, always fighting,--
and the women as well as the men; and when we find a tribe in
Scotland, the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism;--we
need not for a moment imagine that things had always been like
that. It is not that man is naturally a savage, and may from the
heights of civilization quickly relapse into savagery; it is
that he is a dual being, with the higher part of his nature
usually in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken at
all, by the conventions of law and order; and so the things that
are only thought, or perhaps secretly practised, in times of
civilization, as soon as war has broken down the conventions,
find their full expression in action,--and others along with
them. So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly since,
a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary habit of an
older and better day surviving, and nearly ready to be awakened
into transcendent splendor. The echoes of the Danaan music were
ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;--and how would
they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green
with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit,
are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers
of Fairyland?

I shall come to my history next week; meanwhile here for you
is the _Song of Finn in Praise of May,_ a part of it, as Mr.
Rollertone translates it, to give a taste of the literary habit
of Pre-christian Ireland:

May day! delightful day!
Bright colors play the vales along;
Now wakes at morning's slender ray,
Wild and gay, the blackbird's song.

Now comes the bird of dusty hue,
The loud cuckoo, the summer lover;
Broad-branching trees are thick with leaves;
The bitter evil time is over.

Swift horses gather nigh,
Where half dry the river goes;
Tufted heather crowns the height;
Weak and white the bog-down blows.

Corncrake singing, from eve til morn,
Deep in corn, the strenuous bird;
Sings the virgin waterfall,
White and tall, her one sweet word.
Loaded bough of little power
Goodly flower-harvests win;
Cattle roam with muddy flanks;
Busy ants go out and in.

---------

Carols loud the lark on high,
Small and shy, his tireless lay,
Singing in wildest, merriest mood
Of delicate-hued delightful May.

And here, from the same source, are the _Delights of Finn,_ as
his son Oisin sang the