nomena. These (common things to us) contradicted their
experience, and the unknown causes were identified with unseen beings.
What wonder if sudden gusts unaccountable, light twirling eddies, mists
marching through ravines and gorges, should mask the invisible powers! Man
was face to face with nature, vibrating with every change, affected by
every influence. His weapons had a secret life within, and the shield of
the champion sounded when one of the Three Waves of Erin rose roaring in
foam.

The aspect of the living waters was ever present, in the surging seas, the
full rivers in all the plains, the liquid voice of streams in every glen,
and the silent, mystical lakes among the mountains. Sometimes the waters
were troubled, and they saw therein the struggles of gigantic
serpents--ancestral memories of extinct animals, or reminiscences of
experience in other regions. Sometimes the waters sank, or, suddenly
rushing up, overwhelmed the abodes of men, owing, they fancied, to some
pledge broken to the invisible deities. These strange phenomena, which
have given cause for so many weird legends, I have correlated with those
that precede or accompany earthquake action. It has seemed to me probable
that there were, of old, beyond our western coasts, islands, which, owing
to the same seismical cause, have sunk beneath the ocean level. The memory
of their existence, and the fact of their absence, might well give rise
to those strange and beautiful traditions of the Lands of Youth, of Life,
of Virtues--their mystical appearance and disappearance--which for ages
inspired the imagination of the poets. When successive waves of invaders
had flowed over the land, the earliest--driven into the woods, mountains,
and remote isles--assumed mythical proportions in the minds of the later
comers, and, in the haze of knowledge, the land and all its far islands
became peopled with a population of phantoms.

That is the cloud-background of our history, the despair of arid
annalists, which contains the Nibelungen treasure of our ancient
literature. We do not look there for precise date, but for the
lightning-flash of ideas in the darkness of the dawn. It was the Heroic
Age of Ireland, when, as in Greece and Rome, all was gigantic, Titanic, or
divine. On the mountain peaks of time man saw his own image in the midst
of clouds, like the spectres of the Brocken, exaggerated, majestic and
terrible. In such conditions the towers of Ilion rose, Hector an