all alive in the
prose and song of Ireland. How deep was the Irish love of these
delightful things is plain from their belief that "the place of the
revealing of poetry was always by the margin of water." And the Salmon
of Knowledge, the eating of which gave Finn his pre-eminence, swam in
a green pool, still and deep, over which hung a rowan tree that shed
its red berries on the stream. Lovely were the places whence Art and
Knowledge came.

Then, as to all good landscape lovers, the beasts, birds, and insects
of Nature were dear to these ancient people. One of the things Finn
most cared for was not only his hounds, but the "blackbird singing on
Letterlee"; and his song, on page 114, in the praise of May, tells us
how keen was his observant eye for animal life and how much it
delighted him. The same minute realisation of natural objects is
illustrated in this book when King Iubdan explains to the servant the
different characteristics of the trees of the forest, and the mystic
elements that abide in them. It was a habit, even of Teutonic poets,
to tell of the various trees and their uses in verse, and Spenser and
Drayton have both done it in later times. But few of them have added,
as the Irish story does, a spiritual element to their description, and
made us think of malign or beneficent elements attached to them. The
woodbine, and this is a strange fancy, is the king of the woods. The
rowan is the tree of the magicians, and its berries are for poets. The
bramble is inimical to man, the alder is full of witchcraft, and the
elder is the wood of the horses of the fairies. Into every tree a
spiritual power is infused; and the good lords of the forest are loved
of men and birds and bees.

Thus the Irish love of nature led them to spiritualise, in another way
than mythical, certain things in nature, and afterwards to humanise,
up to a certain point, the noble implements wrought by human skill out
of natural materials. And this is another element in all these
stories, as it is in the folk-lore also of other lands. In the tale of
the Sons of Turenn, the stones of the wayside tell to Lugh the story
of the death of his father Kian, and the boat of Mananan, indwelt by a
spirit, flies hither and thither over the seas, obeying the commands,
even the thought, of its steersman. The soul of some famed spears is
so hot for slaughter that, when it is not being used in battle, its
point must stand in a bath of blood or of drowsy herbs,