Quern-biter hungers;
Shield-walker wearieth
Shut in the scabbard.
This is my sentence:
Bring us to battle.
Perhaps, however, the greatest strength in Congal will be found in the dealing with the apparitions, the gigantic and malign demons, who haunt the hill and the stream, and represent the primitive imaginings of a race not yet emancipated from the terrors of the supernatural in the forces and forms of nature. These figures of ancient Irish poetry, the Herdsman Borcha, who swept down Finn's fortress with his staff, and counts the kine in the unconquered lands, the Giant Walker, who strides angrily around the hostile camp at night, and the Washer at the Ford, who dabbles with slain men's heads, live again in Ferguson's verse with their original reality and terror, and amid the setting of natural scenery from which their phantoms were created. This is the picture of the Giant Walker, whose apparition presaged doom to Cougal at his first night's camp:—
Around the Mound of Sighs
They filled the woody-sided vale; but no sweet sleep their
eyes
Refreshed that night; for all the night, around their echo