nting and adventures
carry them over the mountains and plains, through the forests, and by
the lakes and rivers. In the stories there is scarcely any part of
Ireland which is not linked, almost geographically, with its scenery.
Even the ancient gods have retired from the coast to live in the
pleasant green hills or by the wooded shores of the great lakes or in
hearing of the soft murmur of the rivers. This business of the sea,
this varied aspect of the land, crept into the imagination of the
Irish, and were used by them to embroider and adorn their poems and
tales. They do not care as much for the doings of the sky. There does
not seem to be any supreme god of the heaven in their mythology.
Neither the sun nor the moon are specially worshipped. There are
sun-heroes like Lugh, but no isolated sun-god. The great beauty of the
cloud-tragedies of storm, the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, so
dramatic in Ireland, or the magnificence of the starry heavens, are
scarcely celebrated. But the Irish folk have heard the sound of the
wind in the tree-tops and marked its cold swiftness over the moor, and
watched with fear or love the mists of ocean and the bewilderment of
the storm-driven snow and the sweet falling of the dew. These are
fully celebrated.

These great and small aspects of Nature are not only celebrated, they
are loved. One cannot read the stories in this book without feeling
that the people who conceived and made them observed Nature and her
ways with a careful affection, which seems to be more developed in the
Celtic folk than elsewhere in modern Europe. There is nothing which
resembles it in Teutonic story-telling. In the story of _The Children
of Lir_, though there is no set description of scenery, we feel the
spirit of the landscape by the lake where Lir listened for three
hundred years to the sweet songs of his children. And, as we read of
their future fate, we are filled with the solitude and mystery, the
ruthlessness and beauty of the ocean. Even its gentleness on quiet
days enters from the tale into our imagination. Then, too, the
mountain-glory and the mountain-gloom are again and again
imaginatively described and loved. The windings and recesses, the
darkness and brightness of the woods and the glades therein, enchant
the Fenians even when they are in mortal danger. And the waters of the
great lakes, the deep pools of the rivers, the rippling shallows, the
green banks, the brown rushing of the torrents, are