot on either side of the

plain, and shouted with the shout of a host, so that the Ultonians

fell down like reaped grass with their faces to the earth, on account

of the presence of the Mor Reega and on account of the omens and great

signs.

* * * * *

The following poems from the ancient Erse are taken from the 'Lyra

Celtica: an Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry,' edited by

Elizabeth A. Sharp.

THE MYSTERY OF AMERGIN

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am a wild boar in valor,

I am a salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of the lance of battle,

I am the God who creates in the head [_i. e._ of man] the fire

[_i. e._ the thought].

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain [if not

I]?

Who announces the ages of the moon [if not I]?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun [if not I]?

THE SONG OF FIONN

May-day, delightful time! How beautiful the color!

The blackbirds sing their full lay. Would that Laeg were here!

The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is the noble

Brilliance of the seasons ever! On the margin of the branching woods

The summer swallows skim the stream: the swift horses seek the pool;

The heather spreads out her long hair; the weak fair bow-down grows.

Sudden consternation attacks the signs; the planets, in their

courses running, exert an influence:

The sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth.

VISION OF A FAIR WOMAN

Tell us some of the charms of the stars:

Close and well set were her ivory teeth;

White as the canna upon the moor

Was her bosom the tartan bright beneath.

Her well-rounded forehead shone

Soft and fair as the mountain snow;

Her two breasts were heaving full;

To them did the hearts of heroes flow.

Her lips were ruddier than the rose;

Tender and tunefully sweet her tongue;

White as the foam adown her side

Her delicate fingers extended hung.

Smooth as the dusky down of the elk

Appeared her shady eyebrows to me;

Lovely her cheeks were, like berries red;

From every guile she was wholly free.

Her countenance looked like the gentle buds

Unfolding their beauty in early spring;

Her yellow locks like the gold-browed hills;

And her eyes like the radiance the sunbeams bring.

In contemporary Celtic poetry no one surpasses Mr. W. B. Yeats,

particularly in the re-creation of that wonderful past with whose

atmosphere his whole work is charged. As an example of Mr. Yeats's

narrative method with legendary themes we may quote some lines from

his beautiful 'The Wanderings of Oisin' (Ossian):--

Fled foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke,

High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;

And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance

broke;

The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.

I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,

And never a song sang Neave, and over my finger-tips

Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,

And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.

Were we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly

peace,

An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?

And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed

fleece

Fled foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke.

And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge--the sea's edge barren

and gray,

Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,

Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away

Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling

bark;

Dropping--a murmurous dropping--old silence and that one sound;

For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark--

Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night;

For as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and

the sun,

Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,

And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was

one.

Finally, here is one of Mr. Yeats's "old songs re-sung":--

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

I sat on cushioned otter skin:

My word was law from Ith to Emen,

And shook at Invar Amargin

The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,

And drove tumult and war away

From girl and boy and man and beast;

The fields grew fatter day by day,

The wild fowl of the air increased;

And every ancient Ollave said,

While he bent down his faded head,--

"He drives away the Northern cold."

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;

A herdsman came from inland valleys,

Crying, the pirates drove his swine

To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.

I called my battle-breaking men

And my loud brazen battle-cars

From rolling vale and rivery glen,

And under the blinking of the stars

Fell on the pirates of the deep,

And hurled them in the gulph of sleep:

These hands won many a torque of gold.

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

But slowly, as I shouting slew

And trampled in the bubbling mire,

In my most secret spirit grew

A whirling and a wandering fire:

I stood: keen stars above me shone,

Around me shone keen eyes of men:

And with loud singing I rushed on

Over the heath and spungy fen,

And broke between my hands the staff

Of my long spear with song and laugh,

That down the echoing valleys rolled.

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

And now I wander in the woods

When summer gluts the golden bees,

Or in autumnal solitudes

Arise the leopard-colored trees;

Or when along the wintry strands

The cormorants shiver on their rocks;

I wander on, and wave my hands,

And sing, and shake my heavy locks.

The gray wolf knows me; by one ear

I lead along the woodland deer;

The hares run by me, growing bold.

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

I came upon a little town

That slumbered in the harvest moon,

And passed a-tiptoe up and down,

Murmuring to a fitful tune,

How I have followed, night and day,

A tramping of tremendous feet,

And saw where this old tympan lay,

Deserted on a doorway seat,

And bore it to the woods with me;

Of some unhuman misery

Our married voices wildly trolled.

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

I sang how, when day's toil is done,

Orchil shakes out her long dark hair

That hides away the dying sun

And sheds faint odors through the air:

When my hand passed from wire to wire

It quenched, with sound like falling dew,

The whirling and the wandering fire,

But left a mournful ulalu;

For the kind wires are torn and still,

And I must wander wood and hill,

Through summer's heat and winter's cold.

_They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves

old_.

II--SCOTTISH

Early Celtic literature in Scotland is so intimately allied with the

Irish, that much of the previous section must be held to belong as

much to the present one. We shall not need to recapitulate here what

is there dealt with. The two Gaelic currents began to separate, if

almost imperceptibly, even then; and only in century-long stages,

after passing the point marked by the mediaeval recapitulators of

Ossian and St. Patrick. How closely intermingled these currents were

up to that point may be learnt from the evidence of such exquisite

lines as those preserved by the Scottish Dean Macgregor, entitled

'Ossian Sang':--

Sweet is the voice in the land of gold,

And sweeter the music of birds that soar,

When the cry of the heron is heard on the wold,

And the waves break softly on Bundatrore.

Down floats on the murmuring of the breeze

The call of the cuckoo from Cossahun,

The blackbird is warbling among the trees;

And soft is the kiss of the warming sun.

The cry of the eagle of Assaroe

O'er the court of Mac Morne to me is sweet,

And sweet is the cry of the bird below

Where the wave and the wind and the tall cliff meet.

Finn Mac Cool is the father of me,

Whom seven battalions of Fenians fear.

When he launches his hounds on the open lea,

Grand is their cry as they rouse the deer.

The last verse is eloquent as to the common traditions of the Scots

and Irish Gael. Ossian is dealt with separately under his own proper

heading, however, and we need not discuss here his interest, literary

and historical.

