tes where they stumble?
"Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put
hands to your plough?

"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing
lone and bowed earthward,
"Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the
night-giving God."

* * * * *

Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend
with the savage;
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth
only above them.

A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and
the height up to heaven,
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots,
purples, and splendors.

AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

O, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods upon the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there's never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying Him night and day,
For a little house--a house of my own--
Out of the wind's and the rain's way.

_Joseph Campbell_

(_Seosamh MacCathmhaoil_)

Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not only a poet
but an artist; he made all the illustrations for _The Rushlight_
(1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under the Gaelic form of
his name, he has published half a dozen books of verse, the most
striking of which is _The Mountainy Singer_, first published in Dublin
in 1909.

I AM THE MOUNTAINY SINGER

I am the mountainy singer--
The voice of the peasant's dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the fish in the stream.

Quiet and love I sing--
The carn on the mountain crest,
The _cailin_ in her lover's arms,
The child at its mother's breast.