THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK

BY
AUBREY DE VERE, LL.D.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY.

SAINT PATRICK - FROM “ENGLISH WRITERS,” BY HENRY MORLEY.

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.

POEMS: -
THE BAPTISM OF SAINT PATRICK.
THE DISBELIEF OF MILCHO.
SAINT PATRICK AT TARA.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE TWO PRINCESSES.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE CHILDREN OF FOCHLUT WOOD.
SAINT PATRICK AND KING LAEGHAIRE.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE IMPOSTOR.
SAINT PATRICK AT CASHEL.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE CHILDLESS MOTHER.
SAINT PATRICK AT THE FEAST OF KNOCK CAE.
SAINT PATRICK AND KING EOCHAID.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE FOUNDING OF ARMAGH CATHEDRAL.
THE ARRAIGNMENT OF SAINT PATRICK.
THE STRIVING OF SAINT PATRICK ON MOUNT CRUACHAN.
EPILOGUE.  THE CONFESSION OF SAINT PATRICK.

INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY.

Once more our readers are indebted to a living poet for wide circulation of a volume of delightful verse.  The name of Aubrey de Vere is the more pleasantly familiar because its association with our highest literature has descended from father to son.  In 1822, sixty-seven years ago, Sir Aubrey de Vere, of Curragh Chase, by Adare, in the county of Limerick - then thirty-four years old - first made his mark with a dramatic poem upon “Julian the Apostate.”  In 1842 Sir Aubrey published Sonnets, which his friend Wordsworth described as “the most perfect of our age;” and in the year of his death he completed a dramatic poem upon “Mary Tudor,” published in the next year, 1847, with the “Lamentation of Ireland, and other Poems.”  Sir Aubrey de Vere’s “Mary Tudor” should be read by all who have read Tennyson’s play on the same subject.

The gift of genius passed from Sir Aubrey to his third son, Aubrey Thomas de Vere, who was born in 1814, and through a long life has put into music only noble thoughts associated with the love of God and man, and of his native land.  His first work, published forty-seven years ago, was a lyrical piece, in which he gave his sympathy to devout and persecuted men whose ways of thought were not his own.  Aubrey de Vere’s poems have been from time to time revised by himself, and they were in 1884 finally collected into three volumes, published by Messrs. Kegan Paul.  Left free to choose from among their various contents, I have taken this little book of “Legends of St. Patrick,” first published in 1872, but in so doing I have unwillingly left many a piece that would please many a reader.

They are not, however, inaccessible.  Of the three volumes of collected works, each may be had separately, and is complete in itself.  The first contains “The Search after Proserpine, and other Poems - Classical and Meditative.”  The second contains the “Legends of St. Patrick, and Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age,” including a version of the “Tain Bo.”  The third contains two plays, “Alexander the Great,” “St. Thomas of Canterbury,” and other Poems.

For the convenience of some readers, the following extract from the second volume of my “English Writers,” may serve as a prosaic summary of what is actually known about St. Patrick.
                                           H. M.

ST. PATRICK.

FROM “ENGLISH WRITERS.”

The birth of St. Patrick, Apostle and Saint of Ireland, has been generally placed in the latter half of the fourth century; and he is said to have died at the age of a hundred and twenty.  As he died in the year 493 - and we may admit that he was then a very old man - if we may say that he reached the age of eighty-eight, we place his birth in the year 405.  We may reasonably believe, therefore, that he was born in the early part of the fifth century.  His birthplace, now known as Kilpatrick, was at the junction of the Levin with the Clyde, in what is now the county of Dumbarton.  His baptismal name was Succath.  His father was Calphurnius, a deacon, son of Potitus, who was a priest.  His mother’s name was Conchessa, whose family may have belonged to Gaul, and who may thus have been, as it is said she was, of the kindred of St. Martin of Tours; for there is a tradition that she was with Calphurnius as a slave before he married her.  Since Eusebius spoke of three bishops from Britain at the Council of Arles, Succath, known afterwards in missionary life by his name in religion, Patricius (pater civium), might very reasonably be a deacon’s son.

In his early years Succath was at home by the Clyde, and he speaks of himself as not having been obedient to the teaching of the clergy.  When he was sixteen years old he, with two of his sisters and other of his countrymen, was seized by a band of Irish pirates that made descent on the shore of the Clyde and carried him off to slavery.  His sisters were taken to another part of the island, and he was sold to Milcho MacCuboin in the north, whom he served for six or seven years, so learning to speak the language of the country, while keeping his master’s sheep by the Mountain of Slieve Miss.  Thoughts of home and of its Christian life made the youth feel the heathenism that was about him; his exile seemed to him a punishment for boyish indifference; and during the years when young enthusiasm looks out upon life with new sense of a man’s power - growing for man’s work that is to do - Succath became filled with religious zeal.

Three Latin pieces are ascribed to St. Patrick: a “Confession,” which is in the Book of Armagh, and in three other manuscripts; {10a} a letter to Coroticus, and a few “Dieta Patricii,” which are also in the Book of Armagh. {10b}  There is no strong reason for questioning the authenticity of the “Confession,” which is in unpolished Latin, the writer calling himself “indoctus, rusticissimus, imperitus,” and it is full of a deep religious feeling.  It is concerned rather with the inner than the outer life, but includes references to the early days of trial by which Succath’s whole heart was turned to God.  He says, “After I came into Ireland I pastured sheep daily, and prayed many times a day.  The love and fear of God, and faith and spirit, wrought in me more and more, so that in one day I reached to a hundred prayers, and in the night almost as many, and stayed in the woods and on the mountains, and was urged to prayer before the dawn, in snow, in frost, in rain, and took no harm, nor, I think, was there any sloth in me.  And there one night I heard a voice in a dream saying to me, ‘Thou hast well fasted; thou shalt go back soon to thine own land;’ and again after a little while, ‘Behold! thy ship is ready.’”  In all this there is the passionate longing of an ardent mind for home and Heaven.

At the age of twenty-two Succath fled from his slavery to a vessel of which the master first refused and finally consented to take him on board.  He and the sailors were then cast by a storm upon a desert shore of Britain, possibly upon some region laid waste by ravages from over sea.  Having at last made his way back, by a sea passage, to his home on the Clyde, Succath was after a time captured again, but remained captive only for two months, and went back home.  Then the zeal for his Master’s service made him feel like the Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon poem; and all the traditions of his home would have accorded with the rise of the resolve to cross the sea, and to spread Christ’s teaching in what had been the land of his captivity.

There were already centres of Christian work in Ireland, where devoted men were labouring and drew a few into their fellowship.  Succath aimed at the gathering of all these scattered forces, by a movement that should carry with it the whole people.  He first prepared himself by giving about four years to study of the Scriptures at Auxerre, under Germanus, and then went to Rome, under the conduct of a priest, Segetius, and probably with letters from Germanus to Pope Celestine.  Whether he received his orders from the Pope seems doubtful; but the evidence is strong that Celestine sent him on his Irish mission.  Succath left Rome, passed through North Italy and Gaul, till he met on his way two followers of Palladius, Augustinus and Benedictus, who told him of their master’s failure, and of his death at Fordun.  Succath then obtained consecration from Amathus, a neighbouring bishop, and as Patricius, went straight to Ireland.  He landed near the town of Wicklow, by the estuary of the River Varty, which had been the landing-place of Palladius.  In that region he was, like Palladius, opposed; but he made some conversions, and advanced with his work northward that he might reach the home of his old master, Milcho, and pay him the purchase-money of his stolen freedom.  But Milcho, it is said, burnt himself and his goods rather than bear the shame of submission to the growing power of his former slave.

St. Patrick addressed the ruling classes, who could bring with them their followers, and he joined tact with his zeal; respecting ancient prejudices, opposing nothing that was not directly hostile to the spirit of Christianity, and handling skilfully the chiefs with whom he had to deal.  An early convert - Dichu MacTrighim - was a chief with influential connections, who gave the ground for the religious house now known as Saul.  This chief satisfied so well the inquiries of Laeghaire, son of Niall, King of Erin, concerning the stranger’s movements, that St. Patrick took ship for the mouth of the Boyne, and made his way straight to the king himself.  The result of his energy was that he met successfully all the opposition of those who were concerned in the maintenance of old heathen worship, and brought King Laeghaire to his side.

Then Laeghaire resolved that the old laws of the country as established by the judges, whose order was named Brehon, should be revised, and brought into accord with the new teaching.  So the Brehon laws of Ireland were revised, with St. Patrick’s assistance, and there were no ancient customs broken or altered, except those that could not be harmonised with Christian teaching.  The good sense of St. Patrick enabled this great work to be done without offence to the people.  The collection of laws thus made by the chief lawyers of the time, with the assistance of St. Patrick, is known as the “Senchus Mor,” and, says an old poem -

     “Laeghaire, Corc Dairi, the brave;
      Patrick, Beuen, Cairnech, the just;
      Rossa, Dubtach, Fergus, the wise;
      These are the nine pillars of the Senchus Mor.”

This body of laws, traditions, and treatises on law is found in no manuscript of a date earlier than the fourteenth century.  It includes, therefore, much that is of later date than the fifth century.

St. Patrick’s greatest energies are said to have been put forth in Ulster and Leinster.  Among the churches or religious communities founded by him in Ulster was that of Armagh.  If he was born about the year 405, when he was carried to Ireland as a prisoner at the age of sixteen the date would have been 421.  His age would have been twenty-two when he escaped, after six or seven years of captivity, and the date 427.  A year at home, and four years with Germanus at Auxerre, would bring him to the age of twenty-seven, and the year 432, when he began his great endeavour to put Christianity into the main body of the Irish people.  That work filled all the rest of his life, which was long.  If we accept the statement, in which all the old records agree, that the time of Patrick’s labour in Ireland was not less than sixty years; sixty years bring him to the age of eighty-eight in the year 493.  And in that year he died.

The “Letter to Coroticus,” ascribed to St. Patrick, is addressed to a petty king of Brittany who persecuted Christians, and was meant for the encouragement of Christian soldiers who served under him.  It may, probably, be regarded as authentic.  The mass of legend woven into the life of the great missionary lies outside this piece and the “Confession.”  The “Confession” only expresses heights and depths of religious feeling haunted by impressions and dreams, through which, to the fervid nature out of which they sprang heaven seemed to speak.  St. Patrick did not attack heresies among the Christians; he preached to those who were not Christians the Christian faith and practice.  His great influence was not that of a writer, but of a speaker.  He must have been an orator, profoundly earnest, who could put his soul into his voice; and, when his words bred deeds, conquered all difficulties in the way of action with right feeling and good sense.
                                         HENRY MORLEY.

                         TO THE MEMORY
                               OF
                           WORDSWORTH.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO “THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK.”

The ancient records of Ireland abound in legends respecting the greatest man and the greatest benefactor that ever trod her soil; and of these the earlier are at once the more authentic and the nobler.  Not a few have a character of the sublime; many are pathetic; some have a profound meaning under a strange disguise; but their predominant character is their brightness and gladsomeness.  A large tract of Irish history is dark: but the time of Saint Patrick, and the three centuries which succeeded it, were her time of joy.  That chronicle is a song of gratitude and hope, as befits the story of a nation’s conversion to Christianity, and in it the bird and the brook blend their carols with those of angels and of men.  It was otherwise with the later legends connecting Ossian with Saint Patrick.  A poet once remarked, while studying the frescoes of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, that the Sibyls are always sad, while the Prophets alternated with them are joyous.  In the legends of the Patrician Cycle the chief-loving old Bard is ever mournful, for his face is turned to the past glories of his country; while the Saint is always bright, because his eyes are set on to the glory that has no end.

