adition or in old manuscripts handed down from peasant
to peasant. Only within the last few years did the Irish suddenly awake
to a consciousness that the authentic symbols, or, rather, the
indisputable proofs of the national existence so dear to them, were
slipping out of their hands. So far had the heritage perished, so ill
had the tradition been maintained, that when they turned to revive their
expiring language and literature, the first question asked was, "What is
it you would revive? Was there ever a literature in Irish or merely a
collection of ridiculous rhodomontade? Is there a language, or does
there survive merely a debased jargon, employed by ignorant peasants
among themselves, and chiefly useful, like a thieves' lingo, to baffle
the police?"

These were the questions put, and not one in a thousand of Irish
Nationalists could give an answer according to knowledge.

Now, matters are changed. The books that were available in print have
been read; the work of poets extant only in manuscript has been printed
and widely circulated; the language is studied with zeal, and not in
Ireland only, but wherever Irishmen are gathered. Yet nothing has so
strongly moved me to believe that we cherish the living rather than pay
funeral honours to the dead, as certain hours spent with a peasant who
could neither write nor read.

The life of a song--poets have said it again and again in immortal
verse--is of all lives the most enduring. Kingdoms pass, buildings
crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned "out of a mouthful of
air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering
substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the
mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on
paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its
contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its
immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was
the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came
through who knows how many generations.

The story which it tells is among the finest in that great repertory of
legend which, since Ireland began to take count of her own possessions,
has become familiar to the world. It is the theme of a play in the last
book published by the chief of modern Irish poets, Mr. W. B. Yeats. But
since he tells the story in a way of his own, and since it is none too
well known even in th