Chapter II

Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is Polaris, the Pole Star or Lodestar: of all winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little Dipper (to give the common designations), Orion, and the lovely cluster of the Pleiades, are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly observed stellar groups. One of our old Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing towards the close of the fifteenth or early in the sixteenth century, thus quaintly brought them into conjunction--

“Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane,
Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane,
The fiers Orion with his goldin glave.”

Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar and Arcturus (or, as often given in the North, ‘Arturus’ or ‘Arthur’ ... a word itself signifying the Great or Wondrous Bear) were often confused. Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole constellation of Ursa Major--or, as we commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as, for example, in Scott’s lines:

“Arthur’s slow wain his course doth roll,
In utter darkness, round the Pole.”

But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not mean this to be understood, for in the second line he speaks of ‘Charlewane,’ _i.e._, Charles’s Wain ... the Wain or Waggon being then, as it still is among country-folk, even more familiar a term than the Great Bear or than the Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in mind the Pole Star, the ‘House of Arthur’ of the ancient British. His choice of the ‘rain-betokening Hyades’ may be taken here as including the Pleiades, these ‘greater seven’ in whom centres so much poetry and old legend. A previous paper has been devoted to the Milky Way, so that there is no need to explain why Watling Street should be analogous with the Galaxy. The ‘Horne’ is the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. Than ‘fierce Orion with his glistering sword’ there is no constellation so universally familiar. If, then, to this category of the old Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran, and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, we have more than enough Winter Lights to consider in one chapter.

Having already, however, dealt with ‘the watery constellations’ we can be the more content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta, Electra, and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus. This great constellation is one of the earliest in extant astronomical records: the earliest, it is believed. The stellar image of a Bull has occurred to many nations since the designation first arose among the ancient Cretans or Akkadians--if, indeed, in its origin it was not immeasurably more remote. East and West, in the deserts of the South and among the grey isles of the North, ‘the Bull’ was recognised. To-day the Scottish peasant still calls it ‘the Steer,’ as his German kinsman does in _der Stier_, his French kinsman in _le Taureau_, his Spanish or Italian kinsman in _Toro_. When certain of the Greeks and Latins used _Keráon_ and _Cornus_ instead of _Tauros_ and _Taurus_, they said merely the same thing--the Horned One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises the image in the first ‘Georgic’:

“When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes
The year....”

just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful ‘Hymn to Taurus,’ writes:

“... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey
The glinting of thy horn
And sullen front, uprising large and dim
Bent to the starry Hunter’s sword at bay.”

Among our own ancestors, the Druids made Taurus an object of worship, the Tauric Festival having been one of the great events of the year, signalised when the sun first entered the imagined frontiers of this constellation. To-day, among the homesteads of our Scottish lowlands, the farm-folk tell of the Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the gloaming on New Year’s Eve and move slowly to the dark pastures which await his coming.

The particular stellar glory of this constellation is Aldebaran. This beautiful star has appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I do not know what were its earliest Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names. But as in Gaelic it is sometimes called ‘the Hound,’ this term may well be a survival from ancient days. If so, there is an interesting relation with the primitive Arabic name by which it is all but universally known. Aldebaran is _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: and, figuratively, a follower could hardly be better symbolised than by a hound. I recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis where the analogy is still further emphasised, for there Aldebaran is called ‘the Hound of the Pleiades,’ which is exactly what the Arabian astronomers implied in ‘the Follower.’ Another interesting resemblance is between ‘the red hound’ of the Gaelic poet and legend and the _Rohinī_ of the Hindûs, that word signifying ‘a red deer’ ... in each case the ruddy gleam of the star having suggested the name. Probably it was this characteristic which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the name ‘Lampadias’ or the Torch-Bearer. In the narration of folk-tales I have more than once or twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as the star of good fortune, of ‘the golden luck.’ With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and may be seen at its finest from the latter part of January till the approach of the vernal equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be gained from the fact that this is thrice the outflow of the Pole Star. How often I have stood on a winter’s night, and watched awhile this small red ‘torch’ burning steadfastly in the unchanging heavens, and thought of its vast journeys, of that eternal, appalling procession through the infinite deeps: how often I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery when, watching its silent fire in what appears an inexorable fixity, I recall what science tells us, that it is receding from our system at an all but unparalleled velocity, a backward flight into the unknown at the rate of thirty miles a second.