These legends are to be found chiefly in several very ancient lives of Saint Patrick, the most valuable of which is the “Tripartite Life,” ascribed by Colgan to the century after the Saint’s death, though it has not escaped later interpolations.  The work was long lost, but two copies of it were re-discovered, one of which has been recently translated by that eminent Irish scholar, Mr. Hennessy.  Whether regarded from the religious or the philosophic point of view, few things can be more instructive than the picture which it delineates of human nature at a period of critical transition, and the dawning of the Religion of Peace upon a race barbaric, but far indeed from savage.  That wild race regarded it doubtless as a notable cruelty when the new Faith discouraged an amusement so popular as battle; but in many respects they were in sympathy with that Faith.  It was one in which the nobler affections, as well as the passions, retained an unblunted ardour; and where Nature is strongest and least corrupted it most feels the need of something higher than itself, its interpreter and its supplement.  It prized the family ties, like the Germans recorded by Tacitus; and it could not but have been drawn to Christianity, which consecrated them.  Its morals were pure, and it had not lost that simplicity to which so much of spiritual insight belongs.  Admiration and wonder were among its chief habits; and it would not have been repelled by Mysteries in what professed to belong to the Infinite.  Lawless as it was, it abounded also in loyalty, generosity, and self-sacrifice; it was not, therefore, untouched by the records of martyrs, examples of self-sacrifice, or the doctrine of a great Sacrifice.  It loved children and the poor; and Christianity made the former the exemplars of faith, and the latter the eminent inheritors of the Kingdom.  On the other hand, all the vices of the race ranged themselves against the new religion.

In the main the institutions and traditions of Ireland were favourable to Christianity.  She had preserved in a large measure the patriarchal system of the East.  Her clans were families, and her chiefs were patriarchs who led their households to battle, and seized or recovered the spoil.  To such a people the Christian Church announced herself as a great family - the family of man.  Her genealogies went up to the first parent, and her rule was parental rule.  The kingdom of Christ was the household of Christ; and its children in all lands formed the tribes of a larger Israel.  Its laws were living traditions; and for traditions the Irish had ever retained the Eastern reverence.

In the Druids no formidable enemy was found; it was the Bards who wielded the predominant social influence.  As in Greece, where the sacerdotal power was small, the Bards were the priests of the national Imagination, and round them all moral influences had gathered themselves.  They were jealous of their rivals; but those rivals won them by degrees.  Secknall and Fiacc were Christian Bards, trained by St. Patrick, who is said to have also brought a bard with him from Italy.  The beautiful legend in which the Saint loosened the tongue of the dumb child was an apt emblem of Christianity imparting to the Irish race the highest use of its natural faculties.  The Christian clergy turned to account the Irish traditions, as they had made use of the Pagan temples, purifying them first.  The Christian religion looked with a genuine kindness on whatever was human, except so far as the stain was on it; and while it resisted to the face what was unchristian in spirit, it also, in the Apostolic sense, “made itself all things to all men.”  As legislator, Saint Patrick waged no needless war against the ancient laws of Ireland.  He purified them, and he amplified them, discarding only what was unfit for a nation made Christian.  Thus was produced the great “Book of the Law,” or “Senchus Mohr,” compiled A.D. 439.

The Irish received the Gospel gladly.  The great and the learned, in other nations the last to believe, among them commonly set the example.  With the natural disposition of the race an appropriate culture had concurred.  It was one which at least did not fail to develop the imagination, the affections, and a great part of the moral being, and which thus indirectly prepared ardent natures, and not less the heroic than the tender, to seek their rest in spiritual things, rather than in material or conventional.  That culture, without removing the barbaric, had blended it with the refined.  It had created among the people an appreciation of the beautiful, the pathetic, and the pure.  The early Irish chronicles, as well as songs, show how strong among them that sentiment had ever been.  The Borromean Tribute, for so many ages the source of relentless wars, had been imposed in vengeance for an insult offered to a woman; and a discourtesy shown to a poet had overthrown an ancient dynasty.  The education of an Ollambh occupied twelve years; and in the third century, the time of Oiseen and Fionn, the military rules of the Feinè included provisions which the chivalry of later ages might have been proud of.  It was a wild, but not wholly an ungentle time.  An unprovoked affront was regarded as a grave moral offence; and severe punishments were ordained, not only for detraction, but for a word, though uttered in jest, which brought a blush on the cheek of a listener.  Yet an injury a hundred years old could meet no forgiveness, and the life of man was war!  It was not that laws were wanting; a code, minute in its justice, had proportioned a penalty to every offence, and specified the Eric which was to wipe out the bloodstain in case the injured party renounced his claim to right his own wrong.  It was not that hearts were hard - there was at least as much pity for others as for self.  It was that anger was implacable, and that where fear was unknown, the war field was what among us the hunting field is.

The rapid growth of learning as well as piety in the three centuries succeeding the conversion of Ireland, prove that the country had not been till then without a preparation for the gift.  It had been the special skill of Saint Patrick to build the good which was lacked upon that which existed.  Even the material arts of Ireland he had pressed into the service of the Faith; and Irish craftsmen had assisted him, not only in the building of his churches, but in casting his church bells, and in the adornment of his chalices, crosiers, and ecclesiastical vestments.  Once elevated by Christianity, Ireland’s early civilisation was a memorable thing.  It sheltered a high virtue at home, and evangelised a great part of Northern Europe; and amidst many confusions it held its own till the true time of barbarism had set in - those two disastrous centuries when the Danish invasions trod down the sanctuaries, dispersed the libraries, and laid waste the colleges to which distant kings had sent their sons.

Perhaps nothing human had so large an influence in the conversion of the Irish as the personal character of her Apostle.  Where others, as Palladius, had failed, he succeeded.  By nature, by grace, and by providential training, he had been specially fitted for his task.  We can still see plainly even the finer traits of that character, while the land of his birth is a matter of dispute, and of his early history we know little, except that he was of noble birth, that he was carried to Ireland by pirates at the age of sixteen, and that after five years of bondage he escaped thence, to return A.D.  432, when about forty-five years old; belonging thus to that great age of the Church which was made illustrious by the most eminent of its Fathers, and tasked by the most critical of its trials.  In him a great character had been built on the foundations of a devout childhood, and of a youth ennobled by adversity.  Everywhere we trace the might and the sweetness which belonged to it, the versatile mind yet the simple heart, the varying tact yet the fixed resolve, the large design taking counsel for all, yet the minute solicitude for each, the fiery zeal yet the genial temper, the skill in using means yet the reliance on God alone, the readiness in action with the willingness to wait, the habitual self-possession yet the outbursts of an inspiration which raised him above himself, the abiding consciousness of authority - an authority in him, but not of him - and yet the ever-present humility.  Above all, there burned in him that boundless love, which seems the main constituent of the Apostolic character.  It was love for God; but it was love for man also, an impassioned love, and a parental compassion.  It was not for the spiritual weal alone of man that he thirsted.  Wrong and injustice to the poor he resented as an injury to God.  His vehement love for the poor is illustrated by his “Epistle to Coroticus,” reproaching him with his cruelty, as well as by his denunciations of slavery, which piracy had introduced into parts of Ireland.  No wonder that such a character should have exercised a talismanic power over the ardent and sensitive race among whom he laboured, a race “easy to be drawn, but impossible to be driven,” and drawn more by sympathy than even by benefits.  That character can only be understood by one who studies, and in a right spirit, that account of his life which he bequeathed to us shortly before its close - the “Confession of Saint Patrick.”  The last poem in this series embodies its most characteristic portions, including the visions which it records.

The “Tripartite Life” thus ends: - “After these great miracles, therefore, after resuscitating the dead, after healing lepers, and the blind, and the deaf, and the lame, and all diseases; after ordaining bishops, and priests, and deacons, and people of all orders in the Church; after teaching the men of Erin, and after baptising them; after founding churches and monasteries; after destroying idols and images and Druidical arts, the hour of death of Saint Patrick approached.  He received the body of Christ from the Bishop Tassach, according to the counsel of the Angel Victor.  He resigned his spirit afterwards to Heaven, in the one hundred and twentieth year of his age.  His body is still here in the earth, with honour and reverence.  Though great his honour here, greater honour will be to him in the Day of Judgment, when judgment will be given on the fruit of his teaching, as of every great Apostle, in the union of the Apostles and Disciples of Jesus; in the union of the Nine Orders of Angels, which cannot be surpassed; in the union of the Divinity and Humanity of the Son of God; in the union, which is higher than all unions, of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
                                 A. DE VERE.

THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK.

THE BAPTISM OF ST. PATRICK.

“How can the babe baptiséd be
  Where font is none and water none?”
Thus wept the nurse on bended knee,
  And swayed the Infant in the sun.

“The blind priest took that Infant’s hand:
  With that small hand, above the ground
He signed the Cross.  At God’s command
  A fountain rose with brimming bound.

“In that pure wave from Adam’s sin
  The blind priest cleansed the Babe with awe;
Then, reverently, he washed therein
  His old, unseeing face, and saw!

“He saw the earth; he saw the skies,
  And that all-wondrous Child decreed
A pagan nation to baptise,
  To give the Gentiles light indeed.”

Thus Secknall sang.  Far off and nigh
  The clansmen shouted loud and long;
While every mother tossed more high
  Her babe, and glorying joined the song.

THE DISBELIEF OF MILCHO,
OR, SAINT PATRICK’S ONE FAILURE.

ARGUMENT.

Fame of St. Patrick goes ever before him, and men of
  goodwill believe gladly; but Milcho, a mighty merchant,
  and one given wholly to pride and greed, wills to
  disbelieve.  St. Patrick sends him greeting and gifts;
  but he, discovering that the prophet welcomed by all
  had once been his slave, hates him the more.
  Notwithstanding, he fears that when that prophet
  arrives, he, too, may be forced to believe, though
  against his will.  He resolves to set fire to his
  castle and all his wealth, and make new fortunes in far
  lands.  The doom of Milcho, who willed to disbelieve.

When now at Imber Dea that precious bark
Freighted with Erin’s future, touched the sands
Just where a river, through a woody vale
Curving, with duskier current clave the sea,
Patrick, the Island’s great inheritor,
His perilous voyage past, stept forth and knelt
And blessed his God.  The peace of those green meads
Cradled ’twixt purple hills and purple deep,
Seemed as the peace of heaven.  The sun had set;
But still those summits twinned, the “Golden Spears,”
Laughed with his latest beam.  The hours went by:
The brethren paced the shore or musing sat,
But still their Patriarch knelt and still gave thanks
For all the marvellous chances of his life
Since those his earlier years when, slave new-trapped,
He comforted on hills of Dalaraide
His hungry heart with God, and, cleansed by pain,
In exile found the spirit’s native land.
Eve deepened into night, and still he prayed:
The clear cold stars had crowned the azure vault;
And, risen at midnight from dark seas, the moon
Had quenched those stars, yet Patrick still prayed on:
Till from the river murmuring in the vale,
Far off, and from the morning airs close by
That shook the alders by the river’s mouth,
And from his own deep heart a voice there came,
“Ere yet thou fling’st God’s bounty on this land
There is a debt to cancel.  Where is he,
Thy five years’ lord that scourged thee for his swine?
Alas that wintry face!  Alas that heart
Joyless since earliest youth!  To him reveal it!
To him declare that God who Man became
To raise man’s fall’n estate, as though a man,
All faculties of man unmerged, undimmed,
Had changed to worm and died the prey of worms,
That so the mole might see!”