Turning to St. Patrick, let us accept provisionally the account that

makes him of Gaelo-Brythonic race, born about 387 A.D. at Kilpatrick

on the Clyde,--Strathclyde being an old famous region of the northern

Brythonic stock. The remains, in prose and verse, of the early

Scottish literature dealing with St. Patrick are of course not so

numerous as the Irish; but as the two were freely interchangeable[A]

in the early period when his record was being written down, it follows

that where Irish memoranda of his true and his legendary history, his

hymns, and so forth, existed, the Scottish chroniclers and bards would

accept them without feeling the need of making a separate record. Nor

must we forget, in speaking of St. Patrick, that the pre-Christian

romantic mythology, with its Firbolgs and ancient heroic gods, giants,

and men, is just as much to be limned into the background of the

picture in the case of early Scottish as in that of Irish Gaelic

tradition and its earliest scriptive forms.

[A] "The early literature of the Scottish Gael," says the Rev.

Nigel MacNeill in his interesting work 'The Literature of the

Highlanders,' "cannot be well understood apart from early

Irish literature. The ballads of the two countries describe

the same struggles, the characters engaging in the strife are

the same and bear the same names."

Curiously enough, if Scotland gave Ireland the saint that in course of

time became almost its national symbol,--Patrick,--Ireland in turn

gave Scotland its dearest saint,--Columba. He was born in 521, near

Temple Douglas (_Tulach-Dubh-glaise_); in 545 founded a church in

Derry; later, the famous church at Kells; and in 563, after some

jealousy had been at work against him, he left for Ireland, and after

pausing at Colonsay, he went on to Ia, now known the world over as

Iona. Iona has become now the _locus classici_ of the Gaelic, not

to say the whole Scottish race. Recently, a writer of profound

imagination, Miss Fiona Macleod, has dated from its lonely shores the

dedication of that impressive book 'The Sin-Eater, and Other Tales,'

showing how it still keeps for those of the true faith its old

effect:--

"I mo cridhe, i mo ghraidh,"

(Isle of my heart, isle of my love,)

as Columba is said to have called it. His followers, the little sacred

circle of twelve, 'the Family of Iona,' had to be militant with a

vengeance: Milesian--or soldiering--as well as cleric, in their work;

and the old traditions are full of references to their fight against

the Feinne and the house of Ossian. But having so far prevailed as

they did, they became in turn the chroniclers of the very things they

had fought against. So in a sense, and a very real one, Iona is the

first centre of the literature of the Scots Gaels to which we can

point. The total effect of Columba, or Columcill, upon Gaelic life and

literature, Irish and Scots, was immense indeed; to gather whose force

one must read in the 'Book of Deer' and the old Irish MSS. on the one

hand, and the Latin hymnology of the Celtic church on the other.

But in speaking of Columba let us not forget the tender and beautiful

figure of St. Bridget,--another of that mysterious train, including

Merlin and St. Patrick, which has associations with Strathclyde--

"Bonnie sweet St. Bride of the

Yellow, yellow hair!"

St. Bridget, the St. Mary of the Gael, whose story has been retold by

Miss Fiona Macleod in 'The Washer of the Ford,' may first be found

depicted by the side of Patrick and Columba in the famous antique

relic, the 'Domhnach Airgid,' dating back to the sixth or seventh

century. She appears constantly in Gaelic hagiology, and with poetic

as well as saintly fame casting a halo about her yellow hair.

O'Curry's 'MS. Materials,' and other collections make it possible,

luckily, for other than purely Gaelic students to read of her as she

appeared in early time. She is a peculiarly interesting figure,

because in the Celtic races women have always counted peculiarly; and

there are signs that they will count even more in time to come. St.

Bridget (Brigit, Bride, Breed), then, is the type for all time of the

Celtic womanhood dowered with divine inspiration, poetry, and charm.

The following variant on an old Gaelic poem is by Miss Fiona Macleod

('From the Hills of Dream'):--

ST. BRIDGET'S MILKING SONG

O sweet St. Bride of the

Yellow, yellow hair:

Paul said, and Peter said,

And all the saints alive or dead

Vowed she had the sweetest head,

Bonnie sweet St. Bride of the

Yellow, yellow hair.

White may my milking be,

White as thee:

Thy face is white, thy neck is white,

Thy hands are white, thy feet are white,

For thy sweet soul is shining bright--

O dear to me,

O dear to see,

St. Bridget white!

Yellow may my butter be,

Soft and round:

Thy breasts are sweet,

Soft, round, and sweet,

So may my butter be:

So may my butter be, O

Bridget sweet!

Safe thy way is, safe, O

Safe, St. Bride:

May my kye come home at even,

None be fallin', none be leavin',

Dusky even, breath-sweet even,

Here, as there, where, O

St. Bride, thou

Keepest tryst with God in heaven,

Seest the angels bow,

And souls be shriven--

Here, as there, 'tis breath-sweet even,

Far and wide--

Singeth thy little maid,

Safe in thy shade,

Bridget, Bride!

Passing from the early legendary hagiological chronicles of the Scots

Gaels, we come to a period when the reader must be content to go again

to Irish sources for his knowledge of the continuators of Gaelic

literature. What we have said previously of the Irish may be referred

to here. The mediaeval scribes and bards busied themselves mainly with

reproducing the past, though with a vivid coloring out of their own

living present. When we have referred all of their subject-matter

dealing with the saints and heroic figures of primitive history to its

own period, all that remains is curiously little. Unfortunately, it is

less than it might have been, if it had not been for the terrible and

often wanton destruction of MSS. which has bereft us, in Scotland

especially, of some of the richest treasures the Celtic genius

has produced. It is only needed to instance the tailor who was

found cutting up an ancient MS. for patterns, to show how almost

inconceivably wholesale the havoc thus done has been in the last

six centuries.

Some of the most interesting and valuable of the Scottish

contributions to Gaelic literature are in what we may call ballad

form. Such is the tragic tale of 'Deirdre,' in the Glen-mason MS.

