r in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the
style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is
substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we
exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic
record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The
marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the
after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'
metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty
in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's
Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
translation:--

Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
She floated on the waves of the world
As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity,
Mourning for her child at home.

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor
human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!

The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural
imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and
there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and
leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into
heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature
of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the
later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren
prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again,
when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts
to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a
long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways
the freshness and individuality was lost with time. The larger saints
swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were
supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid
up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any
defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the
progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain
side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
appropriate or inappropriate--sometimes real jewels of genuine old