                              Thus Patrick mused
Not ignorant that from low beginnings rise
Oftenest the works of greatness; yet of this
Unweeting, that his failure, one and sole
Through all his more than mortal course, even now
Before that low beginning’s threshold lay,
Betwixt it and that Promised Land beyond
A bar of scandal stretched.  Not otherwise
Might whatsoe’er was mortal in his strength
Dying, put on the immortal.

                              With the morn
Deep sleep descended on him.  Waking soon,
He rose a man of might, and in that might
Laboured; and God His servant’s toil revered;
And gladly on that coast Erin to Christ
Paid her firstfruits.  Three days he preached his Lord:
The fourth embarking, cape succeeding cape
They passed, and heard the lowing herds remote
In hollow glens, and smelt the balmy breath
Of gorse on golden hillsides; till at eve,
The Imber Domnand reached, on silver sands
Grated their keel.  Around them flocked at dawn
Warriors with hunters mixed, and shepherd youths
And maids with lips as red as mountain berries
And eyes like sloes, or keener eyes, dark-fringed
And gleaming like the blue-black spear.  They came
With milk-pail, and with kid, and kindled fire
And spread the genial board.  Upon that shore
Full many knelt and gave themselves to Christ,
Strong men, and men at midmost of their hopes
By sickness felled; old chiefs, at life’s dim close
That oft had asked, “Beyond the grave what hope?”
Worn sailors weary of the toilsome seas,
And craving rest; they, too, that sex which wears
The blended crowns of Chastity and Love;
Wondering, they hailed the Maiden-Motherhood;
And listening children praised the Babe Divine,
And passed Him, each to each.

                              Ere long, once more
Their sails were spread.  Again by grassy marge
They rowed, and sylvan glades.  The branching deer
Like flying gleams went by them.  Oft the cry
Of fighting clans rang out: but oftener yet
Clamour of rural dance, or mart confused
With many-coloured garb and movements swift,
Pageant sun-bright: or on the sands a throng
Girdled with circle glad some bard whose song
Shook the wild clan as tempest shakes the woods.
Still north the wanderers sailed: at evening, mists
Cumbered the shore and on them leaned the blast,
And fierce rain flashed mingling with dim-lit sea.
All night they toiled; next day at noon they kenned
A seaward stream that shone like golden tress
Severed and random-thrown.  That river’s mouth
Ere long attained was all with lilies white
As April field with daisies.  Entering there
They reached a wood, and disembarked with joy:
There, after thanks to God, silent they sat
In thought, and watched the ripples, dusk yet bright,
That lived and died like things that laughed at time,
On gliding ’neath those many-centuried boughs.
But, midmost, Patrick slept.  Then through the trees,
Shy as a fawn half-tamed now stole, now fled
A boy of such bright aspect faëry child
He seemed, or babe exposed of royal race:
At last assured beside the Saint he stood,
And dropped on him a flower, and disappeared:
Thus flower on flower from the great wood he brought
And hid them in the bosom of the Saint.
The monks forbade him, saying, “Lest thou wake
The master from his sleep.”  But Patrick woke,
And saw the boy, and said, “Forbid him not;
The heir of all my kingdom is this child.”
Then spake the brethren, “Wilt thou walk with us?”
And he, “I will:” and so for his sweet face
They called his name Benignus: and the boy
Thenceforth was Christ’s.  Beneath his parent’s roof
At night they housed.  Nowhere that child would sleep
Except at Patrick’s feet.  Till Patrick’s death
Unchanged to him he clave, and after reigned
The second at Ardmacha.

                              Day by day
They held their course; ere long the hills of Mourne
Loomed through sea-mist: Ulidian summits next
Before them rose: but nearer at their left
Inland with westward channel wound the wave
Changed to sea-lake.  Nine miles with chant and hymn
They tracked the gold path of the sinking sun;
Then southward ran ’twixt headland and green isle
And landed.  Dewy pastures sunset-dazed,
At leisure paced by mild-eyed milk-white kine
Smiled them a welcome.  Onward moved in sight
Swiftly, with shadow far before him cast,
Dichu, that region’s lord, a martial man
And merry, and a speaker of the truth.
Pirates he deemed them first and toward them faced
With wolf-hounds twain that watched their master’s eye
To spring, or not to spring.  The imperious face
Forbidding not, they sprang; but Patrick raised
His hand, and stone-like crouched they chained and still:
Then, Dichu onward striding fierce, the Saint
Between them signed the Cross; and lo, the sword
Froze in his hand, and Dichu stood like stone.
The amazement past, he prayed the man of God
To grace his house; and, side by side, a mile
They clomb the hills.  Ascending, Patrick turned,
His heart with prescience filled.  Beneath, there lay
A gleaming strait; beyond, a dim vast plain
With many an inlet pierced: a golden marge
Girdled the water-tongues with flag and reed;
But, farther off, a gentle sea-mist changed
The fair green flats to purple.  “Night comes on;”
Thus Dichu spake, and waited.  Patrick then
Advanced once more, and Sabhall soon was reached,
A castle half, half barn.  There garnered lay
Much grain, and sun-imbrowned: and Patrick said,
“Here where the earthly grain was stored for man
The bread of angels man shall eat one day.”
And Patrick loved that place, and Patrick said,
“King Dichu, give thou to the poor that grain,
To Christ, our Lord, thy barn.”  The strong man stood
In doubt; but prayers of little orphaned babes
Reared by his hand, went up for him that hour:
Therefore that barn he ceded, and to Christ
By Patrick was baptised.  Where lay the corn
A convent later rose.  There dwelt he oft;
And ’neath its roof more late the stranger sat,
Exile, or kingdom-wearied king, or bard,
That haply blind in age, yet tempest-rocked
By memories of departed glories, drew
With gradual influx into his old heart
Solace of Christian hope.

                              With Dichu bode
Patrick somewhile, intent from him to learn
The inmost of that people.  Oft they spake
Of Milcho.  “Once his thrall, against my will
In earthly things I served him: for his soul
Needs therefore must I labour.  Hard was he;
Unlike those hearts to which God’s Truth makes way
Like message from a mother in her grave:
Yet what I can I must.  Not heaven itself
Can force belief; for Faith is still good will.”
Dichu laughed aloud: “Good will!  Milcho’s good will
Neither to others, nor himself, good will
Hath Milcho!  Fireless sits he, winter through,
The logs beside his hearth: and as on them
Glimmers the rime, so glimmers on his face
The smile.  Convert him!  Better thrice to hang him!
Baptise him!  He will film your font with ice!
The cold of Milcho’s heart has winter-nipt
That glen he dwells in!  From the sea it slopes
Unfinished, savage, like some nightmare dream,
Raked by an endless east wind of its own.
On wolf’s milk was he suckled not on woman’s!
To Milcho speed!  Of Milcho claim belief!
Milcho will shrivel his small eye and say
He scorns to trust himself his father’s son,
Nor deems his lands his own by right of race
But clutched by stress of brain!  Old Milcho’s God
Is gold.  Forbear him, sir, or ere you seek him
Make smooth your way with gold.”

                              Thus Dichu spake;
And Patrick, after musings long, replied:
“Faith is no gift that gold begets or feeds,
Oftener by gold extinguished.  Unto God,
Unbribed, unpurchased, yearns the soul of man;
Yet finds perforce in God its great reward.
Not less this Milcho deems I did him wrong,
His slave, yet fleeing.  To requite that loss
Gifts will I send him first by messengers
Ere yet I see his face.”

                              Then Patrick sent
His messengers to Milcho, speaking thus:
“If ill befell thy herds through flight of mine
Fourfold that loss requite I, lest, for hate
Of me, thou disesteem my Master’s Word.
Likewise I sue thy friendship; and I come
In few days’ space, with gift of other gold
Than earth concedes, the Tidings of that God
Who made all worlds, and late His Face hath shown,
Sun-like to man.  But thou, rejoice in hope!”

Thus Patrick, once by man advised in part,
Though wont to counsel with his God alone.

Meantime full many a rumour vague had vexed
Milcho much musing.  He had dealings large
And distant.  Died a chief?  He sent and bought
The widow’s all; or sold on foodless shores
For usury the leanest of his kine.
Meantime, his dark ships and the populous quays
With news still murmured.  First from Imber Dea
Came whispers how a sage had landed late,
And how when Nathi fain had barred his way,
Nathi that spurned Palladius from the land,
That sage with levelled eyes, and kingly front
Had from his presence driven him with a ban
Cur-like and craven; how on bended knee
Sinell believed, the royal man well-loved
Descending from the judgment-seat with joy:
And how when fishers spurned his brethren’s quest
For needful food, that sage had raised his rod,
And all the silver harvest of blue streams
Lay black in nets and sand.  His wrinkled brow
Wrinkling yet more, thus Milcho answer made:
“Deceived are those that will to be deceived:
This knave has heard of gold in river-beds,
And comes a deft sand-groper; let him come!
He’ll toil ten years ere gold enough he finds
To make a crooked torque.”

                              From Tara next
The news: “Laeghaire, the King, sits close in cloud
Of sullen thought, or storms from court to court,
Because the chiefest of the Druid race
Locru, and Luchat prophesied long since
That one day from the sea a Priest would come
With Doctrine and a Rite, and dash to earth
Idols, and hurl great monarchs from their thrones;
And lo!  At Imber Boindi late there stept
A priest from roaring waves with Creed and Rite,
And men before him bow.”  Then Milcho spake:
“Not flesh enough from thy strong bones, Laeghaire,
These Druids, ravens of the woods, have plucked,
But they must pluck thine eyes!  Ah priestly race,
I loathe ye!  ’Twixt the people and their King
Ever ye rub a sore!”  Last came a voice:
“This day in Eire thy saying is fulfilled,
Conn of the ‘Hundred Battles,’ from thy throne
Leaping long since, and crying, ‘O’er the sea
The Prophet cometh, princes in his train,
Bearing for regal sceptres bended staffs,
Which from the land’s high places, cliff and peak,
Shall drag the fair flowers down!’”  Scoffing he heard:
“Conn of the ‘Hundred Battles!’  Had he sent
His hundred thousand kernes to yonder steep
And rolled its boulders down, and built a mole
To fence my laden ships from spring-tide surge,
Far kinglier pattern had he shown, and given
More solace to the land.”

                              He rose and turned
With sideway leer; and printing with vague step
Irregular the shining sands, on strode
Toward his cold home, alone; and saw by chance
A little bird light-perched, that, being sick,
Plucked from the fissured sea-cliff grains of sand;
And, noting, said, “O bird, when beak of thine
From base to crown hath gorged this huge sea-wall,
Then shall that man of Creed and Rite make null
The strong rock of my will!”  Thus Milcho spake,
Feigning the peace not his.

                              Next day it chanced
Women he heard in converse.  Thus the first:
“If true the news, good speed for him, my boy!
Poor slaves by Milcho scourged on earth shall wear
In heaven a monarch’s crown!  Good speed for her
His little sister, not reserved like us
To bend beneath these loads.”  To whom her mate:
“Doubt not the Prophet’s tidings!  Not in vain
The Power Unknown hath shaped us!  Come He must,
Or send, and help His people on their way.
Good is He, or He ne’er had made these babes!”
They passed, and Milcho said, “Through hate of me
All men believe!”  And straightway Milcho’s face
Grew bleaker than that crab-tree stem forlorn
That hid him, wanner than that sea-sand wet
That whitened round his foot down-pressed.