It would be hopeless to attempt here even the briefest account of the primitive and diverse nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of Orion ... the Winter-Bringer, as this constellation is called in an old Scandinavian saga, identical thus with the marginal reading in the Geneva Bible relative to the reference to Orion in Job--‘which starre bringeth in winter,’ an allusion to its evening appearance at the season of cold and storms. For these things are writ in the records of a hundred nations. They are alive in the poetry of all peoples. Centuries before our era, when Thebes was the greatest city of Greece, the poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior, the Great Hunter, whose nightly course was so glorious above the dusky lands and waters of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek poets, Catullus and Horace gave it a like preeminence in Latin literature. In our own poetry, many surely will recall from _Paradise Lost_:

“... when with fierce winds Orion arm’d
Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry....”

or Tennyson’s beautiful line in _Locksley Hall_:

“Great Orion sloping slowly to the west....”

or, it may be, that epic of ‘Orion’ upon which is based Richard Hengist Horne’s claim to remembrance--or, once more, Matthew Arnold’s fine allusion to Sirius and Orion in _Sohrab and Rustum_:

“... the Northern Bear,
Who from her frozen height with jealous eye
Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South.”

Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had identified Orion both with Horus and Osiris. Among the peoples of Israel the poets acclaimed the constellation as Nimrod, ‘the mighty Hunter’ (or by another term signifying the Giant), ‘bound to the sky for rebellion against Jehovah.’ Among the Celtic races it has had kindred names, sometimes abstract, sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A year or so ago I was told a sea-tale of the Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to this constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is of especial interest, because of its connection with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a modern, not an ancient tale, though with more than one strange old survival) the major position is not held by Fionn, but by the Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is represented as succumbing under the spear thrust in his left side by the enraged Fionn, at last in grips with the daring chieftain who had robbed him of Grania. When questioned, my informant said he had heard a variant of this attribution, and that the constellation was an image of Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a swoon, because she and her lover have been overtaken by the wrath of Fionn ... though from the description I could not make out whether the latter indicated the star Sirius, or the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The Gaels of old called Orion _Caomai_, a name said to signify the Armed King: while the _Gall_ (the Scandinavian races) applied the name _Orwandil_, but with what signification I do not know, though I have read somewhere that it stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.

Of the chief stars in Orion there is not space here to speak. But of the splendid Rigel--as affluent in the mysterious science of the astrologer as in nocturnal light--pearly Anilam, of the Belt or Sword--ominous Bellatrix--ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze--of these alone one might write much ... as one might write much of the Girdle or Staff itself, what Scott in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ calls ‘Orion’s studded belt.’ It has a score of popular names, from the Danish Frigge Rok (Freya’s Distaff) to the seamen’s ‘Yard-arm,’ as, collectively, its three great stars have all manner of names in different countries, from the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three Marys, to The Rake of the French Rhinelanders or the Three Mowers of the Silesian peasant.

Those who have studied the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades will remember how universally the numeral seven is associated with their varying nomenclature. But there was, and still is among primitive peoples, not infrequent confusion in the use of ‘The Seven Stars’ as a specific name. Although from China to Arabia, from India and Persia to the Latin countries of the South, the term almost invariably designates the Pleiades, in the folklore of many Western nations it is used for the seven planets, and in many Northern races it is often used for the seven brilliant stars of the Great Bear. Even the Biblical allusion to ‘The Seven Stars,’ as our own Anglo-Saxon ancestral _Sifunsterri_, does not necessarily indicate the Pleiades: many consider the seven great planets to be meant. There is a Shetland rune, common to all the north isles and to be heard in Iceland and Norway, known as the rune of sevens, and of which one of the invocatory lines is ‘And by da seven shiners.’ All kinds of interpretation have explained this, from the obvious ‘seven planets,’ or else the Pleiades, to the Seven Candlesticks of Revelation and I know not what besides. I have again and again asked fisher-folk or others from the Orkneys and Shetlands, and in all but one or two instances the answer has clearly indicated the Great Bear, occasionally Polaris and the Ursine Arcturus and their nearest brilliant ‘shiners.’ Again, _Crannarain_, one of the Gaelic names for the Pleiades, is, perhaps, as often applied to the Great Bear: the curious legend of the Baker’s Shovel, implied in the Gaelic term, fitting equally.

