Flushed with mirth and hope they burn.[794]
On that ever-memorable occasion at Stonehenge, when the Saxons massacred their unsuspecting hosts, a Bard relates that—
The glad repository of the world was amply supplied.
Well did Eideol prepare at the spacious circle of the world
Harmony and gold and great horses and intoxicating mead.
The word mead implies that this celestial honey-brew was esteemed to be the drink of the Maid; ale as we know was ceremoniously brewed within churches, and was thus probably once a holy beverage drunk on holy-days: the words beer and brew will account for representations of the senior Selenus, as at times inebriate. The Fairy Queen, occasionally the “Sorceress of the ebon Throne,” was esteemed to be the “Mother of wildly-working dreams”; Matthew Arnold happily describes the Celts as “drenched and intoxicated with fairy dew,” and it seems to have a general tenet that the fairy people in their festal glee were sometimes inebriated by ambrosia:—
From golden flowers of each hue,
Crystal white, or golden yellow,
Purple, violet, red or blue,
We drink the honey dew