s (his "bush of blades"), with the magic cast that there is no
meeting. And now there is nothing left to him but the lamentation,

"Och, och! Great is my madness!
I lifting here my young lad!
My son's head in my one hand,
His arms and his raiment on the other.

"I, the father that slew his son,
May I never throw spear nor noble javelin;
The hand that slew its son,
May it win torture and sharp wounding.

"The grief for my son I put from me never,
Till the flagstones of my side crumble,
It is in me, and through my heart,
Like a sharp blaze in the hoar hill grasses.

"If I and my heart's Connlaoch
Were playing our kingly feats together,
We could range from wave to shore
Over the five provinces of Erin."

The penultimate stanza, with its magnificent closing image and its truly
AEschylean hyperbole, is not even suggested in Miss Brooke's version. It
is, perhaps, the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any ballad
finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the resonant verse, strongly
rhymed (in the Gaelic assonances), and copiously stressed with
alliteration, bears out the theme.

These, I trust, are critical opinions. But if the collector would have a
special weakness for a vase which his own spade had unearthed, I may be
prejudiced in favour of the poem, which I got in the sweat of my brow
from very probably the one man living who knew it in that form.

Tellers of old Irish fairy tales about enchanted princes, magic cocks
and hens, and the like, are still numerous; but it is very rare to find
a man who keeps living the old poetry which was made, perhaps, in the
twelfth century. Yet while any survive the tradition is still there; the
song still lives, for I did not spend my hours without feeling that this
old man could respond to any emotion that the song-maker put into the
sound and the meaning and the associations of his words. There are still
those to whom the Irish even of the twelfth century is no dead language.
Even if it were, no doubt the songs made in it might still be strong in
life, as are to-day those of Homer and a hundred others. But in the case
of these smaller literatures, once the tongue itself has ceased to be
heard, dumbness and paralysis fall upon what might else be so full of
vitality. And a song has more than its own life, it has power to
quicken, to breed. If any one considers that legend of the son and
father (found i