Of the Great Bear, of the North Star, however, I have already spoken. Of Polaris itself, indeed, there is more than enough to draw upon. Years ago I began an MS. book called ‘The Book of the North Star,’ and from my recollection of it (for at the moment of writing I am far from my books) I should say there is enough folklore and legend and various interest connected with this star wherefrom to evolve a volume solely devoted to it. It is strange that ‘the Lamp of the North’ should have so fascinated all the poets from the time of Homer till to-day, and yet that all have dwelled in the same illusion as to its absolute steadfastness. Nevertheless, Homer’s

“Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave”

has both poetic truth and the truth of actuality.

It is a relief to put aside notes and pen and paper, and to go out and look up into the darkness and silence, to those ‘slow-moving palaces of wandering light’ of which one has been writing. How overwhelmingly futile seems not only the poor written word, but even the mysterious pursuit of the far-fathoming thought of man. By the sweat of the brow, by the dauntless pride of the mind, we mortal creatures have learned some of the mysteries of the coming and going in infinitude of these incalculable worlds, of their vast procession from the unknown to the unknown. Then, some night, one stands solitary in the darkness, and feels less than the shadow of a leaf that has passed upon the wind, before these still, cold, inevitable, infinitely remote yet overwhelmingly near Children of Immortality.

BEYOND THE BLUE SEPTENTRIONS

TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS

The star Septentrion is, for the peoples of the North and above all for the shepherd, the seaman and the wayfarer, the star of stars. A hundred legends embody its mystery, its steadfast incalculable service, its unswerving isolation over the Pole. Polaris, the North Star, the Pole-Star, the Lodestar, the Seaman’s Star, the Star of the Sea, the Gate of Heaven, Phœnice, Cynosure, how many names, in all languages, at all times. The Mongolian nomad called it the Imperial Ruler of Heaven: the Himalayan shepherd, Grahadāra, the Pivot of the Planets: the Arab knows it as the Torch of Prayer, burning for ever at the portal of the heavenly Mecca. It shines through all literature, since (and indeed long before) Euripides wrote his superb verse of how the two great Northern constellations which encircle Polaris, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two ‘swift-wandering’ Bears, ‘guard the Atlantean Pole,’ till a poet of our own time wrote the less majestic but not less lovely line relating to these constellations which gives the title to this paper. In all ages, too, the dreaming mind of man has imagined here the Throne of the Gods, the Seat of the Mighty, the last Portal of the Unknown. It is the Flatheansas of our Gaelic ancestors, the ultimate goal of the heroic spirit: the Himinbiorg, or Hill of Heaven, of the Norsemen of old, and the abode of Heimdallr, the guardian of the bridge Bifröst (the Rainbow) which unites Asgard the Everlasting with that brief whirling phantom, the Earth. It is Albordy, ‘the dazzling mountain on which was held the Assembly of the Gods’ of the ancient Teutonic peoples: the mysterious Mount Mēru, the seat of the gods, of the Aryan dreamers of old, and the Hindû sages of later time: ‘the holy mountain of God’ alluded to in Ezekiel--so, at least, it has been surmised.

‘The blue Septentrions’ ... Boötes with Arcturus, the Great Bear, the Lesser Bear, the Pointers or the Northern Hounds, the North Star ... what legend, what poetry, what romance, what wonder belongs to these stars and constellations which guard the marches of the Arctic North. To the mass of what is already extant, what need to add further matter? And yet there is ever new justification in that continual need of the soul to hear over and over again and in ever-varying ways even the most fragmentary runes or sagas of this unfathomably mysterious stellar universe which encloses us with Silence and Beauty and Wonder, the three Veils of God--as the Hebridean islesman, the Irish Gael of the dreaming west, and the Arab of the Desert alike have it.

I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary association of Arthur (the Celtic-British King and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine, and at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus, that lovely Lamp of the North, the glory of Boötes. But now, I may add what there I had to omit.

