“’Mother, I’ve been on the cliffs out yonder,
     Straining my eyes o’er the breakers free
     To the lovely spot where the sun was setting,
     Setting and sinking into the sea.

     “’The sky was full of the fairest colors
     Pink and purple and paly green,
     With great soft masses of gray and amber,
     And great bright rifts of gold between.

     “’And all the birds that way were flying,
     Heron and curlew overhead,
     With a mighty eagle westward floating,
     Every plume in their pinions red.

     “’And then I saw it, the fairy city,
     Far away o’er the waters deep;
     Towers and castles and chapels glowing
     Like blessed dreams that we see in sleep.

     “‘What is its name?’ ’Be still, acushla
     (Thy hair is wet with the mists, my boy);
     Thou hast looked perchance on the Tir-na-n’oge,
     Land of eternal youth and joy!

     “’Out of the sea, when the sun is setting,
     It rises, golden and fair to view;
     No trace of ruin, or change of sorrow,
     No sign of age where all is new.

     “’Forever sunny, forever blooming,
     Nor cloud nor frost can touch that spot,
     Where the happy people are ever roaming,
     The bitter pangs of the past forgot.’

This is the Greek story of Elysion; these are the Elysian Fields of the Egyptians; these are the Gardens of the Hesperides; this is the region in the West to which the peasant of Brittany looks from the shores of Cape Raz; this is Atlantis.

The starving child seeks to reach this blessed land in a boat and is drowned.

     “High on the cliffs the light-house keeper
     Caught the sound of a piercing scream;
     Low in her hut the lonely widow
     Moaned in the maze of a troubled dream;

     “And saw in her sleep a seaman ghostly,
     With sea-weeds clinging in his hair,
     Into her room, all wet and dripping,
     A drowned boy on his bosom bear.

     “Over Death Sea on a bridge of silver
     The child to his Father’s arms had passed! 
     Heaven was nearer than Tir-na-n’oge,
     And the golden city was reached at last.”

CHAPTER VIII.

The oldest son of Noah.

That eminent authority, Dr. Max Mueller, says, in his “Lectures on the Science of Religion,”

“If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—­assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly varying speech of human beings.  These three oases