All old primitive tales know the advent of this mysterious bird. Was not, as I have said, the divine Hera herself wooed thus by Zeus? In that ancient Heraion, in the heart of the Peloponnesos which Pausanias saw, he tells us of a statue of the goddess whose sceptre bore the image of this spring-born voice of eternal love and eternal illusion. The people loved it not, for in their eyes the story covered an evil thing: but the priests bowed before an ancient mystery, and the poets smiled, and the musicians paused and wondered and struck a new vibrant note. In every country there are oldtime tales of the cuckoo with the attributes of a god, or demigod, or at least of magic and illusion. When, in the great Northern saga, Ilmarinen, the son of Wondersmith and the Air, goes north to woo the snow-bound princess ... what but another lovely metaphor of Spring calling to the North to cover herself with the snow-blossom of betrothal and the roses and honeysuckles of procreant love ... he orders thus the outbringing of his sleigh: “Take the fleetest of my racers, Put the grey steed in the harness, Hitch him to my sledge of magic: Place six cuckoos on the break-board, Seven blue-birds on the crossbow, Thus to charm the northland maidens, Thus to make them look and listen As the cuckoos call and echo.” The wind, that grey steed, fleetest of racers, the calling of cuckoos, the northland maidens charmed to silence among awakening fields or amid the first green stirring of grass-blades and pointed leaf: is not Ilmarinen, son of Wondersmith and the Air, the veritable cuckoo-god? If ever the cuckoo-myth find its historian one will learn how widespread and basic it is. We follow it from Orpheus himself to the myth of Saturn and Rhea, to that of Faunus and Fauna, to Siegfried in the north, to Cuchulain in the west--for the famous hero of the Gaels is, for all the bardic legends as to Setanta being Cu-chulain, the hound of Culain, as unmistakably a cuckoo-god as his Finnish or Esthonian namesake, Kukkolind. The base of all is the divine inspiration, the mysterious wandering Breath, the incalculable Word, ‘the heroic cuckoo,’ who awakens the green world, the world of blossom and leaf and the songs of birds and the sap in the trees and the mounting warmth in the blood, who, as the chroniclers say, ‘rouses the enchanted maid of spring from her long sleep.’ Of all these, whether it be Faunus, or Kullervo, or Kalevipoeg, or the Son of Mananan, or Cuchulain, the same thing may be said: they are bringers of Spring, champions of the sun, rhapsodes of the immemorial ecstasy, bacchids of the ancient intoxication.