ld and the green silk flashing against
the sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each
tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of each strand a
little ball of gold. Each of her two arms was as white as the
snow of a single night, and each of her two cheeks of the hue of
the foxglove. Even and small the teeth in her head, and they
shone like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth, her
lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as snow, or the foam of
the wave, was her neck. . . . Her feet were slim and white as the
ocean foam; evenly set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a
bluish black, such as you see on the shell of a beetle."

--What I call on you to note about that is something very
unpoetic. It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the
evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the
creation of beauty;--but the dress. The Irish writers got these
ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, classical
civilization, or any foreign civilization. The ideas were
home-grown, the tradition Irish. The writer was describing what
he was familiar with: the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess
before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs. He was
heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was
drawing with his eye on the object. I am inclined to think that
imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just
as tradition must always be based on fact. Now then: try,
will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or
sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to
work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen. I
think you cannot do it. And this picture is not extraordinary;
it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish
stories. What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges
into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long
unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor
of an Ireland consummately civilized.--But to return to the
hall of Eochaid Airem:

Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the
cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone,
they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what
it would be. So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk
of the evening. Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of
them: Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.
No man had seen h