Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 339
the nations trembled. Here, steeped in Lough Liath's
waters, Finn's golden tresses took on the hue and glitter
of radiant snow. From the spilled goblet of the god
sprang the hazels, whose magic clusters might assuage
that hunger of the spirit which knows no other assuage-
ment. The Faed Fia was shed around them. Here
shined and trembled the wisp of druid-grasses, from whose
whisperings with the dawn-wind pure ears might learn
the secrets of life and death. Here beneath those hazels,
their immortal green and their scarlet clusters, sprang the
-well of the waters of all wisdom. Three dreadful queens
guarded it. Sometimes they smile, seeing afar some
youth wandering unconsoled, o'erladen with the burthen
of his thoughts, rapt with visions, tormented by the gods,
a. stranger in his own household, scorned by those whom
he cannot scorn, outcast from the wholesome cheerful
life of men—they smile, and, smiling, dart from rosy
immortal fingers one radiant drop upon his pallid lips,
and, lo ! the word out of his mouth becomes a sword
wherewith he shears through mountains ; with his
right hand, he upholds the weak, and with the left pros-
trates powers, and tyrants tremble before the light of his
mild eyes.
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire happenings and
becomings without number, or the spiritual force and
power of them, touched with awe the boy's heart as he
gazed on the haunted hill, so 'long familiar in his mind
as a thought, as a name, now a great visible actuality loom-
ing before his eyes, crowned with cloud, crawled over by
the travelling mists. Save with the mind's eye the boy