“No sooner did I come down,
Than the white steed took fright;
He went then on his way,
And I, in sorrow, both weak and feeble.”
He had been a long time in the “Land of Youth,” and intended going back to that country, perpetually “under the full bloom;” but now he could not. His stay in that land reminds us of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. He tells the everlastingly occurring Patrick—
“I spent a time protracted in length,
Three hundred years and more,
Until I thought ’twould be my desire
To see Fionn and the Fianna alive.”
The great prince-poet, as everywhere represented, is in his last days poor and blind. After declaring to Patrick that—