Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

Irish
Superstitions.
—
—
99
on the blasts of the wind ;
and pale ghosts, mcsscncrcrs of
the unseen world, brought back the secrets of the 'n-avc."
A Gaelic song has the following—" In a blast comes cloudy
death, and lays his grey head low. His ghost is rolled on
the vapours of the fenny field." Henri Martin speaks of
"harps of bards, untouched, sound mournful over the hill."
Some ghosts were material enough. That of St. Kicran,
of Clonmacnoise, managed to strike King Fclim, the
plunderer of his church, so effectually, with his ghostly
crozier, as to give an internal wound, of which the chief
died. When Finn or Fionn appeared to Osgar, on the
battle-field of Gabhra, it is affirmed that " his words were
not murmurs of distant streams," but loud and clear.
But the Fetch, as recognized in the scattered poems
collected, or revised, in Macpherson's Ossian, is more a
spirit of the air. Some of the descriptions, relating to the
ghosts of Erin and Argyle, are striking :
"She was like the new moon seen through the gathering
mist—like a watery beam of feeble light, when the moon
rushes sudden from between two clouds, and the midnight
shower is on the heath.— Clouds, the robe of ghosts,— rolled
their gathered forms on the wind—with robes of light.
Soon shall our cold pale ghosts meet in a cloud, on Cona's
eddying winds.—Tell her that in a cloud I ma}' meet the
lovely maid of Toscar."
Again— " Faint light gleams over the heath.
The ghosts
of Arden pass through, and show their dim and distant
forms.—The misty Loda, the house of the spirits of men.
Ghosts vanish, like mists on the sunny hill.— II is soul came
forth to his fathers, to their stormy isle. There the\' i)ursued
boars of mist along the skirts of winds.— I
move lil