of men and women. But the Irish
peasant still sees them flitting by his path in the evening light, or
dancing on the meadow round the grassy mound, singing and playing
strange melodies; or mourns for the child they have carried away to
live with them and forget her people, or watches with fear his
dreaming daughter who has been touched by them, and is never again
quite a child of this earth, or quite of the common race of man.

These were the invisible lands and peoples of the Irish imagination;
and they live in and out of many of the stories. Cuchulain is lured
into a fairy-land, and lives for more than a year in love with Fand,
Mananan's wife. Into another fairy-land, through zones of mist,
Cormac, as is told here, was lured by Mananan, who now has left the
sea to play on the land. Oisin, as I have already said, flies with
Niam over the sea to the island of Eternal Youth. Etain, out of the
immortal land, is born into an Irish girl and reclaimed and carried
back to her native shore by Midir, a prince of the Fairy Host. Ethne,
whose story also is here, has lived for all her youth in the court of
Angus, deep in the hill beside the rushing of the Boyne.

These stories are but a few out of a great number of the loves and
wars between the men and women of the human and the fairy races.
Curiously enough, as the stories become less ancient, the relations
between men and the fairies are more real, more close, even more
affectionate. Finn and the Fianna seem to be almost in daily
companionship with the fairy host--much nearer to them than the men of
the Heroic Cycle are to the gods. They interchange love and music and
battle and adventure with one another. They are, for the most part,
excellent friends; and their intercourse suffers from no doubt. It is
as real as the intercourse between Welsh and English on the
Borderland.

There was nothing illusive, nothing merely imaginary, in these fairy
worlds for the Irish hero or the Irish people. They believed the lands
to be as real as their own, and the indwellers of fairyland to have
like passions with themselves. Finn is not a bit surprised when
Vivionn the giantess sits beside him on the hill, or Fergus when King
Iubdan stands on his hand; or St Patrick when Ethne, out of fairyland,
dies on his breast, or when he sees, at his spell, Cuchulain, dead
some nine hundred years, come forth out of the dark gates of Sheol,
high in his chariot, grasping his deadly spear, driven as of ol