s the decorative arts flourished in
Ireland.

Lastly, on this matter, the Irish tale-tellers, even to the present
day, dwell with persistence on the colour of the human body as a
special loveliness, and with as much love of it as any Venetian when
he painted it. And they did this with a comparison of its colour to
the colours they observed in Nature, so that the colour of one was
harmonised with the colour of the other. I might quote many such
descriptions of the appearance of the warriors--they are
multitudinous--but the picture of Etain is enough to illustrate what I
say--"Her hair before she loosed it was done in two long tresses,
yellow like the flower of the waterflag in summer or like red gold.
Her hands were white as the snow of a single night, and her eyes as
blue as the dark hyacinth, and her lips red as the berries of the
rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of the sea-waves. The
radiance of the moon was in her face and the light of wooing in her
eyes." So much for the Irish love of colour.[6]

[6] I give one example of the way colour was laid on to animals
just for the pleasure of it. "And the eagle and cranes were red
with green heads, and their eggs were pure crimson and blue";
and deep in the wood the travellers found "strange birds with
white bodies and purple heads and golden beaks," and afterwards
three great birds, "one blue and his head crimson, and another
crimson and his head green, and another speckled and his head
gold."

Their love of music was equally great; and was also connected with
Nature. "The sound of the flowing of streams," said one of their
bardic clan, "is sweeter than any music of men." "The harp of the
woods is playing music," said another. In Finn's Song to May, the
waterfall is singing a welcome to the pool below, the loudness of
music is around the hill, and in the green fields the stream is
singing. The blackbird, the cuckoo, the heron and the lark are the
musicians of the world. When Finn asks his men what music they thought
the best, each says his say, but Oisin answers, "The music of the
woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird,
and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron." And Finn himself,
when asked what was his most beloved music, said first that it was
"the sharp whistling of the wind as it went through the uplifted
spears of the seven battalions of the Fianna," and this was fitting
for a hero to say. B