                              Time passed.
One morn in bitter mockery Milcho mused:
“What better laughter than when thief from thief
Pilfers the pilfered goods?  Our Druid thief
Two thousand years hath milked and shorn this land;
Now comes the thief outlandish that with him
Would share milk-pail and fleece!  O Bacrach old,
To hear thee shout ‘Impostor!’”  Straight he went
To Bacrach’s cell hid in a skirt wind-shav’n
Of low-grown wood, and met, departing thence,
Three sailors sea-tanned from a ship late-beached.
Within a corner huddled, on the floor,
The Druid sat, cowering, and cold, and mazed:
Sudden he rose, and cried, by conquering joy
Clothed as with youth restored: “The God Unknown,
That God who made the earth, hath walked the earth!
This hour His Prophet treads the isle!  Three men
Have seen him; and their speech is true.  To them
That Prophet spake: ‘Four hundred years ago,
Sinless God’s Son on earth for sinners died:
Black grew the world, and graves gave up their dead.’
Thus spake the Seer.  Four hundred years ago!
Mark well the time!  Of Ulster’s Druid race
What man but yearly, those four hundred years,
Trembled that tale recounting which with this
Tallies as footprint with the foot of man?
Four hundred years ago - that self-same day -
Connor, the son of Nessa, Ulster’s King,
Sat throned, and judged his people.  As he sat,
Under clear skies, behold, o’er all the earth
Swept a great shadow from the windless east;
And darkness hung upon the air three hours;
Dead fell the birds, and beasts astonied fled.
Then to his Chief of Druids, Connor spake
Whispering; and he, his oracles explored,
Shivering made answer, ‘From a land accursed,
O King, that shadow sweeps; therein, this hour,
By sinful men sinless God’s Son is slain.’
Then Ulster’s king, down-dashing sceptre and crown,
Rose, clamouring, ‘Sinless! shall the sinless die?’
And madness fell on him; and down that steep
He rushed whereon the Emanian Palace stood,
And reached the grove, Lambraidhè, with two swords,
The sword of battle, and the sword of state,
And hewed and hewed, crying, ‘Were I but there
Thus they should fall who slay that Sinless One;’
And in that madness died.  Old Erin’s sons
Beheld this thing; nor ever in the land
Hath ceased the rumour, nor the tear for him
Who, wroth at justice trampled, martyr died.
And now we know that not for any dream
He died, but for the truth: and whensoe’er
The Prophet of that Son of God who died
Sinless for sinners, standeth in this place,
I, Bacrach, oldest Druid in this Isle,
Will rise the first, and kiss his vesture’s hem.”

He spake; and Milcho heard, and without speech
Departed from that house.

                              A later day
When the wild March sunset, gone almost ere come,
By glacial shower was hustled out of life,
Under a blighted ash tree, near his house,
Thus mused the man: “Believe, or Disbelieve!
The will does both; Then idiot who would be
For profitless belief to sell himself?
Yet disbelief not less might work our bane!
For, I remember, once a sickly slave
Ill shepherded my flock: I spake him plain;
‘When next, through fault of thine, the midnight wolf
Worries my sheep, on yonder tree you hang:’
The blear-eyed idiot looked into my face,
And smiled his disbelief.  On that day week
Two lambs lay dead.  I hanged him on a tree.
What tree? this tree!  Why, this is passing strange!
For, three nights since, I saw him in a dream:
Weakling as wont he stood beside my bed,
And, clutching at his wrenched and livid throat,
Spake thus, ‘Belief is safest.’”

                              Ceased the hail
To rattle on the ever barren boughs,
And friendlier sound was heard.  Beside his door
Wayworn the messengers of Patrick stood,
And showed the gifts, and held his missive forth.
Then learned that lost one all the truth.  That sage
Confessed by miracles, that prophet vouched
By warnings old, that seer by words of might
Subduing all things to himself - that priest,
None other was than the uncomplaining boy
Five years his slave and swineherd!  In him rage
Burst forth, with fear commixed, as when a beast
Strains in the toils.  “Can I alone stand firm?”
He mused; and next, “Shall I, in mine old age,
Byword become - the vassal of my slave?
Shall I not rather drive him from my door
With wolf hounds and a curse?”  As thus he stood
He marked the gifts, and bade men bare them in,
And homeward signed the messengers unfed.

But Milcho slept not all that night for thought,
And, forth ere sunrise issuing, paced a moor
Stone-roughened like the graveyard of dead hosts,
Till noontide.  Sudden then he stopt, and thus
Discoursed within: “A plot from first to last,
The fraudulent bondage, flight, and late return;
For now I mind me of a foolish dream
Chance-sent, yet drawn by him awry.  One night
Methought that boy from far hills drenched in rain
Dashed through my halls, all fire.  From hands and head,
From hair and mouth, forth rushed a flaming fire
White, like white light, and still that mighty flame
Into itself took all.  With hands outstretched
I spurned it.  On my cradled daughters twain
It turned, and they were ashes.  Then in burst
The south wind through the portals of the house,
Tempest rose-sweet, and blew those ashes forth
Wide as the realm.  At dawn I sought the knave;
He glossed my vision thus: ‘That fire is Faith -
Faith in the God Triune, the God made Man,
Sole light wherein I walk, and walking burn;
And they that walk with me shall burn like me
By Faith.  But thou that radiance wilt repel,
Housed through ill-will, in Error’s endless night.
Not less thy little daughters shall believe
With glory and great joy; and, when they die,
Report of them, like ashes blown abroad,
Shall light far lands, and health to men of Faith
Stream from their dust.’  I drave the impostor forth:
Perjured ere long he fled, and now returns
To reap a harvest from his master’s dream” -
Thus mused he, while black shadow swept the moor.
  So day by day darker was Milcho’s heart,
Till, with the endless brooding on one thought,
Began a little flaw within that brain
Whose strength was still his boast.  Was no friend nigh?
Alas! what friend had he?  All men he scorned;
Knew truly none.  In each, the best and sweetest
Near him had ever pined, like stunted growth
Dwarfed by some glacier nigh.  The fifth day dawned:
And inly thus he muttered, darkly pale:
“Five days; in three the messengers returned:
In three - in two - the Accursèd will be here,
Or blacken yonder Sleemish with his crew
Descending.  Then those idiots, kerne and slave -
The mighty flame into itself takes all -
Full swarm will fly to meet him!  Fool! fool! fool!
The man hath snared me with those gifts he sent;
Else had I barred the mountains: now ’twere late,
My people in revolt.  Whole weeks his horde
Will throng my courts, demanding board and bed,
With hosts by Dichu sent to flout my pang,
And sorer make my charge.  My granaries sacked,
My larder lean as ship six months ice-bound,
The man I hate will rise, and open shake
The invincible banner of his mad new Faith,
Till all that hear him shout, like winds or waves,
Belief; and I be left sole recusant;
Or else perhaps that Fury who prevails
At times o’er knee-joints of reluctant men,
By magic imped, may crumble into dust
By force my disbelief.”

                              He raised his head,
And lo, before him lay the sea far ebbed
Sad with a sunset all but gone: the reeds
Sighed in the wind, and sighed a sweeter voice
Oft heard in childhood - now the last time heard:
“Believe!” it whispered.  Vain the voice!  That hour,
Stirred from the abyss, the sins of all his life
Around him rose like night - not one, but all -
That earliest sin which, like a dagger, pierced
His mother’s heart; that worst, when summer drouth
Parched the brown vales, and infants thirsting died,
While from full pail he gorged his swine with milk
And flung the rest away.  Sin-walled he stood:
God’s Angels could not pierce that cincture dread,
Nor he look through it.  Yet he dreamed he saw:
His life he saw; its labours, and its gains
Hard won, long-waited, wonder of his foes;
The manifold conquests of a Will oft tried;
Victory, Defeat, Retrieval; last, that scene
Around him spread: the wan sea and grey rocks;
And he was ’ware that on that self-same ledge
He, Milcho, thirty years gone by, had stood,
While pirates pushed to sea, leaving forlorn
On that wild shore a scared and weeping boy,
(His price two yearling kids and half a sheep)
Thenceforth his slave.

                              Not sole he mused that hour.
The Demon of his House beside him stood
Upon that iron coast, and whispered thus:
“Masterful man art thou for wit and strength;
Yet girl-like standst thou brooding!  Weave a snare!
He comes for gold, this prophet.  All thou hast
Heap in thy house; then fire it!  In far lands
Build thee new fortunes.  Frustrate thus shall he
Stare but on stones, his destined vassal scaped.”

So fell the whisper; and as one who hears
And does, the stiff-necked man obsequious bent
His strong will to a stronger, and returned,
And gave command to heap within his house
His stored up wealth - yea, all things that were his -
Borne from his ships and granaries.  It was done.
Then filled he his huge hall with resinous beams
Seasoned for far sea-voyage, and the ribs
Of ocean-sundering vessels deep in sea;
Which ended, to his topmost tower he clomb,
And therein sat two days, with face to south,
Clutching a brand; and oft through clenched teeth hissed,
Hissed long, “Because I will to disbelieve.”
  But ere the second sunset two brief hours,
Where comfortless leaned forth that western ridge
Long patched with whiteness by half melted snows,
There crept a gradual shadow.  Soon the man
Discerned its import.  There they hung - he saw them -
That company detested; hung as when
Storm-boding cloud on mountain hangs half way
Scarce moving, and in fear the shepherd cries,
“Would that the worse were come!”  So dread to him
Those Heralds of fair Peace!  He gazed upon them
With blood-shot eyes; a moment passed: he stood
Sole in his never festal hall, and flung
His lighted brand into that pile far forth,
And smiled that smile men feared to see, and turned,
And issuing faced the circle of his serfs
That wondering gathered round in thickening mass,
Eyeing that unloved House.

                              His place he chose
Beside that blighted ash, fronting those towers
Palled with red smoke, and muttered low, “So be it!
Worse to be vassal to the man I hate,”
With hueless lips.  His whole white face that hour
Was scorched; and blistered was the dead tree’s bark;
Yet there he stood; and in that fiery light
His life, no more triumphant, passed once more
In underthought before him, while on spread
The swift, contagious madness of that fire,
And muttered thus, not knowing it, the man,
“The mighty flame into itself takes all,”
Mechanic iteration.  Not alone
Stood he that hour.  The Demon of his House
By him once more and closer than of old,
Stood, whispering thus, “Thy game is now played out;
Henceforth a byword art thou - rich in youth -
Self-beggared in old age.”  And as the wind
Of that shrill whisper cut his listening soul,
The blazing roof fell in on all his wealth,
Hard-won, long-waited, wonder of his foes;
And, loud as laughter from ten thousand fiends,
Up rushed the fire.  With arms outstretched he stood;
Stood firm; then forward with a wild beast’s cry
He dashed himself into that terrible flame,
And vanished as a leaf.

                              Upon a spur
Of Sleemish, eastward on its northern slope,
Stood Patrick and his brethren, travel-worn,
When distant o’er the brown and billowy moor
Rose the white smoke, that changed ere long to flame,
From site unknown; for by the seaward crest
That keep lay hidden.  Hands to forehead raised,
Wondering they watched it.  One to other spake:
“The huge Dalriad forest is afire
Ere melted are the winter’s snows!”  Another,
“In vengeance o’er the ocean Creithe or Pict,
Favoured by magic, or by mist, have crossed,
And fired old Milcho’s ships.”  But Patrick leaned
Upon his crosier, pale as the ashes wan
Left by a burned out city.  Long he stood
Silent, till, sudden, fiercelier soared the flame
Reddening the edges of a cloud low hung;
And, after pause, vibration slow and stern
Troubling the burthened bosom of the air,
Upon a long surge of the northern wind
Came up - a murmur as of wintry seas
Far borne at night.  All heard that sound; all felt it;
One only know its import.  Patrick turned;
“The deed is done: the man I would have saved
Is dead, because he willed to disbelieve.”

