“ Alas! for the wonderful yew-forest, [6] that they should have gone into the abode of clay!
Had they been alive, they would have revenged their lords;
Had mighty death not intervened, this warrior-band had not been unavenged by me.
To their very end they were brave; they ever strove for victory over their foes;
They would still sing a stave—a deep-toned shout,—they sprang from the race of a noble lord.
That was a joyous, lithe-limbed band to the very hour when they were slain:
The green-leaved forest has received them—it was an all-fierce slaughter. ”

“ Her sons, carrying Christianity and a new humanism over Great Britain and the Continent, became the teachers of whole nations, the counsellors of kings and emperors. For once, if but for a century or two, the Celtic spirit dominated a large part of the Western world, and Celtic ideals imparted a new life to a decadent civilisation until they succumbed, not altogether to the benefit of mankind, before a mightier system—that of Rome. ”

“ In the battle of Aidne, Crede, the daughter of King Guare of Aidne, beheld Dinertach of the Hy Fidgenti, who had come to the help of Guare, with seventeen wounds upon his breast. Then she fell in love with him. He died, and was buried in the cemetery of Colman's Church.
These are arrows that murder sleep
At every hour in the bitter-cold night:
Pangs of love throughout the day
For the company of the man from Roiny.
Great love of a man from another land
Has come to me beyond all else:
It has taken my bloom, no colour is left,
It does not let me rest. ”

“ Religious poetry ranges from single quatrains to lengthy compositions dealing with all the varied aspects of religious life. Many of them give us a fascinating insight into the peculiar character of the early Irish Church, which differed in so many ways from the rest of the Christian world. We see the hermit in his lonely cell, the monk at his devotions or at his work of copying in the scriptorium or under the open sky ”

“ Thou never hadst a day of sorrow, many a night thou hadst abroad;
Thou hadst awaiting thee many a king with many a battle.
O sword of the kings of mighty fires, do not fear to be astray!
Thou shalt find thy man of craft, a lord worthy of thee.
Who shall henceforth possess thee, or to whom wilt thou deal ruin?
From the day that Carroll departed, with whom wilt thou be bedded?
Thou shalt not be neglected until thou come to the house of glorious Naas:
Where Finn of the feasts is they will hail thee with 'welcome.'
FOOTNOTES:
[19] A name for Ireland. ”

“ The bias and ignorance of English historians and of many professed students of Irish history, who continue to write without a first-hand knowledge of its sources, have also reacted unfavourably upon the study of Irish literature. Slowly, however, the fact is becoming recognised in ever wider circles that the vernacular literature of ancient Ireland is the most primitive and original among the literatures of Western Europe, and that in its origins and development it affords a most fascinating study. ”

“ My head all unwashed is among warrior-bands in fierce slaughter.
It is blindness for any one making a tryst to set aside the tryst with Death:
The tryst that we made at Claragh has been kept by me in pale death. ”

“ When the wind sets from the south across the land of Saxons of mighty shields,
The wave strikes the Isle of Scit, it surges up to the summit of Caladnet,
And pounds the grey-green mouth of the Shannon.
The ocean is in flood, the sea is full, delightful is the home of ships,
The wind whirls the sand around the estuary,
Swiftly the rudder cleaves the broad sea. ”

“ Time and again in the course of their history the nations of Western and Northern Europe have had to struggle hard for the preservation of their national life against a powerful denationalising influence proceeding from Rome. Those among them who underwent the Roman conquest lost early, together with their liberty, their most precious national possession, their native language and with it their vernacular literature. Less than a [Pg viii] century after the slaughter of Vercingetorix Romanised Gauls were carrying off the palm of Roman eloquence. ”

“ I am the man of tribulations.' 'Wherefore hast thou come?' says Moling. 'That thou mayst bestow a blessing upon me.' 'I will not bestow it,' says Moling, 'for thou dost not deserve it. Besides, what good could it do thee?' 'If,' says the Devil, 'thou shouldst go into a tub of honey and bathe therein with thy raiment on, its odour would remain upon thee unless the raiment were washed.' 'How would that affect thee?' asks Moling. ”

“ It had been the influence and example of those Irish missionaries who converted Northumberland that taught the Anglian monk to preserve and cultivate his national literature.
Ireland had become the heiress of the classical and theological learning of the Western Empire of the third and fourth centuries, and a period of humanism was thus ushered in which reached its culmination during the sixth and following centuries, the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. ”

