om the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment--
***
"Sunbeams upon distant hills,
Gliding apace with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."

This is pretty, but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we find
the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the historic
times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths and cairns
perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. The scene of the
destruction of the Firbolgs will be found to be a place of tombs, the
metropolis of the Fomorians a place of tombs, and a place of tombs the
sacred home of the Tuatha along the shores of the Boyne. Doubtless, they
are represented also as dwelling in the hills, lakes, and rivers, but
still the connection between the great raths and cairns and the gods
is never really forgotten. When the floruit of a god has expired, he
is assigned a tomb in one of the great tumuli. No one can peruse this
ancient literature without seeing clearly the genesis of the Irish gods,
_videlicet_ heroes, passing, through the imagination and through the
region of poetic representation, into the world of the supernatural.
When a king died, his people raised his ferta, set up his stone, and
engraved upon it, at least in later times, his name in ogham. They
celebrated his death with funeral lamentations and funeral games, and
listened to the bards chanting his prowess, his liberality, and his
beauty. In the case of great warriors, these games and lamentations
became periodical. It is distinctly recorded in many places, for
instance in connection with Taylti, who gave her name to Taylteen and
Garman, who gave her name to Loch Garman, now Wexford, and with Lu
Lamfada, whose annual worship gave its name to the Kalends of August.
Gradually, as his actual achievements became more remote, and the
imagination of the bards, proportionately, more unrestrained, he would
pass into the world of the supernatural. Even in the case of a hero
so surrounded with historic light as Cuculain we find a halo, as of
godhood, often settling around him. His gray warsteed had already passed
into the realm of mythical representation, as a second avatar of the
Liath Macha, the grey war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be
believed, even in the days when the