Yet Patrick grieved for Milcho, nor that hour
Passed further north.  Three days on Sleemish hill
He dwelt in prayer.  To Tara’s royal halls
Then turned he, and subdued the royal house
And host to Christ, save Erin’s king, Laeghaire.
But Milcho’s daughters twain to Christ were born
In baptism, and each Emeria named:
Like rose-trees in the garden of the Lord
Grew they and flourished.  Dying young, one grave
Received them at Cluanbrain.  Healing thence
To many from their relics passed; to more
The spirit’s happier healing, Love and Faith.

SAINT PATRICK AT TARA.

The King is wroth with a greater wrath
  Than the wrath of Nial or the wrath of Conn!
From his heart to his brow the blood makes path,
  And hangs there, a red cloud, beneath his crown.

Is there any who knows not, from south to north,
  That Laeghaire to-morrow his birthday keeps?
No fire may be lit upon hill or hearth
Till the King’s strong fire in its kingly mirth
  Up rushes from Tara’s palace steeps!

Yet Patrick has lighted his Paschal fire
  At Slane - it is holy Saturday -
And blessed his font ’mid the chaunting choir!
  From hill to hill the flame makes way;
While the king looks on it his eyes with ire
  Flash red, like Mars, under tresses grey.

The chiefs and the captains with drawn swords rose:
  To avenge their Lord and the Realm they swore;
  The Druids rose and their garments tore;
“The strangers to us and our Gods are foes!”
Then the king to Patrick a herald sent,
  Who spake, ‘Come up at noon and show
Who lit thy fire and with what intent:
  These things the great king Laeghaire would know.”

But Laeghaire had hid twelve men by the way,
Who swore by the sun the Saint to slay.

When the waters of Boyne began to bask
  And fields to flash in the rising sun
The Apostle Evangelist kept his Pasch,
  And Erin her grace baptismal won:
Her birthday it was: his font the rock,
He blessed the land, and he blessed his flock.

Then forth to Tara he fared full lowly:
  The Staff of Jesus was in his hand:
Twelve priests paced after him chaunting slowly,
  Printing their steps on the dewy land.
It was the Resurrection morn;
The lark sang loud o’er the springing corn;
The dove was heard, and the hunter’s horn.

The murderers twelve stood by on the way;
Yet they saw nought save the lambs at play.

A trouble lurked in the monarch’s eye
When the guest he counted for dead drew nigh:
He sat in state at his palace gate;
  His chiefs and nobles were ranged around;
The Druids like ravens smelt some far fate;
  Their eyes were gloomily bent on the ground.
Then spake Laeghaire: “He comes - beware!
Let none salute him, or rise from his chair!”

Like some still vision men see by night,
  Mitred, with eyes of serene command,
Saint Patrick moved onward in ghostly white:
  The Staff of Jesus was in his hand;
Twelve priests paced after him unafraid,
And the boy, Benignus, more like a maid;
Like a maid just wedded he walked and smiled,
To Christ new plighted, that priestly child.

They entered the circle; their anthem ceased;
  The Druids their eyes bent earthward still:
On Patrick’s brow the glory increased
  As a sunrise brightening some sea-beat hill.
The warriors sat silent: strange awe they felt:
The chief bard, Dubtach, rose and knelt:

Then Patrick discoursed of the things to be
When time gives way to eternity,
Of kingdoms that fall, which are dreams not things,
And the Kingdom built by the King of kings.
Of Him he spake who reigns from the Cross;
Of the death which is life, and the life which is loss;
How all things were made by the Infant Lord,
And the small hand the Magian kings adored.
His voice sounded on like a throbbing flood
That swells all night from some far-off wood,
And when it ended - that wondrous strain -
Invisible myriads breathed “Amen!”

While he spake, men say that the refluent tide
  On the shore by Colpa ceased to sink:
They say that the white stag by Mulla’s side
  O’er the green marge bending forbore to drink:
That the Brandon eagle forgat to soar;
  That no leaf stirred in the wood by Lee:
Such stupor hung the island o’er,
  For none might guess what the end would be.

Then whispered the king to a chief close by,
“It were better for me to believe than die!”

Yet the king believed not; but ordinance gave
  That whoso would might believe that word:
So the meek believed, and the wise, and brave,
  And Mary’s Son as their God adored.
And the Druids, because they could answer nought,
Bowed down to the Faith the stranger brought.
That day on Erin God poured His Spirit:
Yet none like the chief of the bards had merit,
Dubtach!  He rose and believed the first,
Ere the great light yet on the rest had burst.

SAINT PATRICK AND THE TWO PRINCESSES.

FEDELM “THE RED ROSE,” AND ETHNA “THE FAIR.”

Like two sister fawns that leap,
  Borne, as though on viewless wings,
Down bosky glade and ferny steep
  To quench their thirst at silver springs,
From Cruachan palace through gorse and heather,
Raced the Royal Maids together.
Since childhood thus the twain had rushed
  Each morn to Clebach’s fountain-cell
Ere earliest dawn the East had flushed
  To bathe them in its well:
Each morn with joy their young hearts tingled;
  Each morn as, conquering cloud or mist,
The first beam with the wavelet mingled,
  Mouth to mouth they kissed!

They stand by the fount with their unlooped hair -
A hand each raises - what see they there?
A white Form seated on Clebach stone;
  A kinglike presence: the monks stood nigh:
Fronting the dawn he sat alone;
  On the star of morning he fixed his eye:
That crozier he grasped shone bright; but brighter
The sunrise flashed from Saint Patrick’s mitre!
They gazed without fear.  To a kingdom dear
  From the day of their birth those Maids had been;
Of wrong they had heard; but it came not near;
  They hoped they were dear to the Power unseen.
They knelt when that Vision of Peace they saw;
Knelt, not in fear, but in loving awe:
The “Red Rose” bloomed like that East afar;
The “Fair One” shone like that morning star.

Then Patrick rose: no word he said,
  But thrice he made the sacred Sign:
At the first, men say that the demons fled;
  At the third flocked round them the Powers divine
Unseen.  Like children devout and good,
Hands crossed on their bosoms, the maidens stood.

“Blessed and holy!  This land is Eire:
Whence come ye to her, and the king our sire?”

“We come from a Kingdom far off yet near
Which the wise love well, and the wicked fear:
We come with blessing and come with ban,
We come from the Kingdom of God with man.”

“Whose is that Kingdom?  And say, therein
  Are the chiefs all brave, and the maids all fair?
Is it clean from reptiles, and that thing, sin?
  Is it like this kingdom of King Laeghaire?”

“The chiefs of that kingdom wage war on wrong,
And the clash of their swords is sweet as song;
Fair are the maids, and so pure from taint
The flash of their eyes turns sinner to saint;
There reptile is none, nor the ravening beast;
There light has no shadow, no end the feast.”

“But say, at that feast hath the poor man place?
  Is reverence there for the old head hoar?
For the cripple that never might join the race?
  For the maimed that fought, and can fight no more?”

“Reverence is there for the poor and meek;
And the great King kisses the worn, pale cheek;
And the King’s Son waits on the pilgrim guest;
And the Queen takes the little blind child to her breast:
There with a crown is the just man crowned;
But the false and the vengeful are branded and bound
In knots of serpents, and flung without pity
From the bastions and walls of the saintly City.”

Then the eyes of the Maidens grew dark, as though
  That judgment of God had before them passed:
And the two sweet faces grew dim with woe;
  But the rose and the radiance returned at last.

“Are gardens there?  Are there streams like ours?
  Is God white-headed, or youthful and strong?
Hang there the rainbows o’er happy bowers?
  Are there sun and moon and the thrush’s song?”

“They have gardens there without noise or strife,
And there is the Tree of immortal Life:
Four rivers circle that blissful bound;
And Spirits float o’er it, and Spirits go round:
There, set in the midst, is the golden throne;
And the Maker of all things sits thereon:
A rainbow o’er-hangs him; and lo! therein
The beams are His Holy Ones washed from sin.”

As he spake, the hearts of the Maids beat time
  To music in heaven of peace and love;
And the deeper sense of that lore sublime
  Came out from within them, and down from above;
By degrees came down; by degrees came out:
Who loveth, and hopeth, not long shall doubt.

“Who is your God?  Is love on His brow?
Oh how shall we love Him and find Him?  How?”
The pure cheek flamed like the dawn-touched dew:
There was silence: then Patrick began anew.
The princes who ride in your father’s train
Have courted your love, but sued in vain; -
Look up, O Maidens; make answer free:
What boon desire you, and what would you be?”

“Pure we would be as yon wreath of foam,
  Or the ripple which now yon sunbeams smite:
And joy we would have, and a songful home;
  And one to rule us, and Love’s delight.”

“In love God fashioned whatever is,
  The hills, and the seas, and the skiey fires;
For love He made them, and endless blis
  Sustains, enkindles, uplifts, inspires:
That God is Father, and Son, and Spirit;
And the true and spotless His peace inherit:
And God made man, with his great sad heart,
That hungers when held from God apart.
Your sire is a King on earth: but I
Would mate you to One who is Lord on high:
There bride is maid: and her joy shall stand,
For the King’s Son hath laid on her head His hand.”
As he spake, the eyes of that lovely twain
  Grew large with a tearful but glorious light,
Like skies of summer late cleared by rain,
  When the full-orbed moon will be soon in sight.

“That Son of the King - is He fairest of men?
  That mate whom He crowns - is she bright and blest?
Does she chase the red deer at His side through the glen?
  Does she charm Him with song to His noontide rest?”

“That King’s Son strove in a long, long war:
His people He freed; yet they wounded Him sore;
And still in His hands, and His feet, and His side,
The scars of His sorrow are ’graved, deep-dyed.”

Then the breasts of the Maidens began to heave
  Like harbour waves when beyond the bar
The great waves gather, and wet winds grieve,
  And the roll of the tempest is heard afar.

“We will kiss, we will kiss those bleeding feet;
  On the bleeding hands our tears shall fall;
And whatever on earth is dear or sweet,
  For that wounded heart we renounce them all.

“Show us the way to His palace-gate:” -
“That way is thorny, and steep, and straight;
By none can His palace-gate be seen,
Save those who have washed in the waters clean.”

They knelt; on their heads the wave he poured
Thrice in the name of the Triune Lord:
And he signed their brows with the Sign adored.
On Fedelm the “Red Rose,” on Ethna “The Fair,”
God’s dew shone bright in that morning air:
Some say that Saint Agnes, ’twixt sister and sister,
As the Cross touched each, bent over and kissed her.

Then sang God’s new-born Creatures, “Behold!
  We see God’s City from heaven draw nigh:
But we thirst for the fountains divine and cold:
  We must see the great King’s Son, or die!
Come, Thou that com’st!  Our wish is this,
  That the body might die, and the soul, set free,
Swell out, like an infant’s lips, to the kiss
  Of the Lover who filleth infinity!”

“The City of God, by the water’s grace,
Ye see: alone, they behold His Face,
Who have washed in the baths of Death their eyes,
And tasted His Eucharist Sacrifice.”