(thirteenth century), which is preserved in the Advocates' Library,

Edinburgh. Others again are versions of poems correspondent to those

given, for instance, in the 'Book of the Dean of Lismore.' Of this

heroic poetry much would have been lost if it had not been for the

zeal of collectors, who for the last five centuries have been

collecting in old MSS. or from the mouths of the Highlanders the

ballads and tales of old time. "The last and greatest of the ballad

and tale collectors," says Mr. MacNeill, "was Mr. Campbell, who in

1859-60 traversed the whole Gaelic area; and assisted by intelligent

Highlanders formed large collections, of which he has given a

considerable quantity to the world in his four volumes of tales. All

these are genuine productions." We may quote further what the same

writer says of the uncertain chronology of these ballads:--"They may

have been composed centuries before they were committed to writing.

We have fragments, such as the Glen-mason MS., written as early as the

twelfth century, in the hand and language common to the learned in

both Albin and Erin at the time. The 'Book of the Dean of Lismore,'

however, is written phonetically to represent the spoken language of

his day, and is mainly in the Perthshire dialect." Cuculain and many

other of the heroes that we mentioned in our Irish article reappear in

these ballads; and in them the Feinne fight out their ancient battles

to the bitter end. A new and rather different coloring is lent, too,

to the Scottish ballads by the Norse element, and the constant wars in

which the Vikings and the Gaels encountered time after time lend some

of their finest episodes to this poetry.

If we turn from the ballads to the prose tales and romances, we find

the same strong resemblances and the same significant differences. The

Irish have always the more fluent and eloquent a faculty in prose and

verse. Their adjectival energy is greater; they are more given to

extravagances of style, both in point of sentiment and of humor. The

Scotch are on the other hand more simple and more terse, and they

touch the deeper notes of pathos and of mystery more often. Nothing

more instructive can be devised for the Celtic student than to take

the volumes in verse and prose representing the three Celtic lands,

Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and to compare their style, method, and

literary idiosyncrasies. For this comparison Mr. Campbell's wonderful

'Tales of the West Highlands,' in prose, and in verse his 'Leabhar na

Feinne,' may be cited, with works of Dr. Hyde, Mr. Standish Hayes

O'Grady, Dr. Joyce, in Irish; and in Welsh, the 'Mabinogion' in Lady

Guest's exquisite English version, or the 'Myvyrian Archaeology.'

In the fourteenth century, which gave Dafydd ap Gwilym to Wales, we

find Gaelic becoming more definitely a conscious literary language.

But the Dafydd of Scotland came more than a century earlier, being

born at the end of the twelfth century. This was the famous Muireadach

Albannach (Murdoch the Scot), several of whose poems figure in the

Dean of Lismore's book, and whose effect on succeeding bards was only

less powerful than Dafydd's on his Welsh successors. The Dean's book

has poems, too, by two woman poets: Efric, wife of the last of the

famous MacNeills of Castle Sween, and Isabel, Countess of Argyle.

Efric's lament for her husband contains some touching lines;

_e. g._:--

"There's no heart among our women;

At the sport, no men are seen;

Like the sky when windless, silent

Is the music of Dun Sween!"

Sir Duncan Campbell, "Duncan Mac Cailem, the good knight," son of Sir

Colin, is another of the poets in Dean Macgregor's collection; but

perhaps we ought to pause here to say a word of the Dean himself.

"Sailing in among the inner Hebridean Isles," says Mr. MacNeill, "we

find in the fertile island of Lismore--'the great garden'--a man in

the fifteenth century often referred to in Gaelic literature: the Rev.

Mr. James Macgregor. A native of Perthshire,... with a heart filled

with the enthusiasm and perfervid spirit of his countrymen, he and his

brother got up the collection of songs and ballads" to which we have

had occasion so often to refer. But we must pass on now to the later

period of Gaelic literature, in which the modern developments have

their beginning. The Scots Gael entered on a new phase, we are told,

with Mary MacLeod (Mairi ni'n Alastair Ruaidh), who was born at Harris

in 1569, and died a centenarian in Skye in 1674. Mairi was as perfect

an example of the folk-minstrel as Celtic literature can provide; for

she could not even write, although her prosody is elaborate, and her

metres often intricate and original to a degree. The first of the

distinctively Jacobite bards, who flourished at the end of the

seventeenth and through the eighteenth century, was John MacDonald,

whose 'Battle of Inverlochy' has been vigorously translated by

Professor Blackie. Hector Maclean; Roderick Morrison, called _An

Clarsair Dall_, or the Blind Harper; John Maclean, whose songs were

heard by Dr. Samuel Johnson and Boswell on their journey to the

Hebrides; and John MacCodrum (a poet whose wit and satiric powers

remind us not a little of more than one of the Welsh satirical bards),

are among the poets of this time who specially deserve note.

In the eighteenth century, Gaelic Scotland produced some remarkable

religious poets, including David MacKellar, author of the well-known

'MacKellar's Hymn'; John Mackay; Donal Matheson, who had satirical as

well as religious power; Lauchlan Maclauchlan; and Dugald Buchanan.

The great link between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries

is Duncan Ban Macintyre, "a name loved throughout the Highlands and

Islands." The Hunter Bard of Glenorchy, as he is often called,--though

his best title is the affectionate Gaelic "Duncan of the Songs,"--was

born on the 20th of March, 1724, at Druimliaghart in Glenorchy,

Argyll. His first song was composed on a sword with which he was armed

at the battle of Falkirk--where he served on the Royalist side as

substitute for a neighboring gentleman.

"This sword," says his biographer, Thomas Pattison, "the

poet lost or threw away in the retreat. On his return home

therefore the gentleman to whom it belonged, and whose

substitute he had been, refused to pay the sum for which

he had engaged Duncan Ban to serve in his stead. Duncan

consequently composed his song on 'The Battle of the

Speckled Kirk'--as Falkirk is called in Gaelic--in which he

good-humoredly satirized the gentleman who had sent him to

the war, and gave a woful description of 'the black sword

that worked the turmoil,' and whose loss, he says, made its

owner 'as fierce and furious as a gray brock in his den.' The

song immediately became popular, and incensed his employer so

much that he suddenly fell upon the poor poet one day with

his walking-stick, and striking him on the back, bade him

'go and make a song about that.' He was however afterward

compelled by the Earl of Breadalbane to pay the bard the sum

of 300 merks Scots (L16, 17_s._ 6_d._), which was his legal

due."

Duncan ended his days in Edinburgh, where he died in 1812,--one of the

last links of the moving record of the early eighteenth century and

its Jacobite associations.

