though the
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the
greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to
him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in
their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as
friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and
when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There is not a
king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without
having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the
Tuatha de Danaan." When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds
of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain
that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made
king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in
the woods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and
in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him
and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,
as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal
impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in
a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the
strength of things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions
of universal nature, like the clouds that shape themselves and re-shape
themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the
gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings
them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,
and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought. Do we not always
fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that why we think
them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in
"Pauline":

"An old hunter
Talking with gods; or a nigh-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos"

IV

One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many
incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the
War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at
Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a long story, has nothing
of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed but a succession of
detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination
of children, and as soon as they had