ite
bitterness of life, and I believe there is like symbolism intended in
the many Irish voyages to the islands of enchantment, or that there was,
at any rate, in the mythology out of which these stories have been
shaped. I follow much Irish and other mythology, and the magical
tradition, in associating the North with night and sleep, and the East,
the place of sunrise, with hope, and the South, the place of the sun
when at its height, with passion and desire, and the West, the place of
sunset, with fading and dreaming things.

MONGAN LAMENTS THE CHANGE THAT HAS COME UPON HIM AND HIS BELOVED.

HANRAHAN LAMENTS BECAUSE OF HIS WANDERINGS.

My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that
flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends,
leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the
hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin's
journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related to
the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red ears, and
were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants following
some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related to the
hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize the souls
of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon, and to the hound
the son of Setanta killed, on what was certainly, in the first form of
the tale, a visit to the Celtic Hades. An old woman told a friend and
myself that she saw what she thought were white birds, flying over an
enchanted place, but found, when she got near, that they had dog's
heads; and I do not doubt that my hound and these dog-headed birds are
of the same family. I got my hound and deer out of a last century Gaelic
poem about Oisin's journey to the country of the young. After the
hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the seashore, and while
he is riding over the sea with Niam, he sees amid the waters--I have not
the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory--a young man
following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one
red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem
plain images of the desire of man 'which is for the woman,' and 'the
desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,' and of all
desires that are as these. I have read them in this way in 'The
Wanderings of Usheen' or Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he