nely cell, the monk at his devotions or
at his work of copying in the scriptorium or under the open sky; or we
hear the ascetic who, alone or with twelve chosen companions, has left one
of the great monasteries in order to live in greater solitude among the
woods or mountains, or on a lonely island. The fact that so many of these
poems are fathered upon well-known saints emphasises the friendly attitude
of the native clergy towards vernacular poetry.

In Nature poetry the Gaelic muse may vie with that of any other nation.
Indeed, these poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the
world. To seek out and watch and love Nature, in its tiniest phenomena as
in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as to the
Celt. Many hundreds of Gaelic and Welsh poems testify to this fact.[2] It
is a characteristic of these poems that in none of them do we get an
elaborate or sustained description of any scene or scenery, but rather a
succession of pictures and images which the poet, like an impressionist,
calls up before us by light and skilful touches. Like the Japanese, the
Celts were always quick to take an artistic hint; they avoid the obvious
and the commonplace; the half-said thing to them is dearest.

Of ancient love-songs comparatively little has come down to us. What we
have are mostly laments for departed lovers. He who would have further
examples of Gaelic love-poetry must turn to modern collections, among
which the _Love-Songs of Connaught_, collected and translated by Douglas
Hyde, occupy the foremost place.

A word on the metrical system of Irish poetry may conclude this rapid
sketch. The original type from which the great variety of Irish metres has
sprung is the catalectic trochaic tetrameter of Latin poetry, as in the
well-known popular song of Caesar's soldiers:--

'Caesar Gallias subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem,
Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias';

or in St. Hilary's _Hymnus in laudem Christi_, beginning:--

'Ymnum dicat turba fratrum, ymnum cantus personet,
Christo regi concinentes laudem demus debitam.'

The commonest stanza is a quatrain consisting of four heptasyllabic lines
with the rhyme at the end of the couplet. In my renderings I have made no
attempt at either rhythm or rhyme; but I have printed the stanzas so as
to show the structure of the poem. For merely practical reasons I have, in
some cases, printed them in the form of couplets