In all European lands, and above all in the countries of the West, there is none without its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim him as theirs, and the places of his passage and exploit are familiar, though only the echo, only the phantom of a great fame ever reached Arvôr. In the Channel and Scilly Isles the story runs that there is Lyonesse, and that Arthur sleeps in a cavern of the seas. The Cornish folk and their kindred of Somerset and Devon believe there is not a rood of ground between Camelot and Tintagel where the great King has not dwelt or passed. Wales calls him her son, and his chivalry her children, and the Cymric poets of a thousand mabinogion have sung his heroic fame. Clydesdale, that more ancient home of the Cymri, has dim memories older than what Taliesin sang: Arthur’s Seat hangs above Edinburgh, a city so old that a thousand years ago its earlier name was forgotten; and from the Sidlaw to the Ochil, from blue Demyat to grey Schiehallion, old names and broken tradition preserve the obscure trails of a memory fallen into oblivion, but not so fallen that the names of Arthur and Queen Guinevere and wild-eyed Merlin of the Woods have ceased to stir the minds of the few who still care for the things that moved our fathers from generation to generation. The snow of the Grampians have not stayed the wandering tale: and there are still a few old people who recall at times, in the winter story-telling before farm-kitchen fires, how the fierce Modred, King of the North, made Queen Gwannolê his own, and how later, in a savage revenge, Arthur condemned her to be torn asunder by wild horses. Lancelot passes from the tale before it crosses the Border, and as it goes north (or is it not that as it comes south?) Merlin is no more a courtier but a wild soothsayer of the woods, Queen Wanders or Gwannolê or Guinevere is tameless as a hawk, and Arthur himself, though a hero and great among his kind, is of the lineage of fire and sword.

Where is Joyeuse Gard? Some say it is in the isle Avillion off the Breton shores: some that it is in Avalon, under the sacred hill of Glastonbury: some that it is wet with the foam of Cornish Seas: others aver that it lies in fathomless silence under the sundown wandering wave and plunging tide. Another legend tells that it leaned once upon the sea from some lost haven under Berwick Law, perhaps where North Berwick now is, or where Dirleton looks across to Fidra, or where the seamews on ruined Tantallon scream to the Bass.

Arthur himself has a sleeping-place (for nowhere is he dead, but sleeps, awaiting a trumpet-call) in ‘a lost land’ in Provence, in Spain, under the waters of the Rhine. To-day one may hear from Calabrian shepherd or Sicilian fisherman that the Great King sleeps in a deep hollow underneath the Straits of Messina. And strangest of all (if not a new myth of the dreaming imagination, for I have not been able to trace the legend beyond a modern Slavonic ballad) among the Carpathian Highlands is a nameless ancient tomb lost in a pine-forest, where at mid-winter a bear has been seen to rise, walking erect like a man, crowned with a crown of iron and gold holding a single shining stone magnificent as the Pole Star, and crying in a deep voice, ‘_I am Arthur of the West, who shall yet be king of the World_.’

Strange indeed, for here among the debris of the lost history of Arthur, that vast shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom may have been the soul of primitive races, and whose sword may have been none other than the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful and perilous quest, here among that débris of legend scattered backward from the realms of the north across Europe is one, remote as it is, which brings us back to the early astronomical myth which identifies the great Celtic champion with the chief constellation of the north.

But as I have heard this fragment of our old lost mythology related in a way I have not seen in any book, I will give it here altered but slightly if at all from one of the countless legends told to me in my childhood.

* * * * *

At sunset the young son of the great King Pendragon came over the brow of a hill that stepped forward from a dark company of mountains and leaned over the shoreless sea which fills the west and drowns the north. All day he had been wandering alone, his mind heavy with wonder over many things. He had heard strange tales of late, tales about his heroic father and the royal clan, and how they were not as other men, but half divine. They were not gods, he knew, for they could be slain in battle or could die with the crowding upon them of many years: but they were more terrible in battle than were the greatest of men, and they had vision and knowledge beyond the vision and knowledge of the druids, and were lordly beyond all men in mien and the beauty of courtesy, and lived beyond the common span of years, and had secret communion with the noble and invisible company. He had heard, too, of his destiny: that he, too, was to be a great king, as much greater than Pendragon, than Pendragon was above all the kings of the world. What was Destiny, he wondered. Then, again, he turned over and over in his mind all the names he could think of that he might choose for his own: for the time was come for him to put away the name of his childhood and to take on that by which he should be known among men.

