nowledge, on which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and
through whose branches flowed, he was told, sap that was human souls, he
came to a tall, dark tree, with little bitter fruits, and was shown a
kind of stair or ladder going up through the tree, and told to go up;
and near the top of the tree, a beautiful woman, like the Goddess of
Life associated with the tree in Assyria, gave him a rose that seemed
to have been growing upon the tree. One finds the Rose in the Irish
poets, sometimes as a religious symbol, as in the phrase, 'the Rose of
Friday,' meaning the Rose of austerity, in a Gaelic poem in Dr. Hyde's
'Religious Songs of Connacht;' and, I think, as a symbol of woman's
beauty in the Gaelic song, 'Roseen Dubh;' and a symbol of Ireland in
Mangan's adaptation of 'Roseen Dubh,' 'My Dark Rosaleen,' and in Mr.
Aubrey de Vere's 'The Little Black Rose.' I do not know any evidence to
prove whether this symbol came to Ireland with mediaeval Christianity, or
whether it has come down from Celtic times. I have read somewhere that a
stone engraved with a Celtic god, who holds what looks like a rose in
one hand, has been found somewhere in England; but I cannot find the
reference, though I certainly made a note of it. If the Rose was really
a symbol of Ireland among the Gaelic poets, and if 'Roseen Dubh' is
really a political poem, as some think, one may feel pretty certain that
the ancient Celts associated the Rose with Eire, or Fotla, or
Banba--goddesses who gave their names to Ireland--or with some principal
god or goddess, for such symbols are not suddenly adopted or invented,
but come out of mythology.

I have made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for
the theft of the Rose, and I have made the Dragon, the constellation
Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move about
the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many countries, and
are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology. It is this Tree
of Life that I have put into the 'Song of Mongan' under its common Irish
form of a hazel; and, because it had sometimes the stars for fruit, I
have hung upon it 'the Crooked Plough' and the 'Pilot' star, as
Gaelic-speaking Irishmen sometimes call the Bear and the North star. I
have made it an axle-tree in 'Aedh hears the Cry of the Sedge,' for this
was another ancient way of representing it.

THE HOST OF THE AIR.

Some writers distinguish between the Sluagh Gaoith