were sleeping, he poured out his prayers,
a Christian voice in Pagan darkness. It was the memory of that darkness,
you remember, that brought him back, years after, to convert Milcho.
Here, too, they say, lies the great bard Ossian; for they love to think
that Finn's son Oisin, [++] the hero poet, survived to the time of St.
Patrick, three hundred years after the other 'Fianna' had vanished from
the earth,--the three centuries being passed in Tir-nan-og, the Land of
Youth, where the great Oisin married the king's daughter, Niam of the
Golden Hair. 'Ossian after the Fianna' is a phrase which has become the
synonym of all survivors' sorrow. Blinded by tears, broken by age, the
hero bard when he returns to earth has no fellowship but with grief, and
thus he sings:--

'No hero now where heroes hurled,--
Long this night the clouds delay--
No man like me, in all the world,
Alone with grief, and grey.

Long this night the clouds delay--
I raise their grave carn, stone on stone,
For Finn and Fianna passed away--
I, Ossian left alone.'

++ Pronounced Isheen' in Munster, Osh'in in Ulster.

In more senses than one Irish folk-lore is Irish history. At least the
traditions that have been handed down from one generation to another
contain not only the sometimes authentic record of events, but
a revelation of the Milesian temperament, with its mirth and its
melancholy, its exuberant fancy and its passion. So in these weird tales
there is plenty of history, and plenty of poetry, to one who will listen
to it; but the high and tragic story of Ireland has been cherished
mainly in the sorrowful traditions of a defeated race, and the legends
have not yet been wrought into undying verse. Erin's songs of battle
could only recount weary successions of Flodden Fields, with never
a Bannockburn and its nimbus of victory; for, as Ossian says of his
countrymen, "they went forth to the war, but they always fell"; but
somewhere in the green isle is an unborn poet who will put all this
mystery, beauty, passion, romance, and sadness, these tragic memories,
these beliefs, these visions of unfulfilled desire, into verse that will
glow on the page and live for ever. Somewhere is a mother who has kept
all these things in her heart, and who will bear a son to write
them. Meantime, who shall say that they have not been imbedded in the
language, as flower petals might be in amber?--that la