He came over the brow of the hill, and out of the way of the mountain-wind, and, being tired, lay down among the heather and stared across the grey wilderness of the sea. The sun set, and the invisible throwers of the nets trailed darkness across the waves and up the wild shores and over the faces of the cliffs. Stars climbed out of shadowy abysses, and the great chariots of the constellations rode from the west to the east and from the north to the south. His eyes closed, but when he opened them again to see if a star quivering on the verge of the horizon had in that brief moment sprung like a deer above the drowning wave or had sunk like a white seabird passing out of sight, he saw a great and kingly figure standing beside him. So great in stature, so splendid in kingly beauty was the mysterious one who had so silently joined him, that he thought this must be one of the gods.

“Do you not know me, my son?” said the kingly stranger.

The boy looked at him in awe and wonder, but unrecognisingly.

“Do you not know me, my son?” he heard again ... “for I am your father Pendragon. But my home is yonder, and there I go before long, and that is why I have come to you as a vision in a dream ...” and, as he spoke, he pointed to the constellation of the _Arth_, or Bear, which nightly prowls through the vast abysses of the polar sky.

When the boy turned his gaze from the great constellation which hung in the dark wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone again. While he yet wondered in great awe at what he had seen and heard, he felt himself float like a mist and become like a cloud, and, as a cloud, rise beyond the brows of the hills, and ascend the invisible stairways of the sky.

When for minutes that were as hours he had moved thus mysteriously into the pathless and unvisited realms of the air, he saw that he had left the highest clouds like dust on a valley-road after one has climbed to the summit of a mountain: nor could he see the earth save as a blind and obscure thing that moved between the twilights of night and dawn.

It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last, suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, or Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear. There he saw, with the vision of immortal not of mortal eyes, a company of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a circular abyss but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of these seven great knights or lordly kings had a star upon his forehead, and these were the stars of the mighty constellation of the Bear which the boy had seen night after night from his home among the mountains by the sea.

It was with a burning throb at his heart that he recognised in the King of all these kings no other than himself.

While he looked, in amazement so great that he could hear the pulse of his heart, as in the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of a woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom-self rise till he stood towering over all there, and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and fell through the eternal silences.

“Comrades in God,” it said, “the time is come when that which is great shall become small.”

And when the voice was ended, the mighty figure faded into the blue darkness, and only a great star shone where the uplifted dragon-helm had brushed the roof of heaven. One by one the white lords of the sky followed in his mysterious way, till once more were to be seen only the stars of the Bear.

The boy-king dreamed that he fell as a falling meteor, and then that he floated over land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank as mist upon the hills of his own land.

A noise of wind stirred in his ears, and he felt the chill dew creep over his hands like the stealthy cold lip of the tide. He rose stumblingly, and stood, staring around him. He was on the same spot, under the brow of the hill that looked over the dim shoreless seas, now obscure with the dusk. He glanced upward and saw the stars of the Great Bear in their slow majestic march round the Pole. Then he remembered.

He went slowly down the hillside, his mind heavy with thought. When he was come to the place of the King his father, lo, Pendragon and all his fierce chivalry came out to meet him, for the archdruid had foretold that the great King to be had received his mystic initiation among the holy silence of the hills.

“I am no more Snowbird the child,” the boy said, looking at them fearlessly, and as though already King. “Henceforth I am Arth-Uthyr,[2] for my place is in the Great Bear which we see yonder in the north.”

[2] Pronounced _Arth-Uir_, or _Arth-Ur_. In ancient British _Arth_ means Bear, and _Uthyr_ great, wondrous.

So all there acclaimed him as Arthur, the wondrous one of the stars, the Great Bear.

“I am old,” said Pendragon, “and soon you shall be King, Arthur my son. So ask now a great boon of me and it shall be granted to you.”

Then Arthur remembered his dream.

“Father and King,” he said, “when I am the King after you I shall make a new order of knights, who shall be strong and pure as the Immortal Ones, and be tender as women, and simple as little children. But first I ask of you seven flawless virgin knights to be of my chosen company. To-morrow let the wood-wrights make for me a round daïs or table such as that where we eat our roasted meats and drink from the ale-horns, but round and of a size whereat I and my chosen knights may sit at ease.”

The King listened, and all there.

“So be it,” said the King.

Then Arthur chose the seven flawless virgin knights, and called them to him.

“Ye are now Children of the Great Bear,” he said, “and comrades and liegemen to me, Arthur, who shall be King of the West. And ye shall be known as the Knights of the Round Table. But no man shall make a mock of that name and live: and in the end that name shall be so great in the mouths and minds of men that they shall consider no glory of the world to be so great as to be the youngest and frailest of that knighthood.”

