lier lilt than the _Fiddler
of Dooney_.

"I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate.

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With, 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'
And dance like a wave of the sea."

In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in
the long battle between paganism and idealism. There is no question that
Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side. Certainly it is
true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who
take it wrongly. Meredith's great line was never truer than it is here,
"Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare." The effect upon the mind,
and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the
reading of it.

All this bringing back of the discarded gods has its glamour and its
risk. Such gods are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the
quaintest of studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments
of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the
evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all
this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general
sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.

But, for the unwary, there is the double danger in all this region that
they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to worship the old gods; or
that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite worship,
the old black magic may spring out upon them. As to the former
alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but
more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and
commanding. They will cry, "Here is the great god"; and, intoxicated by
the mystery, will fall down to worship. But that which does not command
can never save, and for a guiding faith we need something more sure than
this.

Moreover, there is the second alternative of the old black magic. A
discarded god is always an uncanny thing to take liberties with. While
the earth-spirit in all its grandeur may appeal to the jaded and
perplexed minds of to-day as a satisfying object of faith, the result
will probably be but a