“Give us the Sacrifice!”  Each bright head
  Bent toward it as sunflowers bend to the sun:
They ate; and the blood from the warm cheek fled:
  The exile was over: the home was won:
A starry darkness o’erflowed their brain:
  Far waters beat on some heavenly shore:
Like the dying away of a low, sweet strain,
  The young life ebbed, and they breathed no more:
In death they smiled, as though on the breast
Of the Mother Maid they had found their rest.

The rumour spread: beside the bier
  The King stood mute, and his chiefs and court:
The Druids dark-robed drew surlily near,
  And the Bards storm-hearted, and humbler sort:
The “Staff of Jesus” Saint Patrick raised:
  Angelic anthems above them swept:
There were that muttered; there were that praised:
  But none who looked on that marvel wept.

For they lay on one bed, like Brides new-wed,
  By Clebach well; and, the dirge days over,
On their smiling faces a veil was spread,
  And a green mound raised that bed to cover.
Such were the ways of those ancient days -
  To Patrick for aye that grave was given;
And above it he built a church in their praise;
  For in them had Eire been spoused to heaven.

SAINT PATRICK AND THE CHILDREN OF FOCHLUT WOOD.

ARGUMENT.

Saint Patrick makes way into Fochlut wood by the sea, the
  oldest of Erin’s forests, whence there had been borne
  unto him, then in a distant land, the Children’s Wail
  from Erin.  He meets there two young Virgins, who sing
  a dirge of man’s sorrowful condition.  Afterwards they
  lead him to the fortress of the king, their father.
  There are sung two songs, a song of Vengeance and a
  song of Lament; which ended, Saint Patrick makes
  proclamation of the Advent and of the Resurrection.
  The king and all his chiefs believe with full
  contentment.

One day as Patrick sat upon a stone
Judging his people, Pagan babes flocked round,
All light and laughter, angel-like of mien,
Sueing for bread.  He gave it, and they ate:
Then said he, “Kneel;” and taught them prayer: but lo!
Sudden the stag hounds’ music dinned the wind;
They heard; they sprang; they chased it.  Patrick spake;
“It was the cry of children that I heard
Borne from the black wood o’er the midnight seas:
Where are those children?  What avails though Kings
Have bowed before my Gospel, and in awe
Nations knelt low, unless I set mine eyes
On Fochlut Wood?”  Thus speaking, he arose,
And, journeying with the brethren toward the West,
Fronted the confine of that forest old.

Then entered they that darkness; and the wood
Closed as a cavern round them.  O’er its roof
Leaned roof of cloud, and hissing ran the wind,
And moaned the trunks for centuries hollowed out
Yet stalwart still.  There, rooted in the rock,
Stood the huge growths, by us unnamed, that frowned
Perhaps on Partholan, the parricide,
When that first Pagan settler fugitive
Landed, a man foredoomed.  Between the stems
The ravening beast now glared, now fled.  Red leaves,
The last year’s phantoms, rattled here and there.
The oldest wood that ever grew in Eire
Was Fochlut Wood, and gloomiest.  Spirits of Ill
Made it their palace, and its labyrinths sowed
With poisons.  Many a cave, with horrors thronged
Within it yawned, and many a chasm unseen
Waited the unwary treader.  Cry of wolf
Pierced the cold air, and gibbering ghosts were heard;
And o’er the black marsh passed those wandering lights
That lure lost feet.  A thousand pathways wound
From gloom to gloom.  One only led to light:
That path was sharp with flints.

                              Then Patrick mused,
“O life of man, how dark a wood art thou!
Erring how many track thee till Despair,
Sad host, receives them in his crypt-like porch
At nightfall.”  Mute he paced.  The brethren feared;
And fearing, knelt to God.  Made strong by prayer
Westward once more they trod that dark, sharp way
Till deeper gloom announced the night, then slept
Guarded by angels.  But the Saint all night
Watched, strong in prayer.  The second day still on
They fared, like mariners o’er strange seas borne,
That keep in mist their soundings when the rocks
Vex the dark strait, and breakers roar unseen.
At last Benignus cried, “To God be praise!
He sends us better omens.  See! the moss
Brightens the crag!”  Ere long another spake:
“The worst is past!  This freshness in the air
Wafts us a welcome from the great salt sea;
Fair spreads the fern: green buds are on the spray,
And violets throng the grass.”

                              A few steps more
Brought them to where, with peaceful gleam, there spread
A forest pool that mirrored yew trees twain
With beads like blood-drops hung.  A sunset flash
Kindled a glory in the osiers brown
Encircling that still water.  From the reeds
A sable bird, gold-circled, slowly rose;
But when the towering tree-tops he outsoared,
Eastward a great wind swept him as a leaf.
Serenely as he rose a music soft
Swelled from afar; but, as that storm o’ertook him,
The music changed to one on-rushing note
O’ertaken by a second; both, ere long,
Blended in wail unending.  Patrick’s brow,
Listening that wail, was altered, and he spake:
“These were the Voices that I heard when stood
By night beside me in that southern land
God’s angel, girt for speed.  Letters he bare
Unnumbered, full of woes.  He gave me one,
Inscribed, ‘The Wailing of the Irish Race;’
And as I read that legend on mine ear
Forth from a mighty wood on Erin’s coast
There rang the cry of children, ‘Walk once more
Among us; bring us help!’”  Thus Patrick spake:
Then towards that wailing paced with forward head.

Ere long they came to where a river broad,
Swiftly amid the dense trees winding, brimmed
The flower-enamelled marge, and onward bore
Green branches ’mid its eddies.  On the bank
Two virgins stood.  Whiter than earliest streak
Of matin pearl dividing dusky clouds
Their raiment; and, as oft in silent woods
White beds of wind-flower lean along the earth-breeze,
So on the river-breeze that raiment wan
Shivered, back blown.  Slender they stood and tall,
Their brows with violets bound; while shone, beneath,
The dark blue of their never-tearless eyes.
Then Patrick, “For the sake of Him who lays
His blessing on the mourners, O ye maids,
Reveal to me your grief - if yours late sent,
Or sped in careless childhood.”  And the maids:
“Happy whose careless childhood ’scaped the wound:”
Then she that seemed the saddest added thus:
“Stranger! this forest is no roof of joy,
Nor we the only mourners; neither fall
Bitterer the widow’s nor the orphan’s tears
Now than of old; nor sharper than long since
That loss which maketh maiden widowhood.
In childhood first our sorrow came.  One eve
Within our foster-parents’ low-roofed house
The winter sunset from our bed had waned:
I slept, and sleeping dreamed.  Beside the bed
There stood a lovely Lady crowned with stars;
A sword went through her heart.  Down from that sword
Blood trickled on the bed, and on the ground.
Sorely I wept.  The Lady spake: ‘My child,
Weep not for me, but for thy country weep;
Her wound is deeper far than mine.  Cry loud!
The cry of grief is Prayer.’  I woke, all tears;
And lo! my little sister, stiff and cold,
Sat with wide eyes upon the bed upright:
That starry Lady with the bleeding heart
She, too, had seen, and heard her.  Clamour vast
Rang out; and all the wall was fiery red;
And flame was on the sea.  A hostile clan
Landing in mist, had fired our ships and town,
Our clansmen absent on a foray far,
And stricken many an old man, many a boy
To bondage dragged.  Oh night with blood redeemed!
Upon the third day o’er the green waves rushed
The vengeance winged, with axe and torch, to quit
Wrong with new wrong, and many a time since then.
That night sad women on the sea sands toiled,
Drawing from wreck and ruin, beam or plank
To shield their babes.  Our foster-parents slain,
Unheeded we, the children of the chief,
Roamed the great forest.  There we told our dream
To children likewise orphaned.  Sudden fear
Smote them as though themselves had dreamed that dream,
And back from them redoubled upon us;
Until at last from us and them rang out -
The dark wood heard it, and the midnight sea -
A great and bitter cry.”

                              “That cry went up,
O children, to the heart of God; and He
Down sent it, pitying, to a far-off land,
And on into my heart.  By that first pang
Which left the eternal pallor in your cheeks,
O maids, I pray you, sing once more that song
Ye sang but late.  I heard its long last note:
Fain would I hear the song that such death died.”

They sang: not scathless those that sing such song!
Grief, their instructress, of the Muses chief
To hearts by grief unvanquished, to their hearts
Had taught a melody that neither spared
Singer nor listener.  Pale when they began,
Paler it left them.  He not less was pale
Who, out of trance awaking, thanked them thus:
“Now know I of that sorrow in you fixed;
What, and how great it is, and bless that Power
Who called me forth from nothing for your sakes,
And sent me to this wood.  Maidens, lead on!
A chieftain’s daughters ye; and he, your sire,
And with him she who gave you your sweet looks
(Sadder perchance than you in songless age)
They, too, must hear my tidings.  Once a Prince
Went solitary from His golden throne,
Tracking the illimitable wastes, to find
One wildered sheep, the meanest of the flock,
And on His shoulders bore it to that House
Where dwelt His Sire.  ‘Good Shepherd’ was His Name.
My tidings these: heralds are we, footsore,
That bring the heart-sore comfort.”

                              On they paced,
On by the rushing river without words.
Beside the elder sister Patrick walked,
Benignus by the younger.  Fair her face;
Majestic his, though young.  Her looks were sad
And awe-struck; his, fulfilled with secret joy,
Sent forth a gleam as when a morn-touched bay
Through ambush shines of woodlands.  Soon they stood
Where sea and river met, and trod a path
Wet with salt spray, and drank the clement breeze,
And saw the quivering of the green gold wave,
And, far beyond, that fierce aggressor’s bourn,
Fair haunt for savage race, a purple ridge
By rainy sunbeam gemmed from glen to glen,
Dim waste of wandering lights.  The sun, half risen,
Lay half sea-couched.  A neighbouring height sent forth
Welcome of baying hounds; and, close at hand,
They reached the chieftain’s keep.

                              A white-haired man
And long since blind, there sat he in his hall,
Untamed by age.  At times a fiery gleam
Flashed from his sightless eyes; and oft the red
Burned on his forehead, while with splenetic speech
Stirred by ill news or memory stung, he banned
Foes and false friend.  Pleased by his daughters’ tale,
At once he stretched his huge yet aimless hands
In welcome towards his guests.  Beside him stood
His mate of forty years by that strong arm
From countless suitors won.  Pensive her face:
With parted youth the confidence of youth
Had left her.  Beauty, too, though with remorse,
Its seat had half relinquished on a cheek
Long time its boast, and on that willowy form,
So yielding now, where once in strength upsoared
The queenly presence.  Tenderest grace not less
Haunted her life’s dim twilight - meekness, love -
That humble love, all-giving, that seeks nought,
Self-reverent calm, and modesty in age.
She turned an anxious eye on him she loved;
And, bending, kissed at times that wrinkled hand,
By years and sorrows made his wife far more
Than in her nuptial bloom.  These two had lost
Five sons, their hope, in war.

                              That eve it chanced
High feast was holden in the chieftain’s tower
To solemnise his birthday.  In they flocked,
Each after each, the warriors of the clan,
Not without pomp heraldic and fair state
Barbaric, yet beseeming.  Unto each
Seat was assigned for deeds or lineage old,
And to the chiefs allied.  Where each had place
Above him waved his banner.  Not for this
Unhonoured were the pilgrim guests.  They sat
Where, fed by pinewood and the seeded cone,
The loud hearth blazed.  Bathed were the wearied feet
By maidens of the place and nurses grey,
And dried in linen fragrant still with flowers
Of years when those old nurses too were fair.
And now the board was spread, and carved the meat,
And jests ran round, and many a tale was told,
Some rude, but none opprobrious.  Banquet done,
Page-led the harper entered, old, and blind:
The noblest ranged his chair, and spread the mat;
The loveliest raised his wine cup, one light hand
Laid on his shoulder, while the golden hair
Commingled with the silver.  “Sing,” they cried,
“The death of Deirdrè; or that desolate sire
That slew his son, unweeting; or that Queen
Who from her palace pacing with fixed eyes
Stared at those heads in dreadful circle ranged,
The heads of traitor-friends that slew her lord
Then mocked the friend they murdered.  Leal and true,
The Bard who wrought that vengeance!”  Thus he sang:

              THE LAY OF THE HEADS.