Duncan was a contemporary of Macpherson's, and with Macpherson and his

'Ossian,' to which a special article is devoted elsewhere, we may well

leave our chronicle, forbearing to touch on the debatable ground of

later and contemporary Celtic literature in Scotland. Enough to say

that Duncan Ban Macintyre has no lack of worthy followers in Gaelic

poetry, and that with the Anglo-Celtic development, associated with

such names as Dr. Norman Macleod, Professor Blackie, Robert Buchanan,

George MacDonald, William Black, and, among new-comers, Miss Fiona

Macleod and Mr. Neil Munro, there seems every prospect that the Gaelic

spirit promises to achieve greatly in the new centuries to come.

The first selection is from the 'Sean Dana,' or Ancient Poems,

collected, or rather written (from oral legendary lore and ballads),

by Dr. John Smith, late in the eighteenth century.

PROLOGUE TO GAUL

How mournful is the silence of Night

When she pours her dark clouds over the valleys!

Sleep has overcome the youth of the chase:

He slumbers on the heath, and his dog at his knee.

The children of the mountain he pursues

In his dream, while sleep forsakes him.

Slumber, ye children of fatigue;

Star after star is now ascending the height.

Slumber! thou swift dog and nimble--

Ossian will arouse thee not from thy repose.

Lonely I keep watch,--

And dear to me is the gloom of night

When I travel from glen to glen,

With no hope to behold a morning or brightness.

Spare thy light, O Sun!

Waste not thy lamps so fast.

Generous is thy soul as the King of Morven's:

But thy renown shall yet fade;--

Spare thy lamps of a thousand flames

In thy blue hall, when thou retirest

Under thy dark-blue gates to sleep,

Beneath the dark embraces of the storm.

Spare them, ere thou art forsaken for ever,

As I am, without one whom I may love!

Spare them,--for there is not a hero now

To behold the blue flame of the beautiful lamps!

Ah, Cona of the precious lights,

Thy lamps burn dimly now:

Thou art like a blasted oak:

Thy dwellings and thy people are gone

East or west; on the face of thy mountain,

There shall be no more found of them but the trace!

In Selma, Tara, or Temora

There is not a song, a shell, or a harp;

They have all become green mounds;

Their stones have fallen into their own meadows;

The stranger from the deep or the desert

Will never behold them rise above the clouds.

And O Selma! home of my delight,

Is this heap my ruin,

Where grows the thistle, the heather, and the wild grass?

The following lines of St. Columba are taken from the 'Lyra Celtica,'

cited above:--

COLUMCILLE FECIT

(ST. COLUMBA MADE IT)

Delightful would it be to me to be in Uchd Ailiun

On the pinnacle of a rock,

That I might often see

The face of the ocean;

That I might see its heaving waves

Over the wide ocean,

When they chant music to their Father

Upon the world's course;

That I might see its level sparkling strand,

It would be no cause of sorrow;

That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,

Source of happiness;

That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves

Upon the rocks;

That I might hear the roar by the side of the church

Of the surrounding sea;

That I might see its noble flocks

Over the watery ocean;

That I might see the sea monsters,

The greatest of all wonders;

That I might see its ebb and flood

In their career;

That my mystical name might be, I say,

Cul ri Erin [Back turned to Ireland];

That contrition might come upon my heart

Upon looking at her;

That I might bewail my evils all,

Though it were difficult to compute them;

That I might bless the Lord

Who conserves all,

Heaven with its countless bright orders,

Land, strand, and flood;

That I might search the books all,

That would be good for my soul;

At times kneeling to beloved Heaven;

At times psalm-singing;

At times contemplating the King of Heaven,

Holy the chief;

At times at work without compulsion,

This would be delightful;

At times plucking duilisc from the rocks;

At times at fishing;

At times giving food to the poor;

At times in a carcair [solitary cell];

The best advice in the presence of God

To me has been vouchsafed.

The King whose servant I am will not let

Anything deceive me.

The third selection is an example of later Gaelic. This stirring

Hebridean poem is sometimes spoken of as from the ancient Gaelic.

Probably by this is meant merely old Gaelic, mediaeval or even later.

The translation is by Mr. Thomas Pattison, and is included in his

'Gaelic Bards.' He has the following note upon it:--

"This effusion, although in its original form it is only a

kind of wild chant,--almost indeed half prose,--yet is the

germ of the ballad. It occurs in many of the tales contained

in that collection,--the repository of old Gaelic lore,--the

'Popular Tales of the West Highlands,' sometimes more and

sometimes less perfect. The original will be found in the

second volume of the Tales.... The vigorous and elastic

spirit that pervades these verses must have strung the heart

of many a hardy mariner, who loved to feel the fresh and

briny breeze drive his snoring birlinn bounding like a living

creature over the tumbling billows of the inland loch, or the

huge swell of the majestic main."

IN HEBRID SEAS

We turned her prow into the sea,

Her stern into the shore,

And first we raised the tall tough masts,

And then the canvas hoar;

Fast filled our towering cloud-like sails,

For the wind came from the land,

And such a wind as we might choose

Were the winds at our command:

A breeze that rushing down the hill

Would strip the blooming heather,

Or rustling through the green-clad grove,

Would whirl its leaves together.

But when it seized the aged saugh,

With the light locks of gray,

It tore away its ancient root,

And there the old trunk lay!

It raised the thatch too from the roof,

And scattered it along;

Then tossed and whirled it through the air,

Singing a pleasant song.

It heaped the ruins on the land:--

Though sire and son stood by,

They could no help afford, but gaze

With wan and troubled eye!

A flap, a flash, the green roll dashed,

And laughed against the red;

Upon our boards, now here, now there,

It knocked its foamy head.

She could have split a slender straw,

So clean and well she went,

As still obedient to the helm

Her stately course she bent.

We watched the big beast eat the small,

The small beast nimbly fly,

And listened to the plunging eels,

The sea-gull's clang on high.

We had no other music

To cheer us on our way:

Till round those sheltering hills we passed

And anchored in this bay.

III--WELSH

The laws governing the life of languages are as elusive as those that

decide the fate of races and empires. Why is the Welsh tongue still

alive and vigorous, and the Irish (_pace_ Dr. Douglas Hyde) moribund?

It is a difficult question, but some light on it may be had by

traversing the early history of Welsh literature.

