ent farmers and herdsmen were full of love and hatred,
and made their friends gods, and their enemies the enemies of gods, and
those who keep their tradition are not less mythological. From this
'mistaking dreams,' which are perhaps essences, for 'realities' which are
perhaps accidents, from this 'passionate, turbulent reaction against the
despotism of fact,' comes, it may be, that melancholy which made all
ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern
peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient
peoples, who like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic,
delight in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by
the emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and
by the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness of
much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief, that
nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended in death
and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn
merely because their beloved was married to another, or because learning
was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be
happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because
they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked. And so
it is that all the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and
Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan, have come out of legends and are
indeed but the images of the primitive imagination mirrored in the little
looking-glass of the modern and classic imagination. This is that
'melancholy a man knows when he is face to face' with nature, and thinks
'he hears her communing with him about' the mournfulness of being born and
of dying; and how can it do otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles,
its flights across the seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes?
No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the
lamentations of Oisin, old and miserable, remembering the companions and
the loves of his youth, and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his
faery love: all dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his
lamentations: 'The clouds are long above me this night; last night was a
long night to me; although I find this day long, yesterday was still
longer. Every day that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world
is like me--a poor old man d