squalls between,
And slant, cerulean-skirted showers, that with a drowsy
sound,
Heard inward, of ebullient waves, stalk all the horizon round.
With its faithfulness to tone and character, its skillful reproduction of style and language, its force and vigor of narrative, its forms of mythologie mysticism and its appreciation of the magic of nature, Congal is the most perfect reproduction of the form and spirit of ancient Celtic poetry in existence, and from it the English reader, who is not a Celtic student, can obtain the best knowledge of its pervading elements.
Congal is not the only contribution made by Sir Samuel Ferguson to Celtic poetry. The Lays of the Western Gael are a series of ballads founded on events in Celtic history and derived from the early chronicles and poems. They are original in form and substance, the ballad form and measure being unknown to the early Celtic poets of Ireland, but they preserve in a wonderful degree the ancient spirit, and give a picture of the ancient times with all the art of truth and verity. As I have said elsewhere 1:—
"To have done this clearly and completely, so that the past lives again and is felt by the instinct of nature to be true and real, free from confusion and extravagance, the imperfections of utterance in a people just learning to express themselves, the alien and antique methods of thought, through the inevitably imperfect knowledge of a language half faded and changed, while preserving not only the terms of expression but the characteristics of thought and feeling, seems a no less difficult task than to trace and interpret the worn letters and half-effaced inscriptions on the Ogham stones, and could only have been done by the genius of the great poet vivifying the labor of the profound scholar. Finally, the impress of the past as it is visible to the present, the effect of the gray cairn and grassy burial mound, and almost the last fading of the tokens of the aboriginal race into the bosom of nature, and the perception of its spirit amid the light and bustle of the day,
The loneliness and awe secure of the forgotten dead,
is the task of the modern poet speaking in his own time and to his own generation of the past."
1 Introduction to popular edition of Lays of the Western
Gael Dublin, 1888.