rish, but he
knew Italian and the then universal tongue of the learned--Latin, in
both of which were tales of visits to the other world; and the
greater part of these tales, as well as those most resembling Dante's
work in form and spirit, were Irish in origin.

All peoples have traditions of persons visiting the realms of the
dead. Homer tells of Odysseus going there; Virgil does the same of
Aeneas; and the Oriental peoples, as well as the Germanic races, have
similar tales; but no people have so many or such finished accounts
of this sort as the ancient Irish. In pagan times in Ireland one of
the commonest adventures attributed to a hero was a visit to "tir na
m-beo," the land of the living, or to "tir na n-og," the land of the
young; and this supernatural world was reached in some cases by
entering a fairy mound and going beneath the ground to it, and in
others by sailing over the ocean.

Of the literature of pagan Ireland, though much has come down to us,
we have only a very small fraction of what once existed, and what we
have has been transmitted and modified by persons of later times and
different culture, who, both consciously and unconsciously, have
changed it, so that it is very different from what it was in its
original form; but the subject and the main outlines still remain,
and we have many accounts of both voyages and underground journeys to
the other world.

The oldest voyage is, perhaps, that of Maelduin, which, Tennyson has
transmuted into English under the title _The Voyage of Maeldune_.
This is a voyage undertaken for revenge; but vengeance, as Sir Walter
Scott has pointed out in his preface to _The Two Drovers_, springs in
a barbarous society from a passion for justice; and it is this
instinct for justice that inspires the Irish hero to endure and to
achieve what he does. Christianity has preserved this legend and
added to it its own peculiar quality of mercy; and this illustrates
one of the characteristics of Ireland's pagan literature--it is
imperfectly Christian and can readily be made to express the
Christian point of view.

Another voyage of pagan Irish literature is the _Voyage of Bran_. In
this tale idealism is the inspiration that leads the hero into the
unknown world. A woman appears who is invisible to all but Bran, and
whose song of the beauteous supernatural land beyond the wave is
heard by none but him; so that, after refusing to go with her the
first time she appears, at length h