whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it."

AUGUSTA GREGORY.




PREFACE

I

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of
Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon
flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the
east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level
horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there
the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and
not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing
where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring
in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to
Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with
Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces
and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called,
with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual
slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows,
had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their
youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the
likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic