n, perhaps, is the
absolute simplicity of the description of that last fight in "The Battle
of the White Strand," in which Cael and Finnachta go, locked in each
other's arms, to their death under the waves without a word.

Wild nature is always about these warriors. The storm in the trees, the
sorrow of the sea, the clatter of wild geese and the singing of swans
find echo in the poems that praise them. We see, too, at times, fields
heavy with harvest, and often the apple trees in bloom and the cuckoo
calling among them,--indeed, the sweet scent of apple gardens, like the
keenness of the winds of spring, beautiful as are the phrases that
present them, become almost stock phrases. Always, too, there are
wonders of the other world about the heroes; women from undersea and
underground come into their halls as naturally as the members of their
own clans, and the twilight mists unfolding from familiar hills will
reveal their marvelous duns, whitewalled with silver or marble, and
thatched with the wings of white birds.

There has been frequent quarreling in certain quarters with Mr. Russell
and Mr. Johnston and Mr. Yeats for introducing mysticism and a definite
symbolism and the ways of Eastern thought into their versions of Irish
mythic tales and their records of Irish mood. There will be found some
justification for such practices in Lady Gregory's translations.
Manannan, the sea-god, is here presented doing tricks like those of the
East Indian fakirs; Finn is reincarnated in later great leaders of the
Gael; and in "The Hospitality of Cuanna's House" there is out-and-out
allegory, to say nothing of a possible symbolistic interpretation of
episodes in almost every other story. Even the willful obscurity of the
modern poetry can be paralleled by the riddling of Cuchulain and Emer.

It is, perhaps, because Lady Gregory has found the old stories not only
in the dignity of their bardic presentation, but also in the happy
familiarity of their telling by the people of the thatched houses in her
own district, that she has been able to bring them so near to us. From
these same people, too, she has got some of her stories of St. Bride
and Columba and poems and stories of recent and contemporary
inspiration, poems and stories that have to do with humble life as well
as with the highly colored heroic life that those who live bare lives
themselves are so fond of imagining. In her "Poets and Dreamers" (1903)
are records of this collecti