     The Bard returns to a stricken house:
       What shape is that he rears on high?
     A withe of the Willow, set round with Heads:
       They blot that evening sky.

     A Widow meets him at the gates:
       What fixes thus that Widow’s eye?
     She names the name; but she sees not the man,
       Nor beyond him that reddening sky.

     “Bard of the Brand, thou Foster-Sire
       Of him they slew - their friend - my lord -
     What Head is that - the first - that frowns
       Like a traitor self-abhorred?”

     “Daughter of Orgill wounded sore,
       Thou of the fateful eye serene,
     Fergus is he.  The feast he made
       That snared thy Cuchullene.”

     “What Head is that - the next - half-hid
       In curls full lustrous to behold?
     They mind me of a hand that once
       I saw amid their gold.”

     “’Tis Manadh.  He that by the shore
       Held rule, and named the waves his steeds:
     ’Twas he that struck the stroke accursed -
       Headless this day he bleeds.”

     “What Head is that close by - so still,
       With half-closed lids, and lips that smile?
     Methinks I know their voice: methinks
       His wine they quaffed erewhile!”

     “’Twas he raised high that severed head:
       Thy head he raised, my Foster-Child!
     That was the latest stroke I struck:
       I struck that stroke, and smiled.”

     “What Heads are those - that twain, so like,
       Flushed as with blood by yon red sky?”
     “Each unto each, his Head they rolled;
       Red on that grass they lie.”

     “That paler twain, which face the East?”
       “Laegar is one; the other Hilt;
     Silent they watched the sport! they share
       The doom, that shared the guilt.”

     “Bard of the Vengeance! well thou knew’st
       Blood cries for blood!  O kind, and true,
     How many, kith and kin, have died
       That mocked the man they slew?”

     “O Woman of the fateful eye,
       The untrembling voice, the marble mould,
     Seven hundred men, in house or field,
       For the man they mocked, lie cold.”

     “Their wives, thou Bard? their wives? their wives?
       Far off, or nigh, through Inisfail,
     This hour what are they?  Stand they mute
       Like me; or make their wail?”

     “O Eimer! women weep and smile;
       The young have hope, the young that mourn;
     But I am old; my hope was he:
       He that can ne’er return!

     “O Conal! lay me in his grave:
       Oh! lay me by my husband’s side:
     Oh! lay my lips to his in death;”
       She spake, and, standing, died.

     She fell at last - in death she fell -
       She lay, a black shade, on the ground;
     And all her women o’er her wailed
       Like sea-birds o’er the drowned.

  Thus to the blind chief sang that harper blind,
Hymning the vengeance; and the great hall roared
With wrath of those wild listeners.  Many a heel
Smote the rough stone in scorn of them that died
Not three days past, so seemed it!  Direful hands,
Together dashed, thundered the Avenger’s praise.
At last the tide of that fierce tumult ebbed
O’er shores of silence.  From her lowly seat
Beside her husband’s spake the gentle Queen:
“My daughters, from your childhood ye were still
A voice of music in your father’s house -
Not wrathful music.  Sing that song ye made
Or found long since, and yet in forest sing,
If haply Power Unknown may hear and help.”
She spake, and at her word her daughters sang.

“Lost, lost, all lost!  O tell us what is lost?
Behold, this too is hidden!  Let him speak,
If any knows.  The wounded deer can turn
And see the shaft that quivers in its flank;
The bird looks back upon its broken wing;
But we, the forest children, only know
Our grief is infinite, and hath no name.
What woman-prophet, shrouded in dark veil,
Whispered a Hope sadder than Fear?  Long since,
What Father lost His children in the wood?
Some God?  And can a God forsake?  Perchance
His face is turned to nobler worlds new-made;
Perchance his palace owns some later bride
That hates the dead Queen’s children, and with charm
Prevails that they are exiled from his eyes,
The exile’s winter theirs - the exile’s song.

“Blood, ever blood!  The sword goes raging on
O’er hill and moor; and with it, iron-willed,
Drags on the hand that holds it and the man
To slake its ceaseless thirst for blood of men;
Fire takes the little cot beside the mere,
And leaps upon the upland village: fire
Up clambers to the castle on the crag;
And whom the fire has spared the hunger kills;
And earth draws all into her thousand graves.

“Ah me! the little linnet knows the branch
Whereon to build; the honey-pasturing bee
Knows the wild heath, and how to shape its cell;
Upon the poisonous berry no bird feeds;
So well their mother, Nature, helps her own.
Mothers forsake not; - can a Father hate?
Who knows but that He yearns - that Sire Unseen -
To clasp His children?  All is sweet and sane,
All, all save man!  Sweet is the summer flower,
The day-long sunset of the autumnal woods;
Fair is the winter frost; in spring the heart
Shakes to the bleating lamb.  O then what thing
Might be the life secure of man with man,
The infant’s smile, the mother’s kiss, the love
Of lovers, and the untroubled wedded home?
This might have been man’s lot.  Who sent the woe?
Who formed man first?  Who taught him first the ill way?
One creature, only, sins; and he the highest!

“O Higher than the highest!  Thou Whose hand
Made us - Who shaped’st that hand Thou wilt not clasp,
The eye Thou open’st not, the sealed-up ear!
Be mightier than man’s sin: for lo, how man
Seeks Thee, and ceases not: through noontide cave
And dark air of the dawn-unlighted peak
To Thee how long he strains the weak, worn eye
If haply he might see Thy vesture’s hem
On farthest winds receding!  Yea, how oft
Against the blind and tremulous wall of cliff
Tormented by sea surge, he leans his ear
If haply o’er it name of Thine might creep;
Or bends above the torrent-cloven abyss,
If falling flood might lisp it!  Power unknown!
He hears it not: Thou hear’st his beating heart
That cries to Thee for ever!  From the veil
That shrouds Thee, from the wood, the cloud, the void,
O, by the anguish of all lands evoked,
Look forth!  Though, seeing Thee, man’s race should die,
One moment let him see Thee!  Let him lay
At least his forehead on Thy foot in death!”

  So sang the maidens: but the warriors frowned;
And thus the blind king muttered, “Bootless weed
Is plaint where help is none!”  But wives and maids
And the thick-crowding poor, that many a time
Had wailed on war-fields o’er their brethren slain,
Went down before that strain as river reeds
Before strong wind, went down when o’er them passed
Its last word, “Death;” and grief’s infection spread
From least to first; and weeping filled the hall.
Then on Saint Patrick fell compassion great;
He rose amid that concourse, and with voice
And words now lost, alas, or all but lost,
Such that the chief of sight amerced, beheld
The imagined man before him crowned with light,
Proclaimed that God who hideth not His face,
His people’s King and Father; open flung
The portals of His realm, that inward rolled,
With music of a million singing spheres
Commanded all to enter.  Who was He
Who called the worlds from nought?  His name is Love!
In love He made those worlds.  They have not lost,
The sun his splendour, nor the moon her light:
That miracle survives.  Alas for thee!
Thou better miracle, fair human love,
That splendour shouldst have been of home and hearth,
Now quenched by mortal hate!  Whence come our woes
But from our lusts?  O desecrated law
By God’s own finger on our hearts engraved,
How well art thou avenged!  No dream it was,
That primal greatness, and that primal peace:
Man in God’s image at the first was made,
A God to rule below!

                              He told it all -
Creation, and that Sin which marred its face;
And how the great Creator, creature made,
God - God for man incarnate - died for man:
Dead, with His Cross he thundered on the gates
Of Death’s blind Hades.  Then, with hands outstretched
His Holy Ones that, in their penance prison
From hope in Him had ceased not, to the light
Flashed from His bleeding hands and branded brow
Through darkness soared: they reign with Him in heaven:
Their brethren we, the children of one Sire.
Long time he spake.  The winds forbore their wail;
The woods were hushed.  That wondrous tale complete,
Not sudden fell the silence; for, as when
A huge wave forth from ocean toiling mounts
High-arched, in solid bulk, the beach rock-strewn,
Burying his hoar head under echoing cliffs,
And, after pause, refluent to sea returns
Not all at once is stillness, countless rills
Or devious winding down the steep, or borne
In crystal leap from sea-shelf to sea-well,
And sparry grot replying; gradual thus
With lessening cadence sank that great discourse,
While round him gazed Saint Patrick, now the old
Regarding, now the young, and flung on each
In turn his boundless heart, and gazing longed
As only Apostolic heart can long
To help the helpless.

                              “Fair, O friends, the bourn
We dwell in!  Holy King makes happy land:
Our King is in our midst.  He gave us gifts;
Laws that are Love, the sovereignty of Truth.
What, sirs, ye knew Him not!  But ye by signs
Foresaw His coming, as, when buds are red
Ye say, ‘The spring is nigh us.’  Him, unknown,
Each loved who loved his brother!  Shepherd youths,
Who spread the pasture green beneath your lambs
And freshened it with snow-fed stream and mist?
Who but that Love unseen?  Grey mariners,
Who lulled the rough seas round your midnight nets,
And sent the landward breeze?  Pale sufferers wan,
Rejoice!  His are ye; yea, and His the most!
Have ye not watched the eagle that upstirs
Her nest, then undersails her falling brood
And stays them on her plumes, and bears them up
Till, taught by proof, they learn their unguessed powers
And breast the storm?  Thus God stirs up His people;
Thus proves by pain.  Ye too, O hearths well-loved!
How oft your sin-stained sanctities ye mourned!
Wives! from the cradle reigns the Bethelem Babe!
Maidens! henceforth the Virgin Mother spreads
Her shining veil above you!

                              “Speak aloud,
Chieftains world-famed!  I hear the ancient blood
That leaps against your hearts!  What?  Warriors ye!
Danger your birthright, and your pastime death!
Behold your foes!  They stand before you plain:
Ill passions, base ambitions, falsehood, hate:
Wage war on these!  A King is in your host!
His hands no roses plucked but on the Cross:
He came not hand of man in woman’s tasks
To mesh.  In woman’s hand, in childhood’s hand,
Much more in man’s, He lodged His conquering sword;
Them too His soldiers named, and vowed to war.
Rise, clan of Kings, rise, champions of man’s race,
Heaven’s sun-clad army militant on earth,
One victory gained, the realm decreed is ours.
The bridal bells ring out, for Low with High
Is wed in endless nuptials.  It is past,
The sin, the exile, and the grief.  O man,
Take thou, renewed, thy sister-mate by hand;
Know well thy dignity, and hers: return,
And meet once more Thy Maker, for He walks
Once more within thy garden, in the cool
Of the world’s eve!”

