And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-colored trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The gray wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares run by me, growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I came upon a little town
That slumbered in the harvest moon,
And passed a-tiptoe up and down,
Murmuring to a fitful tune,
How I have followed, night and day,
A tramping of tremendous feet,
And saw where this old tympan lay,
Deserted on a doorway seat,
And bore it to the woods with me;
Of some unhuman misery
Our married voices wildly trolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I sang how, when day's toil is done,
Orchil shakes out her long dark hair
That hides away the dying sun
And sheds faint odors through the air:
When my hand passed from wire to wire
It quenched, with sound like falling dew,
The whirling and the wandering fire,
But left a mournful ulalu;
For the kind wires are torn and still,
And I must wander wood and hill,
Through summer's heat and winter's cold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
II—SCOTTISH
Early Celtic literature in Scotland is so intimately allied with the Irish, that much of the previous section must be held to belong as much to the present one. We shall not need to recapitulate here what is there dealt with. The two Gaelic currents began to separate, if almost imperceptibly, even then; and only in century-long stages, after passing the point marked by the mediæval recapitulators of Ossian and St. Patrick. How closely intermingled these currents were up to that point may be learnt from the evidence of such exquisite lines as those preserved by the Scottish Dean Macgregor, entitled 'Ossian Sang':—
Sweet is the voice in the land of gold,
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 among the trees;
And soft is the kiss of the warming sun.
The cry of the eagle of 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.