This specimen of Irish metre may help to place much of our poetry in another light, for its beauty depends less upon the intrinsic substance of the thought than the external elegance of the framework. We must understand this in order to do justice to our versified literature, for the student must not imagine that he will find long-sustained epics or interesting narrative poems after the manner of the Iliad or Odyssey, or even the Nibelungenlied, or the "Song of Roland;" none such now exist: if they did exist they are lost. The early poems consist rather of eulogies, elegies, historical pieces, and lyrics, few of them of any great length, and still fewer capable of interesting an English reader in a translation. Occasionally we meet with touches of nature poetry of which the Gael has always been supremely fond. Here is a tentative translation made by O'Donovan of a part of the first poem which Finn mac Cúmhail is said to have composed after his eating of the salmon of knowledge:-- "May-Day, delightful time! How beautiful the colour; the blackbirds sing their full lay; would that Laighaig were here! The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brilliance of the seasons! On the margin of the branching woods the summer swallows skim the stream. The swift horses seek the pool. The heath spreads out its long hair, the weak, fair bog-down grows. Sudden consternation attacks the signs, the planets, in their courses running, exert an influence; the sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth." The language of this poem is so old as to be in parts unintelligible, and the broken metre points to the difficulties of transmission over a long period of time, yet he would be a bold man who would ascribe with certainty the authorship of it to Finn mac Cúmhail in the third century, or the elegy on Cuchorb to Mève, daughter of Conan, a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. And yet all the history of these people is known and recorded with much apparent plausibility and many collateral circumstances connecting them with the men of their time. How much of this is genuine historical tradition? How much is later invention? It is difficult to decide at present. [1] Pronounced "Taun Bo Hoo-il-n'ya." The "a" in Táin is pronounced nearly like the "a" in the English word "Tarn." [2] Cuilmenn--it has been remarked, I think, by Kuno Meyer--seems cognate with Colmméne, glossed _nervus_, and Welsh _cwlm_, "a knot or tie." It is found glossed _lebar--i.e._, leabhar, or "book." [3] For the authorship of this book see above, p. 71.