ng off their
divinity. Poets have chosen their themes more often from stories that
are all, or half, mythological, than from history or stories that give
one the sensation of history, understanding, as I think, that the
imagination which remembers the proportions of life is but a long
wooing, and that it has to forget them before it becomes the torch and
the marriage-bed.

One finds, as one expects, in the work of men who were not troubled
about any probabilities or necessities but those of emotion itself, an
immense variety of incident and character and of ways of expressing
emotion. Cuchulain fights man after man during the quest of the Brown
Bull, and not one of those fights is like another, and not one is
lacking in emotion or strangeness; and when one thinks imagination can
do no more, the story of the Two Bulls, emblematic of all contests,
suddenly lifts romance into prophecy. The characters too have a
distinctness we do not find among the people of the _Mabinogion_,
perhaps not even among the people of the _Morte D'Arthur_. We know we
shall be long forgetting Cuchulain, whose life is vehement and full of
pleasure, as though he always remembered that it was to be soon over; or
the dreamy Fergus who betrays the sons of Usnach for a feast, without
ceasing to be noble; or Conal who is fierce and friendly and
trustworthy, but has not the sap of divinity that makes Cuchulain
mysterious to men, and beloved of women. Women indeed, with their
lamentations for lovers and husbands and sons, and for fallen rooftrees
and lost wealth, give the stories their most beautiful sentences; and,
after Cuchulain, one thinks most of certain great queens--of angry,
amorous Maeve, with her long, pale face; of Findabair, her daughter, who
dies of shame and of pity; of Deirdre, who might be some mild modern
housewife but for her prophetic wisdom. If one does not set Deirdre's
lamentations among the greatest lyric poems of the world, I think one
may be certain that the wine-press of the poets has been trodden for one
in vain; and yet I think it may be proud Emer, Cuchulain's fitting
wife, who will linger longest in the memory. What a pure flame burns in
her always, whether she is the newly-married wife fighting for
precedence, fierce as some beautiful bird, or the confident housewife,
who would awaken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words; or
the great queen who would get him out of the tightening net of his doom,
by sending h