This mingling of the
beauty of youth and the honour of ancientry runs through all the Irish
tales. Youth and the love of it, of its beauty and strength, adorn and
vitalize their grey antiquity. But where, in their narrative, the
hero's youth is over and the sword weak in his hand, and the passion
less in his and his sweetheart's blood, life is represented as
scarcely worth the living. The famed men and women die young--the sons
of Turenn, Cuchulain, Conall, Dermot, Emer, Deirdre, Naisi, Oscar.
Oisin has three hundred years of youth in that far land in the
invention of which the Irish embodied their admiration of love and
youth. His old age, when sudden feebleness overwhelms him, is made by
the bardic clan as miserable, as desolate as his youth was joyous.
Again, Finn lives to be an old man, but the immortal was in him, and
either he has been born again in several re-incarnations (for the
Irish held from time to time the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls), or he sleeps, like Barbarossa, in a secret cavern, with all
his men around him, and beside him the mighty horn of the Fianna,
which, when the day of fate and freedom comes, will awaken with three
loud blasts the heroes and send them forth to victory. Old as she is,
Ireland does not grow old, for she has never reached her maturity. Her
full existence is before her, not behind her. And when she reaches it
her ancientry and all its tales will be dearer to her than they have
been in the past. They will be an inspiring national asset. In them
and in their strange admixture of different and successive periods of
customs, thoughts and emotions (caused by the continuous editing and
re-editing of them, first in oral recitation and then at the hands of
scribes), Ireland will see the record of her history, not the history
of external facts, but of her soul as it grew into consciousness of
personality; as it established in itself love of law, of moral right,
of religion, of chivalry, of courtesy in war and daily life; as it
rejoiced, and above all, as it suffered and was constant, in suffering
and oppression, to its national ideals.

It seems as if, once at least, this aspect of the tales of Ireland was
seen by men of old, for there is a story which tells that heaven
itself desired their remembrance, and that we should be diverted and
inspired by them. In itself it is a record of the gentleness of Irish
Christianity to Irish heathendom, and of its love of the heroic past.
F