him, holding in silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus.  The whole life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land, shall come forth clear and definite; we shall stand by the threshold of Cuculain’s dwelling, and move among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca.  We shall look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdre looked on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the river,—­and this even though we must go back two thousand years.

To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland’s genius will write itself in epic all across the land, with songs for every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove.  Here our more passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of the western lands, and Ossin’s son Oscar, before whose might even the fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed.  As the epoch of Cuculain shows us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler humor.  The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,—­a sense of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic life.  We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add.  In these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man; the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with valor and the love of beauty and song.

Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland contain it all; that our whole race could go no further.  For no man lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find.  Nor amongst women were any sadder than Deirdre and Grania; craftier than Meave, more winsome than Nessa the mother of Concobar.  Perfected flowers of human life all of them,—­if that be all of human life.  So, were this all, we might well consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close; there is nothing to add that the natural man could add.

But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life begins—­the life of our ever-living soul.  The natural man seeks victory; he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness; the love of women, and the loyalty of followers.  But the natural man trembles in the face of defeat, of sorrow, of subjection; the natural man cannot raise the black veil of death.