—­What I call on you to note about that is something very unpoetic.  It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the creation of beauty;—­but the dress.  The Irish writers got these ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, classical civilization, or any foreign civilization.  The ideas were home-grown, the tradition Irish.  The writer was describing what he was familiar with:  the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs.  He was heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was drawing with his eye on the object.  I am inclined to think that imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just as tradition must always be based on fact.  Now then:  try, will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen.  I think you cannot do it.  And this picture is not extraordinary; it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish stories.  What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor of an Ireland consummately civilized.—­But to return to the hall of Eochaid Airem: 

Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone, they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what it would be.  So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk of the evening.  Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of them:  Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.  No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come.  And then it was but putting his spear in his left hand for him, and putting his right arm about the waist of Etain, and rising through the air with her, and vanishing through the roof.  And when the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw two swans circling above Tara and away, their long white necks yoked together with a yoke of moon-bright silver.

It was a long time the Gods were ruling in Ireland before the Milesians came.  King after king reigned over them; and there are stories on stories, a rich literature for another nation, about the time of these Danaan Gods alone.  One of them was Lir, the Boundless Deep.  He had four children by his first wife; when she died, he married her sister, Aoife by name.  Aoife was jealous of the love he had for his children, and was for killing them.  But when it came to doing it, “her womanhood overcame her,” and instead she put swanhood on the four of them, and the doom that swans they should be from that out for nine hundred years:  three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland, three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and Innishglory.  After that the enchantment would end.