m, we must believe, the circling life of the soul, the cycle of
necessity, with the door of liberation to the home of the blest, who
have reached perfect freedom and go no more out. We may picture in
imagination their solemn celebrations; priests robed, perhaps, in the
mingled green and purple of their hills, passing within the circle,
chanting some archaic hymn of the Divine.

IV.

THE DE DANAANS.

In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after, Erin was a
land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and wolves. The central
plain was altogether hidden under green clouds of oak-woods, full of
long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny glades, echoing in spring
and summer to the songs of innumerable birds. Everywhere through the
wide and gloomy forests were the blue mirrors of lakes, starred with
shaggy islands, the hanging hills descending verdant to the water's
edge. Silver rivers spread their network among the woods, and the lakes
and the quiet reaches of the rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The
hilly lands to the north and south showed purple under the sky from
among their forests, oak mingling with pine; and the four seas beat
around our island with their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all,
the arch of the blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant
land, full of gladness and mystery.

We can but obscurely image to ourselves the thoughts and deeds of the
earliest dwellers in our island. We know that they were skilled in many
arts of peace and inured to the shock of war. The sky spread above them
as over us, and all around them was the green gloom of the forests, the
whiteness of lakes and rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The
great happenings of life, childhood and age and death, were for them
what they are for us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned
by wind and sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for their
friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred passed
into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in the
invisible Beyond.

[Illustration: River Erne, Belleek.]

The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over earthly
things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races now, looked
confidently and with intent faith across the threshold. For them the
dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while very near to