The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends.  Though the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful forts or dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any worldly purpose ever been assigned to the stone circles.  Yet there seems to be a very simple interpretation of their symbology; the circle, through all antiquity, stood for the circling year, which ever returns to its point of departure, spring repeating spring, summer answering to summer, winter with its icy winds only the return of former winters:  the circling year and its landmarks, whether four seasons, or twelve months, or twenty-seven lunar mansions, through one of which the wandering moon passes in a day.  We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven stones, or four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four seasons, the regents of the year.  By counting the stones in each circle we can tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the solar months or the lunar mansions.

But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the symbol of the spiritual cycle of the soul, the path of birth and death.  We must remember that even for ourselves the same symbolism holds:  in the winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in spring, the Crucifixion; in summer, the birth of the beloved disciple; in autumn, the day of All Souls, the feast of the dead.  Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons only symbolize the stages of a spiritual life, the august procession of the soul.

We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and built so majestically for the hidden world; these great stone circles symbolized for them, we must believe, the circling life of the soul, the cycle of necessity, with the door of liberation to the home of the blest, who have reached perfect freedom and go no more out.  We may picture in imagination their solemn celebrations; priests robed, perhaps, in the mingled green and purple of their hills, passing within the circle, chanting some archaic hymn of the Divine.

IV.

The de Danaans.

In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after, Erin was a land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and wolves.  The central plain was altogether hidden under green clouds of oak-woods, full of long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny glades, echoing in spring and summer to the songs of innumerable birds.  Everywhere through the wide and gloomy forests were the blue mirrors of lakes, starred with shaggy islands, the hanging hills descending verdant to the water’s edge.  Silver rivers spread their network among the woods, and the lakes and the quiet reaches of the rivers teemed with trout and salmon.  The hilly lands to the north and south showed purple under the sky from among their forests, oak mingling with pine; and the four seas beat around our island with their white fringe of hovering gulls.  Over all, the arch of the blue, clearer and less clouded then than now.  A pleasant land, full of gladness and mystery.