hose barrow is not mentioned
in these or other compositions, and every one of which may at the
present day be identified where the ignorant plebeian or the ignorant
patrician has not destroyed them. The early History of Ireland clings
around and grows out of the Irish barrows until, with almost the
universality of that primeval forest from which Ireland took one of
its ancient names, the whole isle and all within it was clothed with
a nobler raiment, invisible, but not the less real, of a full and
luxuriant history, from whose presence, all-embracing, no part was free.
Of the many poetical and rhetorical titles lavished upon this country,
none is truer than that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient
history passed unceasingly into the realm of artistic representation;
the history of one generation became the poetry of the next, until the
whole island was illuminated and coloured by the poetry of the bards.
Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs are not,
though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all their
subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once lived
and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the swelling rath
and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral monuments their names
were preserved, and in the performance of sacred rites, and the holding
of games, fairs, and assemblies in their honour, the memory of their
achievements kept fresh, till the traditions that clung around these
places were inshrined in tales which were finally incorporated in the
Leabhar na Huidhre and the Book of Leinster.

Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds--in one the imagination is at
work consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the former
class are the product of a lettered and learned age. The story floats
loosely in a world of imagination. The other sort of pre-historic
narrative clings close to the soil, and to visible and tangible
objects. It may be legend, but it is legend believed in as history never
consciously invented, and growing out of certain spots of the earth's
surface, and supported by and drawing its life from the soil like a
natural growth.

Such are the early Irish tales that cling around the mounds and
cromlechs as that by which they are sustained, which was originally
their source, and sustained them afterwards in a strong enduring life.
It is evident that these cannot be classed with stories that float
vaguely in an ideal world