n many sense
it was a fatal attitude, and they reaped the misery of it; but
they gained some wealth for the human spirit from it too. The
aged Oisin has returned from Fairyland to find the old glorious
order in Ireland fallen and passed during the three centuries of
his absence. High Paganism has gone, and a religion meek,
inglorious, and Unceltic has taken its mission thereto: tells
him the gods are conquered and dead, and that the omnipotent God
of the Christians reigns alone now.--"I would thy God were set on
yonder hill to fight with my son Oscar!" replies Oisin. Patrick
paints for him the hell to which he is destined unless he accepts
Christianity; and Oisin answers:
"Put the staff in my hands! for I go to the Fenians, thou
cleric, to chant
The warsongs that roused them of old; they will rise,
making clouds with their breath.
Innumerable, singing, exultant; and hell underneath them
shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them
in death."
"No," says Patrick; "none war on the masters of hell, who could
break up the world in their rage"; and bids him weep and kneel in
prayer for his lost soul. But that will not do for the old
Celtic warrior bard; no tame heaven for him. He will go to
hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to
the mere meanness of fate. He will
"Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or
at feast."
So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and
desolation. His kingdom has been conquered; he is in exile in
Wales; his four and twenty sons, "wearers of golden torques,
proud rulers of princes," have been slain; he is considerably
over a hundred years old, and homeless, and sick; but no whit of
his pride is gone. He has learnt no lesson from life excepts
this One: that fate and Karma and sorrow are not so proud, not
so skillful to persecute, as the human so