poetry."

"A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the
beam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in the
battle of heroes. His face is like the beam of the setting moon;
his robes are of the clouds of the hill; his eyes are like two
decaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dim
twinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of a
distant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his pale
hand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the
gale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my native
hills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never
talk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am light
as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist.
Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hovers
over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove
from the field of ghosts.' Like the darkened moon, he retired in
the midst of the whistling blast."

We recognise here several leading traits in all the early
unspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, the
marks of former wounds, the feeble voice, the memory

44 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, buch xiv. sect. 765.

of the past, the mournful aspect, and the prophetic words. But the
rhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit world
in the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climatic
peculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws light
on the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere.

Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian
conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural
operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy,
regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heart
to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their
fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly,
the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when it
is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena
associated with death. But beyond these two comprehensive
statements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy of
separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has
been very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is a
peculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objective
existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man does
not ce