“ The national language was employed not only for the purposes of instruction and devotion, in tombstone or other inscriptions, but also in religious prose and poetry, and, still more remarkable, in learned writings. There can, I think, be little doubt that we should hardly have any early records of Anglo-Saxon literature if the English had not in the first instance received Christianity from the Irish. ”

“ There are no ancient Irish epics or ballads. So much was prose the natural vehicle of expression for Gaelic narrative, that when in later centuries the Arthurian epics were done into Gaelic, they were all turned from poetry into prose. At the same time, most Irish tales and stories are interspersed with lyrics put into the mouth of the principal heroes, after the manner of the cante fable, most familiar to modern readers from the French story of Aucassin et Nicolete. My collection begins with a few specimens of such poems. ”

“ Before thee the host broke on the day when Kelly was slain,
Flannagan's son, with numbers of troops, in high lofty great Tara.
Before thee they ebbed southwards in the battle of the Boyne of the rough feats,
When Cnogva fell, the lance of valour, at seeing thee, for dread of thee.
Thou wast furious, thou wast not weak, heroic was thy swift force,
When Ailill Frosach of Fál [19] fell in the front of the onset.
[Pg 74]
Thou never hadst a day of defeat with Carroll of the beautiful garths. ”

“ It is not till the end of the eleventh century that we find the beginnings of a national literature in France and Germany. In Ireland, on the other hand, which had received her Christianity not direct from Rome but from Britain and Gaul, and where the Church, far removed from the centre of Roman influence and cut off from the rest of Christendom, was developing on national lines, vernacular literature received a fresh impulse from the new faith. A flourishing primitive Christian literature arose. ”

“ In Nature poetry the Gaelic muse may vie with that of any other nation. Indeed, these poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the world. To seek out and watch and love Nature, in its tiniest phenomena as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as to the Celt. Many hundreds of Gaelic and Welsh poems testify to this fact. ”

“ The same fate was shared by all Celtic nationalities of the Continent, and by those numerous Germanic tribes that were conquered by Rome, or came within the sphere of the later Roman civilisation. In Britain, where the Roman occupation was only temporary, its denationalising effect may be gauged by the numerous Latin loan-words preserved to the present day in the Welsh language, by the partial Romanisation of British personal proper names, by the early inscribed stones, which, unlike those of Ireland, are all in Latin, and by the late and slow beginnings of a literature in the vernacular. ”

“ Better to beware of them than to trust them,
better to trample upon them than to fondle them,
better to crush them than to cherish them.
They are waves that drown you,
they are fire that burns you,
they are two-edged weapons that cut you,
they are moths for tenacity,
they are serpents for cunning,
they are darkness in light,
they are bad among the good,
they are worse among the bad.'
[Pg 108]
'O Cormac, grandson of Conn,' said Carbery, 'what is the worst for the body of man?'
'Not hard to tell,' said Cormac. ”

“ If thou hoard it, a close treasure, none of thy offspring will ever be destitute.
There are around us here and there many spoils of famous luck:
Horrible are the huge entrails which the Morrigan [9] washes.
She came to us from the edge of a spear, 'tis she that egged us on.
Many are the spoils she washes, terrible the hateful laugh she laughs.
She has flung her mane over her back—it is a stout heart that will not quail at her:
Though she is so near to us, do not let fear overcome thee! ”

“ Of ancient love-songs comparatively little has come down to us. What we have are mostly laments for departed lovers. He who would have further examples of Gaelic love-poetry must turn to modern collections, among which the Love-Songs of Connaught, collected and translated by Douglas Hyde, occupy the foremost place.
A word on the metrical system of Irish poetry may conclude this rapid sketch. The original type from which the great variety of Irish metres has sprung is the catalectic trochaic tetrameter of Latin poetry, as in the well-known popular song of Cæsar's soldiers ”

“ Far and wide you have wandered on every track:
If every day we followed your ways,
We should come safe into the presence of dread God.
You leave an example and a bequest
To every one in this world,
You have taught us by your life:
Earnest prayer to God is no fallacy.
Then may God grant us peace and happiness!
May the countenance of the King
Shine brightly upon us
When we leave behind us our withered bodies.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] A name for Ireland.
[Pg 39]
THE DEVIL'S TRIBUTE TO MOLING
Once as Moling was praying in his church he saw a man coming in to him. ”

