Let us remember that during the Thirty Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans sunk into cannibalism; let us remember the lessons of our own day, which show what a very few years of war, so it be intense enough, can do toward reducing civilized to the levels of savage consciousness.  So when we find Ireland, in this fourth century, always fighting,—­ and the women as well as the men; and when we find a tribe in Scotland, the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism;—­we need not for a moment imagine that things had always been like that.  It is not that man is naturally a savage, and may from the heights of civilization quickly relapse into savagery; it is that he is a dual being, with the higher part of his nature usually in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken at all, by the conventions of law and order; and so the things that are only thought, or perhaps secretly practised, in times of civilization, as soon as war has broken down the conventions, find their full expression in action,—­and others along with them.  So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly since, a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary habit of an older and better day surviving, and nearly ready to be awakened into transcendent splendor.  The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;—­and how would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers of Fairyland?

I shall come to my history next week; meanwhile here for you is the Song of Finn in Praise of May, a part of it, as Mr. Rollertone translates it, to give a taste of the literary habit of Pre-christian Ireland: 

     May day! delightful day! 
     Bright colors play the vales along;
     Now wakes at morning’s slender ray,
     Wild and gay, the blackbird’s song.

     Now comes the bird of dusty hue,
     The loud cuckoo, the summer lover;
     Broad-branching trees are thick with leaves;
     The bitter evil time is over.

     Swift horses gather nigh,
     Where half dry the river goes;
     Tufted heather crowns the height;
     Weak and white the bog-down blows.

     Corncrake singing, from eve til morn,
     Deep in corn, the strenuous bird;
     Sings the virgin waterfall,
     White and tall, her one sweet word. 
     Loaded bough of little power
     Goodly flower-harvests win;
     Cattle roam with muddy flanks;
     Busy ants go out and in.

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     Carols loud the lark on high,
     Small and shy, his tireless lay,
     Singing in wildest, merriest mood
     Of delicate-hued delightful May.

And here, from the same source, are the Delights of Finn, as his son Oisin sang them to Patrick: 

     These are the things that were dear to Finn,—­
     The din of battle, the banquet’s glee,
     The bay of his hounds through the rough glen ringing,
     And the blackbird singing in Letterlee.