* * * * *

And that is how Arthur, the son of Pendragon, who three years later became King of the West, read the Rune of the Stars that are called the Great Bear, and took their name upon him, and from the strongest and purest and noblest of the land made Knighthood, such as the world had not seen, such as the world since has not known.

* * * * *

Very different, a cruder legend of the Polestar, the drift of which I heard some months ago from a fisherman of Ross, ‘foregathered with’ in the Sound of Morvern.

One day, Finn, before he was born the King of the West, a thousand years earlier than that and maybe thousands more on the top of that thousand, went hunting a great bear beyond the highest mountains in Ross and Sutherland. It came to the Ord, and then, seeing there was no more land, it went into the sea with an awesome plunge, like Iceland in the story before it swam away from Scotland, so that the fish were knocked out of the nets and the fishing cobles were thrown on the shores like buckies, and the tides ran like hares till they leaped into the sea again at the rocks of Wick and over Cromarty Cliffs. Aye, it is said a green wave ran right through the great Kirk at Inverness; and that away across the lands of Mackenzie and Chisholm, of Fraser and Gordon, a storm of foam blew like snow against the towers and steeples of Aberdeen. At least all this might well have been, if in those old ancient days there had been any Aberdeen or Inverness to see it, or if there were cobles and nets then, as, for all you or I or the wind know, there may have been. Well, the Bear swam away due north, and Finn after it and his great hounds Luath and Dorch. It took them a month to come up with it, and then it was among mountains of solid ice with the sea between hard as granite. Then it came to the place where there’s an everlasting Rainbow. The Bear climbed this, to jump to the other side of the Pole, but Luath ran up one side and Dorch the other and Finn hurled his great shining spears, one after the other: so that down the bear came with a rush, and so great was the noise and stramash that the icebergs melted, and out flew thousands of solanders and grey swans and scarts and God knows what all, every kind of bird that is with a web to its foot. The hounds fell into the water, and the Bear lay on a floe like a wounded seal, but Finn never moved an inch but put spear after spear into the Bear. “Well, you’re dead now,” he said; “and if you’re not, you ought to be,” he added, seeing that the Bear was up again and ready to be off.

“This can’t go on,” said God Allfather, so He swung a noose and sagged up the Bear into the black Arctic sky. But the hounds hung on to its tail, and so were carried up too. And as for Finn, he took the hero-leap, and with one jump was on the Pole, and with the next was in the Northman’s Torch (_Arcturus_), and with the third was on the Hill of Heaven itself. And that’s where he went back to on the day he died after his three hundred years of mortal life. He’s never moved since, and he won’t move again, till Judgment Day. And by the same token, you can see the Great Bear prowling round the Pole still, and Finn the Watchman never letting him go by, night or day, day or night, and far away down are the two Hounds that herd the Great Bear and his mate. And when these come too near, Finn hurls his spears, and that’s when we see the Northern Lights. And behind the streamers and the auroras and the rainbows and the walls of ice Finn looks into the Garden of Eden--Paradise as they say, just the Flatheanas of the old tales, the old songs. And who would be doubting it?

WHITE WEATHER

A MOUNTAIN REVERIE

To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs of every strath and corrie, may not have for many people the charm of the southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a call as potent as any that can put the bittersweet ache into longing hearts. There is peace there: and silence is there: and, withal, a beauty that is not like any other beauty. The air and wind are auxiliary; every cloud or mist-drift lends itself to the ineffable conspiracy; the polar breath itself is a weaver of continual loveliness often more exquisitely delicate than the harebell, often incalculable or immeasurable, or beautiful with strangeness, as moonlight on great waters, or the solitary torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the heart of a mountain-tarn. There is no soundlessness like it. And yet the silence is relative; is, in a word, but an imagination laid upon an illusion. If there is no wind on the moor, there may be a wandering air among the lower heights. If so, many hollows of rocks, caverns lost in bracken, caves of hill-fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the daw and the hoodie and filled with holes as though the broken flutes of the dead forgotten giants of old tales, will make a low but audible music: a lifting and falling sighing, with singular turnings upon itself of an obscure chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is slipping into this side knowledge and is almost on the edge of memory, slides like rain along that edge and vanishes, vague as an unremembered fragrance. Or if the suspense be so wide that not a breath moves lower than where the corries climb towards the very brows of the mountains, one will surely hear, far up among the time-hollowed scarps and weather-sculptured scaurs, that singular sound which can sink to a whimpering, as of unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans strayed and bewildered, or can be as though unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-way with songs and strange flutes and thin wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused tumult as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a lamentation more desperate than the cries of men and a lamenting as of that mysterious and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the Wind. The wind, in truth, is almost always to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye may learn, where the ear fails: as when one is in a glen or strath or on a shore or moor, and, looking up, may see smoke rising from the serrated crests or the curving sky-lines, like the surf of vast billows--to realise soon, that this volcanic apparition means no more than that vast volumes of driven snow are being lifted by the north wind and whirled against and over the extreme mountain-bastions. _Trath chaidleas ’s a ghleann an t-àile_, ‘when the air sleeps in the glens,’ goes a Gaelic saying, ‘you may hear the wind blowing in the high corries _mar chaithream chlàr_,’ like the symphony of harps.