“ But, from the eleventh century onward, we have an almost unbroken series of hundreds of MSS. in which all that had escaped destruction was collected and arranged. Many of the tales and poems thus preserved were undoubtedly originally composed in the eighth century; some few perhaps in the seventh; and as Irish scholarship advances, it is not unlikely that fragments of poetry will be found which, from linguistic or internal evidence, may be claimed for the sixth century. [Pg xi]
The Celtic nations stand almost alone in this, that they did not employ poetry for epical narrative. ”

“ Ah, blackbird, thou art satisfied
Where thy nest is in the bush:
Hermit that clinkest no bell,
Sweet, soft, peaceful is thy note.
MOLING SANG THIS
When I am among my elders
I am proof that sport is forbidden:
When I am among the mad young folk
They think that I am their junior.
[Pg 101]
THE CHURCH BELL IN THE NIGHT
Sweet little bell
That is struck [29] in the windy night,
I liefer go to a tryst with thee
Than to a tryst with a foolish woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] The tongueless Irish bells were struck, not rung. ”

“ To Ireland and beyond her border
It is ruin of study and of schools.
THE CRUCIFIXION
At the cry of the first bird
They began to crucify Thee, O cheek like a swan!
It were not right ever to cease lamenting—
It was like the parting of day from night.
Ah! though sore the suffering
Put upon the body of Mary's Son—
Sorer to Him was the grief
That was upon her for His sake.
[Pg 100]
THE PILGRIM AT ROME
To go to Rome
Is much of trouble, little of profit:
The King whom thou seekest here,
Unless thou bring Him with thee, thou wilt not find.
HOSPITALITY
O King of stars! ”

“ Then, challenged by Liadin, he permits them a perilous freedom. In the result he banishes Curithir, who thenceforward renounces love and becomes a pilgrim. When Liadin still seeks him he crosses the sea. She returns to the scene of their penance, and shortly dies. When all is over, Cummin lovingly lays the stone where she had mourned her love, and upon which she died, over the grave of the unhappy maiden.
Curithir
Of late
Since I parted from Liadin,
Long as a month is every day,
Long as a year each month. ”

“ Of the oldest bardic poetry very little has as yet been published, and less translated. But many fine examples of a later age will be found in Standish Hayes O'Grady's Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, a book which [Pg xii] makes one realise more clearly than any other that the true history of Ireland has never yet been written. ”

“ Again, when Christianity came with the authority of Rome and in the Latin language, now imbued with an additional sanctity, there ensued in all nations a struggle between the vernacular and the foreign tongue for obtaining the rank of a literary language—a struggle from which the languages of the Continental nations, as well as of Britain, emerged only [Pg ix] slowly and late. ”

“ It was only on the outskirts of the Continental world, and beyond the sway and influence of the Roman Empire, that some vigorous nations preserved their national institutions intact, and among them there are only three whom letters reached early enough to leave behind some record of their pagan civilisation in a vernacular literature. These were the Irish, the Anglo-Saxons, and, comparative latecomers, the Icelanders. ”

“ Coursing on the Irish Sea.
[Pg 102]
FROM THE TRIADS OF IRELAND
Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow's dug into the pail; the slender blade of green corn upon the ground; the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.
The three worst welcomes: a handicraft in the same house with the inmates; scalding water upon your feet; salt food without a drink.
Three rejoicings followed by sorrow: a wooer's, a thief's, a tale-bearer's.
Three rude ones of the world: a youngster mocking an old man; a robust person mocking an invalid ”

“ For the sake of the fair babe that was conceived in Thy womb,
For the sake of the holy child that is High-King in every place,
For the sake of His cross that is higher than any cross,
For the sake of His burial when He was buried in a stone-tomb,
For the sake of His resurrection when He arose before every one,
For the sake of the holy household from every place to Doom,
Be Thou our safeguard in the Kingdom of the good Lord,
That we may meet with dear Jesus—that is our prayer—hail!
[Pg 34]
EVE'S LAMENT
I am Eve, great Adam's wife,
'Tis I that outraged Jesus of old ”