O Swan-child, come from the grave, and be bright as you were
        of old
     When you sing o’er the sun-bright wave in the Danaans’ Age
        of Gold! 
     Are you never remembering, darling, the truth that you knew
        well then,
     That there’s nobody dies from the world, asthore, but is
        born in the world again.

It brings me naturally to the place where we take her up in our history.  At the end of the fourth century, “the sea,” says the Roman poet Claudian, “was foamy with the hostile oars of the Irish.”  Niall of the Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and he was all for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling deep.  He raided the coasts of Britain annually, and any other coasts that came handy, carrying off captives where he might.  One of these was a boy named Sucat, from Glamorgan:  probably from Glamorgan, though it might have been from anywhere between the Clyde and the Loire.  In time this Sucat escaped from his Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the Latin name of Patrick, and made it his business to Christianize Ireland.  That was about the time when the Britons were throwing off the Roman yoke.  He was at the height of his career in the middle of the fifth century.

Even if he did not make a clean and bloodless sweep of the whole country, Patrick was one of the most successful Christian missionaries that ever preached.  There was some opposition by the druids, but it was not successful.  He went to the courts of the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his chieftain led.  We are in an atmosphere altogether different from the rancor and fanaticism of the continent.  Patrick,—­there must have been something very winning and kindly about the man,—­ roused no tradition of animosity.  He never made Ireland hate her pagan past.  When the Great Age came,—­which was not till later, —­not till the Crest-Wave had passed from Wales,—­and Christian Irishmen took to writing down the old legends and stories, they were very tender to the memories of the Gods and heroes.  It was in pity for the Children of Lir, that were turned into swans, that they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and sent to heaven.  Can you fancy Latona and her children so received by Greekish or Latin monks into the Communion of Saints?  But the Irish Church was always finding excuses for the salvation of the great figures of old.  Some saint called up Cuculain from hell, converted him, and gave him a free pass that Peter at the Gates should honor.  There was Conchobar MacNessa again.  He was king of Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic cycle of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his warriors.  A brain-ball was driven through the skull of Conchobar from a sling; but sure, his druid doctors would never be phased by