Now we come to a third cycle: the "Fenian" named after Finn Mac Cool, according to most Irish writers; the "Ossianic" named after Ossian, Finn's famous son, according to most Scotch. We need only speak of it here of course on its purely Irish side and from the Fenian aspect, as the reader will find it fully dealt with under its Ossianic aspect elsewhere. The heroes of this cycle, if we accept their historical existence in Ireland, lived from the second to the fourth centuries of the Christian era. Art, his grandson Cormac, and Cormac's son, Cairbre; Cool, his son Finn, and King Goll: these, with Owen Mor and many another, fill the Fenian romances with their fierce and picturesque pursuit of destiny and death. They only await the hand of that predestined shaper into final and positive and modernly intelligible form of the confused romances which treat of their doings, to add a new epic to the larger literature which has the Old World for its text and the New World for its interpreter. These three great cycles of Irish romance by no means exhaust the wealth of story, still lurking _perdu_ in old MSS. or in rare and rarely read works. Some of these additional tales have already reached American readers under modern retellings or poetic interpretations; such as, _e. g._, 'The Voyage of Maeldune', retold memorably, and differently enough, in flowing hexametrical periods by Tennyson:-- "And we came to the Isle of Shouting; we landed; a score of wild birds Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words; Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices pealed, The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field, And the men dropt dead in the valleys, and half of the cattle went lame, And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into flame; And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew, Till they shouted along with the shouting, and seized one another and slew; But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not stay, And we left the dead to the birds, and we sailed with our wounded away."