No More Learning

It seems that when mortals have
gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty,
blown hither and thither by the winds that awakened the stars, the dim
kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and
given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in
the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat
by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and
said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the
dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old
and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would
be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log
out of the fire and bury it in the garden, and her child would live
as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log, and the
child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries,
who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince
died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful
peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died
also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, and
so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of
the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a scandal to the
whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was
very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him
about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and
then they burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and
everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[I] who
went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery
life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake
to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted,
until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough
Ia, on the top of the Birds' Mountain at Sligo.

The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log
and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled
hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with 'yes'
and 'no,' or entangled their feet with the sorry net of 'maybe' and
'perhaps. ' The great winds came and took them up into themselves.

FOOTNOTE:

[I] Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would
mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a
very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend
of mind found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey
Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or
the story-teller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many
Lough Leaths.
EARTH, FIRE AND WATER


SOME French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert
went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them
what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to
be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be
that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers
better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been
rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and
I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of
mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form
themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some
pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods
everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that
communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories
of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our country people speak with
the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand
death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into
the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make
our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they
may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a
clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did
not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of
water, and that 'even the generation of images in the mind is from
water'?

1902.




THE OLD TOWN


I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of
faery.

I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and relations of my
own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home
talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought
us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking,
where Sphinxes and Chimaeras sit open-eyed and where there are always
murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was an
imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made
the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
"the Old Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's
day.