Then come with me, lady, to joys untold, And a circlet of gold on thy head shall be, Banquets of milk and of wine most rare, Thou shalt share, O lady, and share with me."[12] The casual Christian allusion in the penultimate verse need not lead us astray, nor does it detract from the essentially pagan character of the rest, for throughout almost the whole of Irish literature the more distinctly or ferociously pagan any piece is, the more certain it is to have a Christian allusion added at the end as a make-weight. There is great ingenuity displayed in thus turning the pagan legend into a Christian homily by the addition of two lines suggesting that if men were not sinful, this beautiful pagan world and the beautiful forms that inhabited it would be visible to the human ken. This was sufficient to disarm any hostility to the legend on the part of the Church. From what we have said it is evident that the ancient Irish pagans believed in the possibility of rebirth, and founded many of their mythical sagas on the doctrine of metempsychosis, and that they had a highly ornate and fully-developed belief in a happy other-world or Elysium, to which living beings were sometimes carried off without going through the forms of death. But it is impossible to say whether rebirth with life in another world, for those whom the gods favoured, was taught as a doctrine or had any ethical significance attached to it by the druids of Ireland, as it most undoubtedly had by their cousins the druids of Gaul. [1] "De Bello Gallico," vi. 14. [2] See "Voyage of Bran," vol. ii. pp. 107-111, where all these passages have been lucidly collected by Mr. Nutt. [3] All of these have been studied by Mr. Nutt, chap. xiv. [4] Vol. ii. p. 121. [5] In a large collection of nearly sixty folk-lore stories taken down in Irish from the lips of the peasantry, I find about five contain allusions to the belief in another world full of life under water, and about four in a life in the inside of the hills. The Hy Brasil type--that of finding the dead living again on an ocean island--is, so far as I have yet collected, quite unrepresented amongst them. An old Irish expression for dying is going "to the army of the dead," used by Déirdre in her lament, and I find a variant of it so late as the beginning of this century, in a poem by Raftery, a blind musician of the county Mayo, who tells his countrymen to remember that they must go "to the meadow of the dead." _See_ Raftery's "Aithreachas," in my "Religious Songs of Connacht," p. 266. [6] Admirably translated by Kuno Meyer, who says "there are a large number of [word] forms in the 'Voyage of Bran,' as old as any to be found in the Wurzburg Glosses," and these Professor Thurneysen ascribes unhesitatingly to the seventh century. Zimmer also agrees that the piece is not later than the seventh century, that is, was first written down in the seventh century, but this is no criterion of the date of the original composition.