Love Entangled, she whose beauty filled three hundred years in the single hour that Fionn thought he was with her, in the days when the ancient world had suddenly grown old, and the little bell of Patrick the Christ-Bringer had tinkled sorrow and desolation and passing away across the Irish hills. Up among the devious green pathways of the travelling wood what lost king’s voice was that? ... “Say, down those halls of Quiet Doth he cry upon his Queen? Or doth he sleep, contented To dream of what has been?” ... what poet of long ago, living in a flame of passion still, a wandering breath for ever, went by on that drowsy wind?-- “Across the world my sorrow flies, A-hunger for the grey and wistful Beauty of Feithfailge’s eyes.” Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any imaginative nature encountering suddenly a wild-apple in blossom in some solitary place. To people of a Celtic race or having a dominant Celtic strain, in particular, perhaps; for to the Gael, the Cymru and the Breton the Apple-tree is associated with his most sacred traditional beliefs. Of old it was sacrosanct. It was the Celtic Tree of Life, what Yggdrasil was to the ancient dreamers of Scandinavia. He cannot think of it, but of the kingdom of eternal youth: of Emhain Abhlach, of Y Breasil, of Avalon, of drowned Avillion. It waves over the lost Edens. In Tir-na-n’Og its boughs, heavy with blossom, hang above the foam of the last pale waters of doom. The tired islander, who has put away hunger and weariness and dreams and the old secret desire of the sword, lays himself down below its branches in Flatheanas, and hears the wild harpers of Rinn in a drowsy hum like the hum of wild bees. Grey-haired men and women on the shores of Connemara look out across the dim wave and see the waving of its boughs. The Breton peasant, standing at twilight on the rock-strewn beaches of Tregastèl, will cross himself as he smells the fragrance of apple-blossom coming from sunken isles across the long rolling billows, and remember, perhaps, how of old in moonlit nights he has seen his keel drive through the yielding topmost branches of the woods of Avalon. Many poets have wandered in the secret valleys of Avillion, and have passed under boughs heavy with foam of dreams, and have forgotten all things and been uplifted in joy. In the glens of the Land of Heart’s Desire the tired singers of the world have become silent under the windless branches, snow-white in the moonshine, having found the Heart of Song.