Og

“ But Angus Ogue had the deep immemorial age of the granite upon him, and he slept as the dead sleep.
Orchil smiled. “They are old, old, the ancient gods,” she whispered: “they are so old, they cannot see eternity at rest. For Angus Ogue is the god of Youth, and he only is eternal and unchanging.”
Then, before she turned once more to her looms of life and death, she lifted her eyes till her gaze pierced the brown earth and rose above the green world and was a trouble amid the quietudes of the sky. ”

“ Yes! in the prehistoric, in Ogga, the gaunt horror of the desire to kill had arisen. The pallid beast of hatred, ridden by the clutching hags of envy and jealousy and spite and terror, ran before Ogga in his path. He—Ogga—stared wildly at the image of a man, stifled and gasping, held at the throat by Ogga’s hand—his own—until the eyes started from their sockets, turning their lifeless whitenesses downward and upward in the wanton agony of death. ”

“ And that the lofty realms of æther might not be more safe than the Earth, they say that the Giants aspired to the sovereignty of Heaven, and piled the mountains, heaped together, even to the lofty stars. Then the omnipotent Father, hurling his lightnings, broke through Olympus,36 and struck Ossa away from Pelion, that lay beneath it. ”

“ Ogga was indeed a wild man, a prehistoric, a creature of the plain, living next to nature, supplying his daily needs by a harsh ingenuity, wringing from obstacles a concession to his daily requests, a being utterly removed from all modern conceptions of social physics, a being on whose uplifted face no word of revelation or literature or exhortation had ever fallen, one whose instincts, the germinal moments of whose mind, with its inseparable faculties of observation and deduction, had only become active and projected under the influences of nature. ”

“ To gaze at Ogier as he took his way
Through the thronged place; and quickly too he gat
Unto the place whereas the Lady sat,
For men gave place unto him, fearing him:
For not alone was he most huge of limb,
And dangerous, but something in his face,
As his calm eyes looked o'er the crowded place,
Struck men with awe; and in the ancient days,
When men might hope alive on gods to gaze,
They would have thought, "The gods yet love our town
And from the heavens have sent a great one down." ”

“ And that is why, when Orchil weaves dumbly in the dark: and Keithoir is blind, and dreams among remote hills and by unfrequented shores: and Manannan lies heavy with deep sleep, with the oceans of the world like moving shadows above him: and Hesus is grown white and hoar with the frost of waning stars and weary with the burden of new worlds: that is why Angus Ogue, the youthful god, is more ancient than they, and is for ever young. Their period is set. Oblivion is upon the march against their immemorial time. But in the heart of Angus Ogue blooms the Rose of Youth, whose beauty is everlasting. ”

“ In the chapter on The Place the marvellous variety of natural conditions under which both Ogga and Lhatto lived—for we have seen in their various and errant life, however specialized, they were meeting all of them—were those which appealed to their wonder, their fear, their admiration, awoke in them joy and amazement and desire, fed the springs of poetic impulse, stirred the sense of worship and dependence, and propagated the thrilling currents of question and imagination. ”

“ And suddenly Ogi found a thrill running over him. There was the great beast before him, brought magically back to life by markings in the dirt. Ogi had made the first picture!
But then terror seized him. He lived in a world of terror, and always had to act before he dared to think. Hastily he scratched over the dirt, until every trace of the magic beast was gone. He gazed behind him, expecting to see the spirit of the aurochs, summoned into the cave by this fearful new magic. ”

“ And then by the dear subtlety of all things great and good, with passion came also, with unhesitating foot, reverence and happiness and aspiration, and Love thus born made of Ogga a divine thing, and of Lhatto, yet unwaking, yet unknown, a woman drifting ashore in a little awkward boat from the irresolute sea, it made of her a wonder of life, full of affluent loveliness, full of assured excellence, full of peace, and Ogga, feeling all these things, knelt and touched the hand of the sleeping girl. ”