The like difficulty meets us in both Welsh and Irish: that of deciding

how far the mediaeval scribes and scholars doctored the older material

which fell into their hands. But in Welsh, the separation of the

primitive from the mediaeval element is often even a more difficult

task than in Irish.

In sketching the early course of Welsh literature, we cannot do better

than turn to the striking instance afforded by the name and fame of

Merlin. In legendary Welsh history, Merlin appears under almost as

many guises as he does in the pages of Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur.'

Merddin Emrys (Ambrosius), Merddin Sylvester (Merlin the Wild),

Merddin ab Morvryn (or Merlin Caledonius),--his name and fame vary

according to the chronicler. Of these, Merlin the son of Morvryn, the

most tangible in the list, was also known as Caledonius, because the

Kymry of the sixth century lived in that greater Wales which ranged as

far north as the Caledonian Forest. After the terrible battle of

Arderydd, Merlin, having seen his kindred all but obliterated, was

seized, tradition tells us, with a frenzy, and thereafter his bardic

utterances assumed a more and more mystical and oracular form. This,

added to his mysterious and magnetic personality and wildly impressive

personal presence, may well have led on in process of time, by gradual

legendary accretions, to the final conception of a Merlin miraculous,

supernatural, daemonic! However this may be, nothing can be more

instructive than to compare the late Merlin with the early Merlin, and

to trace his phases in Welsh folk-tale, and define his poetry finally

in the pages of the 'Black Book of Carmarthen.'

The 'Black Book of Carmarthen,' in its strikingly decorative black and

red manuscript, makes a wonderful testament of old Welsh poetry. If we

could solve all its problems and read all that is written between its

lines, we should be very near the great secret of the Druidic religion

and of Celtic mythology, as well as the secret of Merlin's actual and

imaginary effect in Welsh literature.

The battle of Arderydd has been cited above as a determining event in

Merlin's history. The opening poem in the 'Black Book of Carmarthen'

is a remarkable rhymed dialogue between Merlin and Taliesin, some of

whose lines are extremely imaginative and touching in their archaic

simplicity. Merlin begins:--

"How sad is Merlin now! how sad!

Keduyf and Kadvan--are they dead?

The furious slaughter filled the field,

And pierced was the Tryrwyd shield!"

Taliesin replies:--

"His house-folk did not falter in the fight!"

So it goes on, telling of the battle and its consequences, until one

reaches at the end that mysterious verse which haunts the imagination

and the ear of the reader. Merlin again speaks:--

"Sevenscore chieftains

Were turned into spirits;

In the wood of Celyddon

Were they transformed.

The wood of Celyddon is the Caledonian Forest. So far as these

excerpts go, they might seem to be the writing of the real Merlin.

There is internal evidence however that this poem, the much disputed

poem of the 'Apple-trees,' and others that follow it in the 'Black

Book,' were written not earlier than the twelfth century. Stephens,

usually an acute critic, imputes in his 'Literature of the Kymry'

these poems to Gwalchmai and other bards of later date. But even so,

these poets evidently founded their poems upon earlier ones,

traditionally handed on as Merlin's.

From such later sources as the 'Myvyrian Archaeology,' or Skene's 'Four

Ancient Books of Wales,' or the admirable Oxford texts edited by

Professor Rhys and Mr. Gwenogfvyn Evans, one can rehabilitate at will

the Merlin of the 'Black Book of Carmarthen,' much as Villemarque has

done after a fashion quite his own. Enough will so be certainly

discovered to outline a primitive Merlin, an original sixth-century

Merlin, under the impressive mediaeval robes of the Latin-Welsh

romantic chroniclers and poets. Enough too will be made clear to show

a basis of myth and prehistoric legend behind the remotest recorded

name, time, or place that can be counted historical.

The same is true of Taliesin, who appears, by the poetical remains

attributed to him,--some of them clearly mediaeval, others just as

clearly primitive,--even more interesting as a poet than Merlin. Just

as there are several Merlins, however, there are two Taliesins: there

is the fifth-century Taliesin, and there is the pseudo-Taliesin of the

twelfth. Both are wonderful in their way, and one knows not which to

admire most--him who wrote the 'Battle of Gwenystrad,' which is

undoubtedly a primitive war song, or the mediaeval poet who chose to

take the disguise of Taliesin, and taking too, probably, some of the

traditional fragments of his early poetry, worked them up afresh with

curious mediaeval art and mystic imagination. For comparison let us

take an early and a late poem, commonly gathered, as in the 'Myvyrian

Archaeology,' under one head.

Take first one of the later poems, the mystical 'Song to the Wind,'

which even in its English dress won Emerson's admiration, and which,

if we allow for all differences between mediaeval and modern

imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any literature is

likely to afford. As it is given among our selections, it need not be

quoted here. In point of time it is usual to assign it, as Stephens

does, to the twelfth or thirteenth century. But it seems to me to bear

traces again of being an older, more primitive poem, retouched

certainly, and probably reshaped, by a twelfth-century poet. And now

for a genuine Taliesin, or what at any rate many critics think to be

genuine. This you may have in the famous 'Gwaith Gwenystrad' (Battle

of Gwenystrad), one of the most spirited war poems in existence,

copied and recopied by a long succession of Kymric scribes, and which

the writer came upon first in the MS. collection of William Morris o

Gaergybi yn Mon, who flourished about 1758. Here are four lines of

Morris's copy _literatim_, which will give a better idea than any

criticism of mine of the mingled realism and imagination of the

poem:--

"Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion,

Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawt gofedon,

Unynt tanc gan aethant golludion,

Llaw ynghroes gryd ygro granwynion."

And here is a rough, vigorous translation of these lines from the same

volume:--

"In the pass of the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who

hurtled their arms.... They fell to the ground together when

the day was lost, their hands on the crucifix. And horror was

in the pale face of the dead warriors."

A succeeding line,

"A gwyar a uaglei ar ddillad,"

(And the blood was tangled in their clothing),

adds the last touch of dreadful sincerity to the account. And in other

primitive poems that we may ascribe to Taliesin are effects as

convincing and vivid.

