The ideal country girl, with her dew-grey eye and long amber hair, is always likened to Venus, to Juno, to Deirdre.  ’I think she is nine times nicer than Deirdre,’ says Raftery, ’or I may say Helen, the affliction of the Greeks’; and he writes of another country girl, that she is ’beyond Venus, in spite of all Homer wrote on her appearance, and Cassandra also, and Io that bewitched Mars; beyond Minerva, and Juno, the king’s wife’; and he wishes ’they might be brought face to face with her, that they might be confused’:—­

’She comes to me like a star through the mist; her hair is golden and goes down to her shoes; her breast is the colour of white sugar, or like bleached bone on the card-table; her neck is whiter than the froth of the flood, or the swan coming from swimming....  If France and Spain belonged to me, I’d give it up to be along with you.’

And he gives ’a thousand praises to God, that I didn’t lose my wits on account of her.’  Raftery puts distinction into each one of his songs; but when lesser poets, echoing the voices of so many generations, bring in the same goddesses, and the same exaggerations, and the same amber hair, monotony brings weariness at last.

There is an Aran song, ‘Brigid na Casad,’ that has more originality than is usual:—­

’Brigid’s kiss was sweeter than the whole of the waters of Lough Erne; or the first wheaten flour, worked with fresh honey into dough; there are streams of bees’ honey on every part of the mountain, there is brown sugar thrown on all you take, Brigid, in your hand.

’It is not more likely for water to change than for the mind of a woman; and is it not a young man without courage will not run the chance nine times?  It’s not nicer than you the swan is when he comes to the shore swimming; it’s not nicer than you the thrush is, and he singing from tree to tree.’

And here is another, homely in the extreme in the beginning, and suddenly rising to wild exaggeration:—­

’Late on the evening of last Monday, and it raining, I chanced to come into Seaghan’s and I sat down.  It is there I saw her near me in the corner of the hearth; and her laugh was better to me than to have her eyes down; her hair was shining like the wool of a sheep, and brighter than the swan swimming.  It is then I asked who owned her, and it is with Frank Conneely she was.

’It is a good house belongs to Frank Conneely, the people say that do be going to it; plenty of whiskey and punch going round, and food without stint for a man to get; and it is what I think the girl is learned, for she has knowledge of books and of the pen, and a schoolmaster coming to teach her every day.

’The troop is on the sea, sailing eternally, and looking always on my Nora Ban.  Is it not a great sin, she to be on a bare mountain, and not to be dressed in white silk, and the king