“ It was before a creature of this sort, gigantic, grotesque, decadent and foreign, that Ogga stared with all his eyes, thinking to please Lhatto by bringing back to her some trophy from its body. The strange beast continued its prolonged feeding and Ogga watched. The night, darkening the valley with blue shadows, that sensibly thickened, overtaking each other and pressing like a repulsing force the fleeing lights, rising upward on the mountain, soon hid the animal, and with the night came rain and a low wind raising innumerable voices in the great woods. ”

“ Gog had been above a mile elevated from the earth when he began to fall, and as he advanced the rapidity increased, so that he went like a ball from a cannon into the morass, and his nose striking against one of the iron-capped hands of his brother Magog, just then rising from the depths, he began to bleed violently, and, but for the softness of the morass, would have lost his life. ”

“ The Ogrum, creatures of the dawn world, in spite of their planes and their poison gas, had no real knowledge of science, of the laws of cause and effect. The Ogrum thought that they could assure the return of the warming and life-giving sun by offering a living sacrifice to this bubbling lava!
If their reasoning was erroneous and false, it was nonetheless hideous and real for all that. For they would certainly offer in sacrifice, here, every man taken from the Idaho, unless they were prevented by force. ”

“ Strength came to his arms. He hurled the smarting, almost senseless Ogga this way and that; each fall of the staggering victim elicited new shouts of triumph. He waved his arms, his lips spat upon the prostrate hunter, whom at length he drew to himself, to the cliff’s edge, and he watched the bleeding body, the matted hair, the rolling eyes, the mouth discolored and thick with gore. Ogga was vanquished. Lagk possessed the earth and Lhatto! The Woman of the Ice Age was his! ”

“ He durst not speak, lest he some monster was.
But while he lay and hoped, that gentle voice
Once more he heard; "Yea, thou mayst well rejoice
Thou livest still, my sweet, thou livest still,
Apart from every earthly fear and ill;
Wilt thou not love me, who have wrought thee this,
That I like thee may live in double bliss?"
Then Ogier rose up, nowise like to one
Whose span of earthly life is nigh outrun,
But as he might have risen in old days
To see the spears cleave the fresh morning haze ”

“ In the centre of this chamber you will see a beautitul boy seated with a goblet of crystal liquid in his hand. This boy is the Ogre's mascot, and upon his existence depends the Ogre's life in this world. You must at once slay the boy, and taking the goblet very carefully in your hand, carry it upstairs to me. But be careful not to spill any of the liquid, as each drop means a man's life. ”

“ It is the custom in Ogreland, that the Ogre, Ogress, and the young Ogres, always sleep in their fine gold crowns. This is the only pomp they indulge in; and they would rather be hung or strangled than forego it. When they were all asleep, the Princess, who was thinking of her lover, remembered, that although Ravagio and Tourmentine had given her their word of honour they would not eat him; if they felt hungry in the night, (which was almost always the case when there was fresh meat near them,) it would be all over with him ”

“ On days so full of vigour as this, when the ocean glistens in the sunshine, and a fresh breeze blows hither from the north, when the feeling of strength fills my breast, then Olga is my calendar's saint. She possesses something fresh, natural, voluptuous in all her being, something Juno-like, and even the large eye is not wanting, which old Homer eulogises with such a base comparison. I will not say for a moment that a large mind speaks from that large eye, but Nature has made everything abundant about her. ”

“ When the Prince entered this chamber he was horrified to see that down both sides of it were stretched the bodies of many scores of men, women and children, who lay there fully dressed, but to all appearance quite lifeless.
"These," said the lady, "are the bodies of the Ogre's victims; he has eaten their hearts, but the bodies, as you see, remain unharmed, while the spirit of each one is compressed into a drop of crystal liquor with which that goblet is filled. You must now sprinkle the bodies with the liquid, giving one drop to each." ”

