"Sweet is the voice in the land of gold,[8]
And sweeter the music of birds that soar,
When the cry of the heron is heard on the wold,
And the waves break softly on Bundatrore.
Down floats on the murmuring of the breeze
The call of the cuckoo from Cossahun,
The blackbird is warbling amongst the trees,
And soft is the kiss of the warming sun.
The cry of the eagle at Assaroe
O'er the court of Mac Morne to me is sweet;
And sweet is the cry of the bird below,
Where the wave and the wind and the tall cliff meet.
Finn mac Cool is the father of me,
Whom seven battalions of Fenians fear,
When he launches his hounds on the open lea,
Grand is their cry as they rouse the deer."
Caoilte [Cweeltya] too, the third great Fenian poet, was as impressionable to the moods of nature as his friends Ossian and Finn. Compare with the foregoing poems his lay on the Isle of Arran, in Scotland.[9]
THE ISLE OF ARRAN.
"Arran of the many stags, the sea inpinges upon her very shoulders! An isle in which whole companies were fed, and with ridges among which blue spears are reddened.
"Skittish deer are on her pinnacles, soft blackberries on her waving heather; cool water there is in her rivers, and musk upon her russet oaks.[10]
"Greyhounds there were in her and beagles, blackberries and sloes of the dark blackthorn, dwellings with their backs set close against her woods, while the deer fed scattered by her oaken thickets.
"A crimson crop grew on her rocks, in all her glades a faultless grass; over her crags affording friendly refuge leaping went on, and fawns were skipping.
"Smooth were her level spots, fat her wild swine, cheerful her fields ... her nuts hung on the boughs of her forest hazels, and there was sailing of long galleys past her.
"Right pleasant their condition, all, when the fair weather set in. Under her river-banks trouts lie; the seagulls wheeling round her grand cliff answer one the other—at every fitting time delectable is Arran!"
In another poem that Caoilte is fabled to have made after he met and consorted with St. Patrick is a vivid description of a freezing night as it appeared to a hunter. A great frost and heavy snow had fallen upon the whole country, so that the russet branches of the forest were twisted together, and men could no longer travel. "A fitting time it is now," said Caoilte, "for wild stags and for does to seek the topmost points of hills and rocks; a timely season for salmons to betake them into cavities of the banks," and he uttered a lay.
"Cold the winter is, the wind is risen, the high-couraged unquelled stag is on foot, bitter cold to-night the whole mountain is, yet for all that the ungovernable stag is belling.[11]
"The deer of Slievecarn of the gatherings commits not his side to the ground; no less than he, the stag of frigid Echtgé's summit who catches the chorus of the wolves.
"I, Caoilte, with Brown Diarmuid,[12] and with keen, light-footed Oscar; we too in the nipping nights' waning end, would listen to the music of the [wolf] pack.
"But well the red deer sleeps that with his hide to the bulging rock lies stretched, hidden as though beneath the country's surface, all in the latter end of chilly night.
"To-day I am an aged ancient, and but a scant few men I know; once on time, though, on a cold and icebound morning I used to vibrate a sharp javelin hardily.
"To Heaven's King I offer thanks, to Mary Virgin's Son as well; often and often I imposed silence on [daunted] a whole host, whose plight to-night is very cold [i.e., who are all dead now]."
It is curious that in the more modern Ossianic pieces, such as the scribes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delighted in transcribing, there is little mention made of Caoilte, and the complaints about surviving the Fenians and being vexed by the clerics are more usually put into the mouth of Ossian.
Here is one of the moans of Ossian in his old age, when fallen on evil times, and thwarted at every turn by St. Patrick and his monks.
Long was last night in cold Elphin,[13]
More long is to-night on its weary way,
Though yesterday seemed to me long and ill,
Yet longer still was this dreary day.
And long for me is each hour new born,
Stricken, forlorn, and smit with grief
For the hunting lands and the Fenian bands,
And the long-haired, generous, Fenian chief.
I hear no music, I find no feast,
I slay no beast from a bounding steed,
I bestow no gold, I am poor and old,
I am sick and cold, without wine or mead.
I court no more, and I hunt no more,
These were before my strong delight,
I cannot slay, and I take no prey:
Weary the day and long the night.
No heroes come in their war array,
No game I play, there is nought to win;
I swim no stream with my men of might,
Long is the night in cold Elphin.
Ask, O Patrick, thy God of grace,
To tell me the place he will place me in,
And save my soul from the Ill One's might,
For long is to-night in cold Elphin."
There is a considerable thread of narrative running through these poems and connecting them in a kind of series, so that several of them might be divided into the various books of a Gaelic epic of the Odyssic type, containing instead of the wanderings and final restoration of Ulysses, the adventures and final destruction of the Fenians, except that the books would be rather more disjointed. There is, moreover, splendid material for an ample epic in the division between the Fenians of Munster and Connacht and the gradual estrangement of the High-king, leading up to the fatal battle of Gabhra; but the material for this last exists chiefly in prose texts, not in the Ossianic lays. It is very strange and very unfortunate that notwithstanding the literary activity of Gaelic Ireland before and during the penal times, no Keating, or Comyn, or Curtin ever attempted to redact the Ossianic poems and throw them into that epic form into which they would so easily and naturally have fitted. These pieces appear to me of even greater value than the Red Branch sagas, as elucidating the natural growth and genesis of an epic, for the Irish progressed just up to the point of possessing a large quantity of stray material, minor episodes versified by anonymous long-forgotten folk-poets; but they never produced a mind critical enough to reduce this mass to order, coherence, and stability, and at the same time creative enough to itself supply the necessary lacunæ. Were it not that so much light has by this time been thrown upon the natural genesis of ancient national epics, one might be inclined to lay down the theory that the Irish had evolved a scheme of their own, peculiar to themselves, and different altogether from the epic, a scheme in which the same characters figure in a group of allied poems and romances, each of which, like one of Tennyson's idylls, is perfect in itself, and not dependent upon the rest, a system which might be taken to be a natural result of the impatient Celtic temperament which could not brook the restraints of an epic.
The Ossianic lays are almost the only narrative poems which exist in the language, for although lyrical, elegiac, and didactic poetry abounds, the Irish never produced, except in the case of the Ossianic épopées, anything of importance in a narrative and ballad form, anything, for instance, of the nature of the glorious ballad poetry of the Scotch Lowlands.