                              The words that Patrick spake
Were words of power, not futile did they fall:
But, probing, healed a sorrowing people’s wound.
Round him they stood, as oft in Grecian days,
Some haughty city sieged, her penitent sons
Thronging green Pnyx or templed Forum hushed
Hung listening on that People’s one true Voice,
The man that ne’er had flattered, ne’er deceived,
Nursed no false hope.  It was the time of Faith;
Open was then man’s ear, open his heart:
Pride spurned not then that chiefest strength of man
The power, by Truth confronted, to believe.
Not savage was that wild, barbaric race:
Spirit was in them.  On their knees they sank,
With foreheads lowly bent; and when they rose
Such sound went forth as when late anchored fleet
Touched by dawn breeze, shakes out its canvas broad
And sweeps into new waters.  Man with man
Clasped hands; and each in each a something saw
Till then unseen.  As though flesh-bound no more,
Their souls had touched.  One Truth, the Spirit’s life,
Lived in them all, a vast and common joy.
And yet as when, that Pentecostal morn,
Each heard the Apostle in his native tongue,
So now, on each, that Truth, that Joy, that Life
Shone forth with beam diverse.  Deep peace to one
Those tidings seemed, a still vale after storm;
To one a sacred rule, steadying the world;
A third exulting saw his youthful hope
Written in stars; a fourth triumphant hailed
The just cause, long oppressed.  Some laughed, some wept:
But she, that aged chieftain’s mournful wife
Clasped to her boding breast his hoary head
Loud clamouring, “Death is dead; and not for long
That dreadful grave can part us.”  Last of all,
He too believed.  That hoary head had shaped
Full many a crafty scheme: - behind them all
Nature held fast her own.

                              O happy night!
Back through the gloom of centuries sin-defaced
With what a saintly radiance thou dost shine!
They slept not, on the loud-resounding shore
In glory roaming.  Many a feud that night
Lay down in holy grave, or, mockery made,
Was quenched in its own shame.  Far shone the fires
Crowning dark hills with gladness: soared the song;
And heralds sped from coast to coast to tell
How He the Lord of all, no Power Unknown
But like a man rejoicing in his house,
Ruled the glad earth.  That demon-haunted wood,
Sad Erin’s saddest region, yet, men say,
Tenderest for all its sadness, rang at last
With hymns of men and angels.  Onward sailed
High o’er the long, unbreaking, azure waves
A mighty moon, full-faced, as though on winds
Of rapture borne.  With earliest red of dawn
Northward once more the wingèd war-ships rushed
Swift as of old to that long hated shore -
Not now with axe and torch.  His Name they bare
Who linked in one the nations.

                              On a cliff
Where Fochlut’s Wood blackened the northern sea
A convent rose.  Therein those sisters twain
Whose cry had summoned Patrick o’er the deep,
Abode, no longer weepers.  Pallid still,
In radiance now their faces shone; and sweet
Their psalms amid the clangour of rough brine.
Ten years in praise to God and good to men
That happy precinct housed them.  In their morn
Grief had for them her great work perfected;
Their eve was bright as childhood.  When the hour
Came for their blissful transit, from their lips
Pealed forth ere death that great triumphant chant
Sung by the Virgin Mother.  Ages passed;
And, year by year, on wintry nights, that song
Alone the sailors heard - a cry of joy.

SAINT PATRICK AND KING LAEGHAIRE.

“Thou son of Calphurn, in peace go forth!
  This hand shall slay them whoe’er shall slay thee!
The carles shall stand to their necks in earth
  Till they die of thirst who mock or stay thee!

“But my father, Nial, who is dead long since,
  Permits not me to believe thy word;
For the servants of Jesus, thy heavenly Prince,
  Once dead, lie flat as in sleep, interred:
But we are as men that through dark floods wade;
We stand in our black graves undismayed;
Our faces are turned to the race abhorred,
And at each hand by us stand spear or sword,
Ready to strike at the last great day,
Ready to trample them back into clay!

“This is my realm, and men call it Eire,
  Wherein I have lived and live in hate
Like Nial before me and Erc his sire,
  Of the race Lagenian, ill-named the Great!”

Thus spake Laeghaire, and his host rushed on,
  A river of blood as yet unshed: -
At noon they fought: and at set of sun
  That king lay captive, that host lay dead!

The Lagenian loosed him, but bade him swear
  He would never demand of them Tribute more:
  So Laeghaire by the dread “God-Elements” swore,
By the moon divine and the earth and air;
He swore by the wind and the broad sunshine
  That circle for ever both land and sea,
By the long-backed rivers, and mighty wine,
  By the cloud far-seeing, by herb and tree,
By the boon spring shower, and by autumn’s fan,
By woman’s breast, and the head of man,
By Night and the noonday Demon he swore
He would claim the Boarian Tribute no more.

But with time wrath waxed; and he brake his faith:
Then the dread “God-Elements” wrought his death;
For the Wind and Sun-Strength by Cassi’s side
Came down and smote on his head that he died.
Death-sick three days on his throne he sate;
Then died, as his father died, great in hate.

They buried their king upon Tara’s hill,
In his grave upright - there stands he still:
Upright there stands he as men that wade
By night through a castle-moat, undismayed;
On his head is the crown, the spear in his hand;
And he looks to the hated Lagenian land.

Such rites in the time of wrath and wrong
  Were Eire’s: baptised, they were hers no longer:
For Patrick had taught her his sweet new song,
  “Though hate is strong, yet love is stronger.”

SAINT PATRICK AND THE IMPOSTOR;

OR, MAC KYLE OF MAN.

Mac Kyle, a child of death, dwells in a forest with other
   men like unto himself, that slay whom they will.
   Saint Patrick coming to that wood, a certain Impostor
   devises how he may be deceived and killed; but God
   smites the Impostor through his own snare, and he
   dies.  Mac Kyle believes, and demanding penance is
   baptised.  Afterwards he preaches in Manann {77} Isle,
   and becomes a great Saint.

In Uladh, near Magh Inis, lived a chief,
Fierce man and fell.  From orphaned childhood he
Through lawless youth to blood-stained middle age
Had rushed as stormy morn to stormier noon,
Working, except that still he spared the poor,
All wrongs with iron will; a child of death.
Thus spake he to his followers, while the woods
Snow-cumbered creaked, their scales of icy mail
Angered by winter winds: “At last he comes,
He that deceives the people with great signs,
And for the tinkling of a little gold
Preaches new Gods.  Where rises yonder smoke
Beyond the pinewood, camps this Lord of Dupes:
How say ye?  Shall he track o’er Uladh’s plains,
As o’er the land beside, his venomous way?
Forth with your swords! and if that God he serves
Can save him, let him prove it!”

                              Dark with wrath
Thus spake Mac Kyle; and all his men approved,
Shouting, while downward fell the snows hard-caked Loosened by shock of forest-echoed hands,
Save Garban.  Crafty he, and full of lies,
That thing which Patrick hated.  Sideway first
Glancing, as though some secret foe were nigh,
He spake: “Mac Kyle! a counsel for thine ear!
A man of counsel I, as thou of war!
The people love this stranger.  Patrick slain,
Their wrath will blaze against us, and demand
An eric for his head.  Let us by craft
Unravel first his craft: then safe our choice;
We slay a traitor, or great ransom take:
Impostors lack not gold.  Lay me as dead
Upon a bier: above me spread yon cloth,
And make your wail: and when the seer draws nigh
Worship him, crying, ‘Lo, our friend is dead!
Kneel, prophet, kneel, and pray that God thou serv’st
To raise him.’  If he kneels, no prophet he,
But like the race of mortals.  Sweep the cloth
Straight from my face; then, laughing, I will rise.”

Thus counselled Garban; and the counsel pleased;
Yet pleased not God.  Upon a bier, branch-strewn,
They laid their man, and o’er him spread a cloth;
Then, moving towards that smoke behind the pines,
They found the Saint and brought him to that bier,
And made their moan - and Garban ’neath that cloth
Smiled as he heard it - “Lo, our friend is dead!
Great prophet kneel; and pray the God thou serv’st
To raise him from the dead.”

                              The man of God
Upon them fixed a sentence-speaking eye:
“Yea! he is dead.  In this ye have not lied:
Behold, this day shall Garban’s covering be
The covering of the dead.  Remove that cloth.”

Then drew they from his face the cloth; and lo!
Beneath it Garban lay, a corpse stone-cold.

Amazement fell upon that bandit throng,
Contemplating that corpse, and on Mac Kyle
Grief for his friend, remorse, and strong belief,
A threefold power: for she that at his birth,
Her brief life faithful to that Law she knew,
Had died, in region where desires are crowned
That hour was strong in prayer.  “From God he came,”
Thus cried they; “and we worked a work accursed,
Tempting God’s prophet.”  Patrick heard, and spake;
“Not me ye tempted, but the God I serve.”
At last Mac Kyle made answer: “I have sinned;
I, and this people, whom I made to sin:
Now therefore to thy God we yield ourselves
Liegemen henceforth, his thralls as slave to Lord,
Or horse to master.  That which thou command’st
That will we do.”  And Patrick said, “Believe;
Confess your sins; and be baptised to God,
The Father, and the Son, and Holy Spirit,
And live true life.”  Then Patrick where he stood
Above the dead, with hands uplifted preached
To these in anguish and in terror bowed
The tidings of great joy from Bethlehem’s Crib
To Calvary’s Cross.  Sudden upon his knees,
Heart-pierced, as though he saw that Head thorn-pierced,
Fell that wild chief, and was baptised to God;
And, lifting up his great strong hands, while still
The waters streamed adown his matted locks,
He cried, “Alas, my master, and my sire!
I sinned a mighty sin; for in my heart
Fixed was my purpose, soon as thou hadst knelt,
To slay thee with my sword.  Therefore judge thou
What eric I must pay to quit my sin?”
Him Patrick answered, “God shall be thy Judge:
Arise, and to the seaside flee, as one
That flies his foe.  There shalt thou find a boat
Made of one hide: eat nought, and nothing take
Except one cloak alone: but in that boat
Sit thou, and bear the sin-mark on thy brow,
Facing the waves, oarless and rudderless;
And bind the boat chain thrice around thy feet,
And fling the key with strength into the main,
Far as thou canst: and wheresoe’er the breath
Of God shall waft thee, there till death abide
Working the Will Divine.”  Then spake that chief,
“I, that commanded others, can obey;
Such lore alone is mine: but for this man
That sinned my sin, alas, to see him thus!”
To whom the Saint, “For him, when thou art gone,
My prayer shall rise.  If God will raise the dead
He knows: not I.”

                              Then rose that chief, and rushed
Down to the shore, as one that flies his foe;
Nor ate, nor drank, nor spake to wife or child,
But loosed a little boat, of one hide made,
And sat therein, and round his ankles wound
The boat chain thrice; and flung the key far forth
Above the ridged sea foam.  The Lord of all
Gave ordinance to the wind, and, as a leaf
Swift rushed that boat, oarless and rudderless,
Over the on-shouldering, broad-backed, glaucous wave
Slow-rising like the rising of a world,
And purple wastes beyond, with funeral plume
Crested, a pallid pomp.  All night the chief
Under the roaring tempest heard the voice
That preached the Son of Man; and when the morn
Shone out, his coracle drew near the surge
Reboant on Manann’s Isle.  Not unbeheld
Rose it, and fell; not unregarded danced
A black spot on the inrolling ridge, then hung
Suspense upon the mile-long cataract
That, overtoppling, changed grass-green to light,
And drowned the shores in foam.  Upon the sands
Two white-haired Elders in the salt air knelt,
Offering to God their early orisons,
Coninri and Romael.  Sixty years
These two unto a hard and stubborn race
Had preached the Word; and gaining by their toil
But thirty souls, had daily prayed their God
To send ere yet they died some ampler arm,
And reap the ill-grown harvest of their youth.
Ten years they prayed, not doubting, and from God,
Who hastens not, this answer had received,
“Ye shall not die until ye see his face.”
Therefore, each morning, peered they o&rsqu