“ Ogma's counterpart in Gaul is Ogmíos, a Herakles and a god of eloquence, thus bearing the dual character of Ogma, while Ogma's epithet grianainech, "of the smiling countenance," recalls Lucian's account of the "smiling face" of Ogmíos.257 Ogma's high position is the result of the admiration of bardic eloquence among the Celts, whose loquacity was proverbial, and to him its origin was doubtless ascribed, as well as that of poetry. ”

“ Then Orchil laughed.
“And yet,” she said, “when Angus Ogue had the snow-sleep of a thousand years, none knew it! For a thousand years the pulse of his heart of love has been the rhythmic beat of the world. For a thousand years the breath of his nostrils has been as the coming of Spring in the human heart. For a thousand years the breath of his life has been warm against the lips of lovers. For a thousand years the memory of these has been sweet against oblivion. Nay, not one 207 hath dreamed of the deep sleep of Angus Ogue.”
“Who is he?” cried Keithoir. ”

“ At first the Ogress would not hear of such a thing, but at last she consented, and made a stew of one of the little pigs instead of cooking the little girl.
"But supposing the Ogre goes to count the children," said she; "he will find one too many."
"Then let her go, dear mother," said the widow's daughter; "she will find her way home, and you will never be blamed."
"But she must stir the stew with her forefinger first," said the Ogress, "that it may have a human flavour." ”

“ The various conditions of the problem of fixing the meaning attached to the word Ogam, and the word standing in the same order of priority to Ogmios in Gaulish as Ogam does to Ogma in Irish, seem best satisfied by supposing the common noun to have meant a round or train of words, fluent speech or ready utterance. This harmonizes well with the sketch of Ogmios as the old man Heracles of the Gauls, whose talk and ready wit charmed his hearers. ”

“ The Rabbi Eliezer184 said that the giants exclaimed, when the Flood broke out, “If all the waters of the earth be gathered together, they will only reach our waists; but if the fountains of the great deep be broken up, we must stamp them down again.” And this they did, but God made the waters boiling hot, and it scalded them so that their flesh was boiled and fell off their bones.185 But what became of Og in the Deluge we learn from the Talmud.186 He went into the water along with a rhinoceros187 beside the ark, and clung to it ”

“ The town had a poetical look from a distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there. The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici. ”

“ One noon, among the hills, Angus Ogue lay in sleep. It was a fair place where he lay, with the heather about him and the bracken with its September gold in it. On the mountain-slope there was not a juniper tall enough, not a rock big enough, to give poise to a raven: all of gold bracken and purple heather it was, with swards of the paler ling. ”

“ Ogul, you must know, is in a very bad State of Health, and his first Physician has order’d him, as a Specific, to eat a Basilisk, boil’d in Rose water: And as that Animal is very hard to be catch’d, and will suffer nothing to approach it, but one of our Sex, our dying Sovereign Ogul has promis’d to honour her, that shall be so happy as to catch it for him, so far as to make her his Consort. ”

“ In Welsh the equivalent of the Gaulish word Ogmios has always remained an appellative; but not so in Irish, where Ogma figures as the name of one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, as the gods of the Goidelic pantheon are collectively called in Irish. Nor is this all: he is signalized in Irish mythology as the inventor of writing, that is to say of the Ogam alphabet; for Ogma being much skilled in dialects and in poetry, it was he, we are told, [31] who invented the Ogam to provide signs for secret speech only known to the learned, and designed to be kept from the vulgar and poor of the nation. ”

“ Ogga stole under the cover of the darkness across the valley, and guided by that indefinite light which even in the starless nights pervades the air drew near to his prey whose occasional movements he heard, heavy, slow and irregular. ”

“ When the Ogre arrived, he emptied the sack, and sent the six little girls and the five little pigs all sprawling on to the floor, saying:
"These will last us some time. Cook the fattest, and put the rest into the cellar. And whilst you get dinner ready, I will take another stroll with the bag. Luck seldom comes singly."
When he had gone, the Ogress looked over the children, and picked out the widow's daughter, saying:
"You look the most good-humoured. And the best-tempered always make the best eating." ”