od before the Northern raids,
bridged over the abyss between the classical and the mediaeval world.
During the whole of that period the rest of Europe was hidden under the
clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone as the one cultured nation.
Receiving the classical learning from Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy,
while the old world was still alive, Ireland carried that culture onward
when Rome and the Roman Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of
Northern barbarians: the Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals
in Spain and Italy; the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the
Picts and Northmen in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile
overrun by Asian nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with
the Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.

Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of heathenism, and the old
Latin culture was swept away. The tradition of ancient Greece still
lingered at Constantinople behind the wall of the Balkans, but it had no
influence at all on the northern nations beyond the wall. Ireland was
thus the one exception, the ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty
of classical days. And from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion
slackened, the light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way
went forth to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were
to form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
with the new.

Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be forgotten. Of the
original life of the great pagan world which swept over the Roman Empire
we know almost nothing. How much do we realize of the thought and genius
of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?

Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But what a
contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin of the
Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions, Ireland is the one
European nation which has clear records of its pagan history. And how
excellent that history was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of
life, the stories of Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin
and Gael, of Meave and Deirdre and Crede bear sufficient witness. The
tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them forth,
flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole tradition
has come down to us, practically at first