Ah, me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear, All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain, As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as a wolf sucked under a weir. It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there; I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased, I will go to Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair, And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast. NOTES THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS. When I wrote these poems I had so meditated over the images that came to me in writing ‘Ballads and Lyrics,’ ‘The Rose,’ and ‘The Wanderings of Oisin,’ and other images from Irish folk-lore, that they had become true symbols. I had sometimes when awake, but more often in sleep, moments of vision, a state very unlike dreaming, when these images took upon themselves what seemed an independent life and became a part of a mystic language, which seemed always as if it would bring me some strange revelation. Being troubled at what was thought a reckless obscurity, I tried to explain myself in lengthy notes, into which I put all the little learning I had, and more wilful phantasy than I now think admirable, though what is most mystical still seems to me the most true. I quote in what follows the better or the more necessary passages. THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE (page 3). The gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha De Danaan, or the Tribes of the goddess Danu, or the Sidhe, from Aes Sidhe, or Sluagh Sidhe, the people of the Faery Hills, as these words are usually explained, still ride the country as of old. Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling winds, the winds that were called the dance of the daughters of Herodias in the Middle Ages, Herodias doubtless taking the place of some old goddess. When the country people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by. They are almost always said to wear no covering upon their heads, and to let their hair stream out; and the great among them, for they have great and simple, go much upon horseback. If any one becomes too much interested in them, and sees them overmuch, he loses all interest in ordinary things.