But we must leave Taliesin and his difficulties, to sketch briefly the

course of poetry between his actual date in early time and his poetic

resurrection in the Middle Ages. Not so interesting poetically but

more important historically is the next of the Welsh bards, Aneurin,

who wrote the 'Gododin.' This curious and interesting war poem tells

of a foray made by the Ottadini, an early Kymric tribe, living in the

greater Wales of their time, on the Northumbrian coast. Mr. Stephens

imagines Cattraeth, which figures as a central scene of the action of

the poem, to be Catterick in Yorkshire; and this we may provisionally

accept.

"The Welshmen went to Cattraeth; and merry marched the host.

But thro' drinking the gray mead, the day--the day was lost."

The expedition was one of those which show the gradual cession of

greater Wales by the Welsh, and their retreat to the lesser Wales that

is still theirs.

We may pause here to remark that the bardic order was early

constituted among the Welsh, as among the Irish. In the Laws of Howel

Dda (Howel the Good), who flourished in the tenth century, we find

very explicit provision made for the bard:--

"In case of fighting, the Bard shall play the 'Monarchy of Britain'

before the battle!

"His land shall be free; he shall have a horse from the King!

"He shall have a harp from the King, and a gold ring from the Queen,

when he is appointed. The harp he shall never part with."

Unless, which is highly probable, we have lost some of the records of

the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, we have to conclude that Welsh

poetry made small headway. The remarkable laws of Howel Dda are the

monument of the tenth century. In the eleventh we come upon the first

signs of a revival in Meilir, who is historically interesting, and in

his last poems shows himself a true poet. In the twelfth we have to

mark a distinct further step in Gwalchmai, who is the first conscious

poet of nature, and who may thus claim to be the founder of one of the

finest traditions in all Welsh poetry. Following Gwalchmai comes the

princely poet Howel the Tall, son of Owain Gwynedd by an Irish lady,

and who himself wore the crown of Gwynedd for a brief two years. He

died in 1171 at twenty-seven, after a life of stormiest adventure; but

in the intervals of battle he found time to write some of the

loveliest love poems that all Welsh literature can boast. His death

was lamented by Periv ab Kedwoi in a much less conventional and more

moving tone than the official bards generally troubled to use for such

elegies. A century or so later, and we find Llywarch ab Llywelyn

(known as "Prydydd y Moch," the Poet of the Pigs) writing a still

finer and more ample lament on the last native prince of Wales,

Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, "Llywelyn ewi Llyw Olaf," as he is still fondly

called. These two laments may be taken as typical of a wide section of

Welsh poetry, dealing with the deaths of heroes and princes, and

ranging in date from the fifth or sixth century to the nineteenth.

Llywelyn the Last died in 1282, and thereafter began what has been

well termed "The Great Oppression" (y Gorthrwm Mawr), by which Norman

and Saxon combined to crush the language and expropriate the people of

the country, with the result of calling up at last Owen Glendower's

hot spirit to fight for the national cause.

But it is remarkable that in this disastrous period arose some of the

finest interpreters of her genius that the country was ever to find.

Within its term were, without a doubt, carried to an approximate

perfection those more native romances that we term 'Mabinogion,'--the

most exquisite and exquisitely turned tales, in point of art, that the

Celtic races have produced. The late Lady Charlotte Guest's edition of

the 'Mabinogion' serves very well to convey, in a translation of

extreme felicity, to non-Celtic readers the art and spirit of these

tales. But it must be kept in mind that all she gives are not strictly

'Mabinogion'; several of them are more properly to be called romances,

as showing strong traces of Norman and French influence. The

'Mabinogi' originally was a tale to be recited by a _mabinog_,

_i. e._, a 'prentice to the bardic craft who had not yet obtained his

full degree, and with it the right of composing and reciting poetry.

The idea which some critics have, that the 'Mabinogion' were boys'

tales, or still worse, nursery tales, is quite wrong. Let us remember

that such tales were the delight of most of the princely halls and

winter hearths of mediaeval Wales, where they were recited after the

great banquets and on feast nights to the most critical audience that

could be afforded. 'The Dream of Rhonabwy,' 'Kilhwch and Olwen,' and

'Math, Son of Mathonwy,' may be mentioned as among the tales in Lady

Guest's volume which are most natively original; and we have chosen

the portrait of Olwen from the second of these for our selections, to

show the art and charm of the Welsh romancers in the Middle Ages.

If the 'Mabinogion' are fine as prose, we have an equally fine

expression of this time in poetry, in the poems of Rhys Goch ab

Rhicert (Rhys the Red, son of Rhicert) and the ever delightful Dafydd

ab Gwilym, who will be found treated separately. After Dafydd, Welsh

poetry was to enter upon a new phase, not fortunate even in its

immediate effects, disastrous in its ultimate ones. It was in the

fourteenth century that Welsh prosody, always intricate, finally waxed

proud, so to speak, of its complexity, and formed for itself a

hide-bound code which was to become the bugbear of Welsh poetry in the

following centuries. To give any adequate account of its complexities

of technique and the whole letter of its syntax would require a long

and tedious treatise in itself. Enough to say that the underlying

principle was that of what is termed in Welsh "Eynghanedd," or

"consonancy"; by which rhymes within rhymes and echoes within echoes

of certain dominant syllables were insisted upon arbitrarily, until

almost every word in every line was subject to a rigid and invincible

rule. Art for art, insisted upon in this way, could only end in

conventionalizing the very thing it was meant to assist.

Poetry, too carefully nursed and housed, thus fell into a bad way; but

luckily meanwhile a new literature was to begin for Wales, along quite

other lines, with the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into

Welsh by Bishop Morgan in the sixteenth century marks an epoch in the

life of the Welsh people and their literature. Therewith the history

of the princes and the great lords ends, and the history of the

people--and a people mainly peasant, let us remark--begins. Its

profound moral force apart, and judged purely as a literary force, the

Bible, admirably and idiomatically translated, had an incalculable

effect. It set a fine and high and yet simple standard of prose, much

as the English Bible does; and taught the possibilities of his tongue

to the poorest Welsh peasant. One finds its influence strong in almost

every prose work of any note published in the last three centuries,

and in a great proportion of the poetry. It did more than anything of

later time to save the language; and here is the simple explanation

of the extraordinary difference between the fortunes of the Welsh and

the Irish tongue. Wales--the Wales of the people--became profoundly

impressed by the religious sentiment and the heroic and profound

poetry of the Hebrews, and gained from them a new stimulus to express

itself and its needs and aspirations in its own native way and in its

own tongue.

