o
make the Tribes of Danu give up those that are 'away.' Bare is now often
called an ugly old woman; but Dr. Joyce says that one of her old names
was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhen was the goddess of the tribes
of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made immortal, and who loved
her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality, to fight among them
against the stranger, and died on the strand of Clontarf.

'AEDH,' 'HANRAHAN' AND 'MICHAEL ROBARTES' IN THESE POEMS.

These are personages in 'The Secret Rose;' but, with the exception of
some of Hanrahan's and one of Aedh's poems, the poems are not out of
that book. I have used them in this book more as principles of the mind
than as actual personages. It is probable that only students of the
magical tradition will understand me when I say that 'Michael Robartes'
is fire reflected in water, and that Hanrahan is fire blown by the wind,
and that Aedh, whose name is not merely the Irish form of Hugh, but the
Irish for fire, is fire burning by itself. To put it in a different way,
Hanrahan is the simplicity of an imagination too changeable to gather
permanent possessions, or the adoration of the shepherds; and Michael
Robartes is the pride of the imagination brooding upon the greatness of
its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi; while Aedh is the myrrh
and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that
it loves.

AEDH PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS.

MONGAN THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS.

AEDH HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE.

The Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and
supreme beauty. The Count Goblet D'Alviella thinks that it was once a
symbol of the sun,--itself a principal symbol of the divine nature, and
the symbolic heart of things. The lotus was in some Eastern countries
imagined blossoming upon the Tree of Life, as the Flower of Life, and is
thus represented in Assyrian bas-reliefs. Because the Rose, the flower
sacred to the Virgin Mary, and the flower that Apuleius' adventurer ate,
when he was changed out of the ass's shape and received into the
fellowship of Isis, is the western Flower of Life, I have imagined it
growing upon the Tree of Life. I once stood beside a man in Ireland when
he saw it growing there in a vision, that seemed to have rapt him out of
his body. He saw the garden of Eden walled about, and on the top of a
high mountain, as in certain mediaeval diagrams, and after passing the
Tree of K