musicians of the world. When Finn asks his men what music they thought
the best, each says his say, but Oisín answers, "The music of the
woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird,
and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron." And Finn himself,
when asked what was his most beloved music, said first that it was
"the sharp whistling of the wind as it went through the uplifted
spears of the seven battalions of the Fianna," and this was fitting
for a hero to say. But when the poet in him spoke, he said his music
was the crying of the sea-gull, and the noise of the waves, and the
voice of the cuckoo when summer was at hand, and the washing of the
sea against the shore, and of the tide when it met the river of the
White Trout, and of the wind rushing through the cloud. And many other
sayings of the same kind this charming and poetic folk has said
concerning those sweet, strong sounds in Nature out of which the music
of men was born.

Again, there is not much music in the Mythological Tales. Lugh, it is
true, is a great harper, and the harp of the Dagda, into which he has
bound his music, plays a music at whose sound all men laugh, and
another so that all men weep, and another so enthralling that all fall
asleep; and these three kinds of music are heard through all the
Cycles of Tales. Yet when the old gods of the mythology became the
Sidhe,[7] the Fairy Host, they--having left their barbaric life
behind--became great musicians. In every green hill where the tribes
of fairy-land lived, sweet, wonderful music was heard all day--such
music that no man could hear but he would leave all other music to
listen to it, which "had in it sorrows that man has never felt, and
joys for which man has no name, and it seemed as if he who heard it
might break from time into eternity and be one of the immortals." And
when Finn and his people lived, they, being in great harmony and union