A characteristic expression of the homelier moral humor of the Welsh

is to be had in the 'Canwyll y Cymry' (Candle of Wales), by Rhys

Pritchard, the famous Elizabethan vicar of Llandovery, which for two

centuries was the most popular book in Wales after the Bible. Its

simple rhymed didactics do not often rise into poetry; but they are

full of human feeling, expressed in a terse and proverbial way, with

distinct individuality. The book easily leads one on to the very

remarkable band of hymn writers, from Anne Griffiths to Williams

Pantycelyn, who have flourished in Welsh. These, and some score

beside, really rank by their imaginative fervor and inspiration as

true poets. In quite another vein, but probably a very ancient and

traditional one in Welsh, we have the homely interludes of Twm O'r

Nant, who was born about 1750, of whose life George Borrow gives a

very vigorous account in 'Wild Wales.' A greater than Twm O'r Nant,

and born a generation earlier, Gronney Owen, a man of the finest

poetic genius, ought to have a special interest for American readers

because he was practically exiled from his beloved Anglesea by the

ungrateful church he served; and died, poor and broken-hearted, in New

Brunswick about the year 1780. His 'Cywydd y Faru' (Ode to the Day of

Judgment), his touching lines to his little daughter Elin, or his

Hogarthian lines upon the London garret in which he lived for a time,

may be cited as showing the various sides of his poetry, of which

unluckily there are no adequate translations yet forthcoming.

In prose we must not omit to mention the 'Bardd Cwsg' (The Sleeping

Bard) of Elis Wynne,--a very imaginative and idiomatic prose

epic-in-little, describing the bard's vision of a curiously Welsh

Inferno. Wynne's prose style is remarkably fine and pure, modeled on

the best Biblical standard of a Welsh without English admixture. Welsh

prose has been admirably handled too by some of the divines who have

flourished within the past two centuries, and who have not confined

their eloquence to the pulpit. Even when the State church had no

sympathy with the Welsh people and their language, many of its

individual members did much to keep the spirit of literature alive;

while the nonconformist ministers of Wales have always been vigorously

and eminently devoted to the same cause.

Under happier conditions to-day, the latest expression of this vital

persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the

movement that has carried the new national university to completion,

and rallied the younger generation under the banner of "Cymru Fydd"

(Young Wales). The songs of Ceiriog Hughes, the poems of Islwyn, the

works of scholars like Professor John Rhys, Canon Silvain Evans, and

Mr. Gwenogfvyn Evans; the ardent writing and editing of Mr. Owen M.

Edwards in his innumerable magazines and other adventures; and the

novels of Daniel Owen,--these may be named as among the influences

that count most to the Wales of the nineteenth century's end.

NOTE.--For citations from Welsh literature see articles

on Aneurin, Mabinogion, and Taliesin. The Breton branch

of Celtic literature will be treated under the heading

'Villemarque,' the celebrated collector of 'Barzaz-Breiz.'

IV--CORNISH

The literature of a single county of England is not likely to be very

extensive, and when that literature and its language died for good and

all, a century ago, it becomes still more limited. Until the reign of

Henry VIII., though for some time English had been very generally

spoken throughout the county, the old Celtic Cornish, holding a middle

position, philologically as well as geographically, between Welsh and

Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peasantry as far east

as the Tamar. The great ecclesiastical revolution of that period

helped to destroy it. Neither prayer-book nor Bible was translated

into it; and though the ardently Catholic Cornish at first would have

none of the former, saying that it was "but like a Christmas game,"

they were overruled by the forcible argument of "apostolick blows and

knocks," and had to submit. Then the language receded rapidly. By the

time of the Great Rebellion Truro was its eastern limit; early in the

eighteenth century only the two western claw-like promontories

retained it; and though Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, was not

really the last person who spoke it, it was dead before the present

century was born. A few traditional sentences, the numerals up to

twenty, and some stray words lingered on until our own day,--twenty

years ago the present writer took down a fair collection from the

mouths of ancient mariners in Mount's Bay,--and a few words are still

mixed with the local dialect of English. But as a language Cornish is

dead, though its ghost still haunts its old dwelling in the names of

villages, houses, woods, valleys, wells, and rocks, from Tamar to

Penwith.

As may be expected, a great proportion of the literature is in verse,

and most of that is in dramatic form. So little is there that an

exhaustive list of what survives is quite possible. It is as

follows:--

1. _The Poem of the Passion._ A versified account of the Passion of

our Lord, recounting the events from Palm Sunday to Easter, with the

addition of many legendary incidents from the Gospel of Nicodemus and

other similar sources. The earliest MS. (in the British Museum) is of

the fifteenth century, which is probably the date of its composition.

It has been twice printed, once by Davies Gilbert, with a translation

by John Keigwin in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1862.

2. _The Ordinalia._ Three connected dramas, known collectively under

this title. The first recounts the Creation and the history of the

world as far as Noah's Flood. The second act of this gives the story

of Moses and of David and the Building of Solomon's Temple, ending

with the curiously incongruous episode of the martyrdom of St.

Maximilla, _as a Christian_, by the bishop placed in charge of the

Temple of Solomon. The second play represents the life of our Lord

from the Temptation to the Crucifixion, and this goes on without a

break into the third play, which gives the story of the Resurrection

and Ascension, and the legend of the death of Pilate. The connecting

link between the three is the legend of the wood of the cross. This

well-known story, most of which is interwoven with the whole trilogy,

is as follows:--Seth was sent by his dying father to beg the promised

Oil of Mercy to save him; the angel who guarded Paradise gave him

three seeds, or, according to the play, apple-pips; and when he

returned and found his father already dead, he placed them in Adam's

mouth and buried him on Mount Moriah. In process of time the three

seeds grew into three trees, and from them Abraham gathered the wood

for the sacrifice of Isaac, and Moses got his rod wherewith he smote

the sea and the rock. Later the three trees, to symbolize the Trinity,

grew into one tree, and David sat under it to bewail his sin. But

Solomon cut it down to make a beam for the Temple, and since it would

in no wise fit into any place, he cast it out and set it as a bridge

over Cedron. Later on he buried it, and from the place where it lay

there sprang the healing spring of Bethesda, to the surface of which

it miraculously floated up, and the Jews found it and made of it the

Cross of Calvary.

These plays were probably written in the fifteenth century, perhaps by

one of the priests of Glazeney College near Falmouth, and were acted

with others that are now lost in the places called _Planan-Guare_ (the

Plain of the Play), of which several still remain. The 'Ordinalia'

were published with a translation by Edwin Norris in 1859.

3. _The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood_, was a modernized

version of the first act of the first of the 'Ordinalia' trilogy. It

was written by William Jordan of Helston in 1611; but the author has

borrowed whole passages of considerable length from the older play.

The language represents a later period of Cornish, and occasionally

several lines of English are introduced. Perhaps by a natural Celtic

antipathy to the Saxon, these are generally put into the mouths of

Lucifer and his angels, who furnish a good deal of the comic part of

the piece. This play was published by Davies Gilbert in 1827, and by

Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1864.

4. _The Life of St. Meriasek._ This play, written in 1504, is perhaps

the most interesting of the batch. The story at least of the others

contains nothing very new to most people, but St. Meriasek or Meriadoc

(to give him his Breton name), the patron of Camborne, is not a

well-known character, and his life, full as it is of allusions and

incidents of a misty period of Cornish history, is most curious and

interesting. It is not perhaps simplified by being mixed up in the

wildest manner with the legend of Constantine and St. Sylvester, and

the scenes shift about from Cornwall or Brittany to Rome, and from the

fourth to the Heaven-knows-what century, with bewildering frequency.

There are also certain other legends interwoven with the story, and it

seems probable that at least three plays have been, as Dr. Whitley

Stokes expresses it, "unskillfully pieced together." Yet there are

many passages of considerable literary merit. The only existing MS. of

this play is in the Hengwrt collection at Peniarth, and it was edited

and translated by Dr. Stokes in 1872.

5. There were probably many other plays which have perished, but one

other there certainly was, of which a fragment exists. What it was

called or what it was about no one knows, but an actor in it, setting

about to learn his own part in it, wrote that short piece of

thirty-six lines on the back of a title-deed of some land in the

parish of St. Stephen, near Bodmin. The deed drifted eventually into

the British Museum, and the present writer discovered the Cornish

verses on it, not wholly by accident, about nineteen years ago. The

writing belongs to the latter part of the fourteenth century, and is

therefore the earliest literary fragment of the language.

6. The rest of the literature of the Cornish language consists of a

few songs, epigrams, mottoes, proverbs, and the like, a short

dissertation on the language, and the tale of 'John of Chy-an-Hur,' a

widely known folk-tale. These are mostly in the latest form of

Cornish, and are contained in the MS. collection of William Gwavas in

the British Museum and in that of Dr. Borlase, until lately in the

possession of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by

Davies Gilbert (with the play of the 'Creation'), by William Pryce in

the 'Archaeologia Cornu-Britannica' in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Borlase in

the Transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and in a

fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly translations or

adaptations from the English, but a few, such as the rather doggerel

'Pilchard Fishing Song,' are originals. Lastly, in the Church of St.

Paul, near Penzance, there is the one solitary epitaph in the

language; written while it was still just alive, and perhaps the last

composition in it.

[The versions given of these specimens of Cornish literature

are founded on those of Dr. Whitley Stokes and Dr. E. Norris.

The phraseology has been to some extent altered, but the

renderings are almost all the same.]

FROM THE 'POEM OF THE PASSION'

[The Death of Our Lord on the Cross]

His pain was strong and sharp, so that he could not live,

But must yield up his white soul; ever purely had he lived.

And Christ prayed, as thus in many a place we read,

"My soul I do commend, O Lord, between thy hands!"

For weakly he breathed, being constrained, so that he could not rest;

On nothing could he lean his head for the garland that he wore.

If he leaned to one side, for his shoulder it grieved him

And the tree did yet worse, if he set it backwards.

Nor could he lean forward for fear of being choked.

Then was it as we read in books as it is written:--

"For the birds to make their nests, places are prepared,

But for Christ where he may lay his head no place is found."

But now must he needs leave his head to hang,

For his blood was all gone from him, and he could not live.

To the side of the Mother that owned him, his head he would hold,

And his soul went from him with chilling shriek and shrill cry.

Beside the Cross of Jesus was a man hight Sentury,

And when he saw the wondrous things that happened at Christ's death,

And how his soul he yielded, against nature, with a cry,

He said without scorning, "This truly was God's Son;"

And many were there with him that testimony bore.

Now was it midday in the land, or later, as is written.

Earthquake there was and lightning, and darkness over all;

The Temple Veil was rent in twain, and to the ground it fell,

And likewise broken were the stones so strong and hard.

Graves in many places were opened wide,

And the bodies that were in them were raised up,

And went straightway to the city--by many were they seen--

To bear witness that it was God's Son that was slain.

Water, earth, and fire, and wind, sun, moon, and stars likewise,

At Christ's suffering death knew sorrow.

Nature will cause, I trow, if the good Lord be pained,

All his subjects, even saints, to be grieved for his pain.

FROM 'ORIGO MUNDI,' IN THE 'ORDINALIA'

[Seth, being sent to fetch the oil of mercy from Paradise for

his dying father, comes to the guardian cherub.]

_Cherubin_--

Seth, what is thine errand,

That thou comest so far?

Tell me anon.

_Seth_--

O Angel, I will tell it thee:

My father is old and weary;

He wishes no longer to live;

And through me he prayed thee

To tell the truth

Of the oil of mercy promised

To him at the last day.

_Cherubin_--

Within the gate put thou thy head,

And behold it all, nor fear,

Whatever thou seest.

And look on all sides,

Spy out every detail,

Search out everything carefully.

_Seth_--

Very gladly I will do it;

I am glad to have permission

To know what is there

And tell it to my father.

[_And he looks and turns round, saying:_

Fair field to behold is this;

Hapless he who lost the land.

But for the tree I wonder greatly

That it should be dry.

But I trow that it went dry

And all was made bare, for the sin

Which my father and mother sinned.

Like the prints of their feet,

They all became dry as herbs,

Alas, when the morsel was eaten.

_Cherubin_--

O Seth, thou art come

Within the gate of Paradise:

Tell me what thou sawest.