Then, too, it is rare that the snowy wilderness is without voice of mountain torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-world in a grip so terrible that the smaller birds cannot fly in the freezing air, there are rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the hands-of-ice are whirled aside like foam, and the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock to rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow, from brief turbulent channels to chasms and crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp smell of churned surge, above which as ceaselessly rises a phantom spray. Again, there is that strange, continual earth-movement, the alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who suddenly unloosened that rush of rock and earth yonder? What enemy moved that boulder that leapt and hurtled and crashed downward and beyond, but a score yards away? Of what elfin-artillery are those rattling stones the witness? What hand, in the silence, thrust itself through the snow and crumbled that old serrated ledge, where, a week ago, the red deer stood sniffing the wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white ptarmigan searched the heather?

Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie. They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind? ... what but the Merry Folk, _Clann Aighean Siubhlach_, the Wandering Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger--a _guth accaimeach_, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound, the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said--after himself lamenting in sympathy _tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ..._ ‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’--that it went like this: _Tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!_... ‘We are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’

Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that, for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and animals. The corbie he called _An t-Eun Acarachd_, the Merciless, literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called _An t-Eun_ (_Adhar_ or _Aidhre_), the bird of the snow or frost--though this is but a variant, of course, of the more familiar _Sneacag_ or _Eun-an-Sneachel_. When he spoke of the eagle simply as _An t-Eun Mòr_, the great bird, that seemed less noteworthy, but when he added, _Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù_, I was puzzled. I thought he meant _aboo_ to simulate the _Iolair’s_ cry, though it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I never thought of it as _Abù_, however, till one day I came upon this word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the good name _An t-Eun Chaismeachd_, ‘the bird of alarm’--how good a name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as _cho luath ri sgadan_, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, _cho luath ris nafeadag_, ‘as swift as the plover.’

White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet, the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, _Shilfe-monaidh_ (_i.e._, the moor--chaffinch), another a pretty name, _Breacan-Beithe_, ‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged _iolair_ that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There is a familiar proverb that ‘_Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois firein aois crsoibh dharaich_,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’ whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (_an t-ar_), one of the oldest names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally believed: therefore the eagle lives three hundred, and the oak’s age is at least nine hundred years. I recall, in connection with the eagle, a singular saying which I heard many years ago and have not since heard or anywhere encountered, to the effect that between dusk and dawn a bat’s flight will be the equivalent of a thousand miles, that between dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a thousand miles, and that a thousand miles is the measure of an eagle’s flight between sunrise and sunset.

Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and the snow-held hills. Everywhere, now, the White Weather may have spread. Far south, listeners may hear the _honk-honk_ of the travelling solander, that most musical and thrilling of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns: or, like phantom-voices from the world of dreams, the _kuilliyak-ee, kuilliyak-o_ of the wild swans, the _Clann righ fo gheasan_, the Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel through the snowy twilight under the dawn-star may remember the dim lands of the north, and a great mountain that rises among white and silent hills and looks down upon a black tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-frost, and so strangely spared of the snow, that not a white wing rests there, or floats overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail in an enchanted sea.

ROSA MYSTICA

(AND ROSES OF AUTUMN)

... _Rosa Sempiterna
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol._...

Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it is difficult for me to realise that the swallow has gone on her long flight to the South, that last night I heard countless teal flying overhead, and before dawn this morning the mysterious _honk-honk_ of the wild-geese. A white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and beaten silver, still molten, still luminous as with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as faint, drowned in a universal delicate haze of silver-grey and pearl. But already a change to pale apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing along a grey-green line that may be where sky and sea meet, or may be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts, but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow licked up by twilight.

Along the husht garden-ways beside me and behind me are roses, crimson and yellow, sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-red damask, and a trailing-rose, brought from France, that looks as though it were live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the rose. Summer has gone, but the phantom-summer is here still. A yellow butterfly hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel: two white butterflies faintly flutter above a corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence. A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated, insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the hour of the rose.

“_C’est l’heure de la rose
L’heure d’ambre et flamme,
Quand dans mon àme
Je sens une Blanche Rose Éclose._”

To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from the west into the dark north: before dawn a steely frost will come over the far crests of the hills. To-morrow the garden will be desolate: a garden of phantom dreams. They have waited long, spell-bound! but the enchantment is fallen; in a few hours all shall be a remembrance. What has so marvellously bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating wind and far-drifting rains and the blight of the sea, will pass in a night. Already, a long way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming sound, like stifled bees. So ... the foam of storm is on the skerries of the seaward isles. Already from the north, a faint but gathering chill comes on the slanting wings of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking of an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten poem:

“_Ged tha thu ’n diugh ’a d’aibheis fhuar,
Bha thu nair ’a d’aros righ_--”

“(_Though thou art to-day a cold ruin
Thou wert once the dwelling of a king._)”

In the long history of the Rose, from the time when the Babylonians carried sceptres ornamented now with this flower now with the apple or lotus, to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in the time of Henry VII.: from the straying into English gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely yellow cabbage-rose which first came into notice shortly after Shakespeare’s death, or from Shakespeare’s own ‘Provençal rose,’ which is no other than the loved and common cabbage-rose of our gardens: from the combes of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey meads in the days of Chaucer and has now wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather it in his brief hyperborean summer: from Keats’ musk-rose--

“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves--”

to that Green Rose which for more than half a century has puzzled the rose-lover and been a theme of many speculations ... a thousand wise and beautiful things have been said of this most loved of flowers and not a few errors been perpetuated.

What has become of the Blue Roses to which in 1800 a French writer, Guillemeau, alludes as growing wild near Turin? They are no less phantoms than some of the rose-allusions which the poet has made sacrosanct, that to the Rhetorician have become an accepted convention. Again, we are told and retold that the cult of the rose is a modern and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is said, the allusions of the Latin poets are not those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the Rose of Catullus, we are reminded, that blooms in the old Italic literature, the flower of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to more for its associations and its decorative value than for love borne to it or enthusiasm lit by it as by a fragrant flame.

All this may be so, and yet I am not persuaded that the people of ancient days did not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if perhaps differently than, we do. It is true that the ancients do not appear to have regarded nature, either in the abstract or in the particular, in the way characteristic of peoples of modern times and above all of our own time. But literary allusiveness does not reveal the extent or the measure of the love of objects and places. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that so beauty-loving a people as the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The fact that only a mere handful of roses may be culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom from Theocritus, a few wild-roses from the Anthology, an epithet from Homer, an image from Simonides or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden mouth, this paucity--so singular compared with the Rose of Poetry in our English speech, from Chaucer’s ‘Rose of Rhone’ to Mr. Yeats’s ‘Rose on the Rood of Time,’ loved and sung through a thousand years. Such paucity does not necessarily mean that only a few poets casually alluded to this supreme flower, and that it was unnoticed or unloved of the many. Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers, and children made coronals, and at mourning ceremonies and marriage festivals these flowers were strewn. The very fact that Sappho called the rose the queen of flowers showed that it was distinguished from and admired among even the violets, pre-eminently the flowers of Athens. That she likened a young maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an Arab poet likens his love to a delicate green palm, or as when a northern poet speaks of her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a wave dancing on the sea.

Then, again, the Rose would not have been consecrated to Venus, as an emblem of beauty: to Eros, as an emblem of love: to Aurora, as an emblem of Youth: and to Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence: if this symbolic usage were not such as would seem fit and natural. That roses, too, were in general demand is evident alone from their far-famed culture and the great trade in them at Paestum, the Lucanian town colonised by the Greek Sybarites five hundred years B.C. All mediæval and later literature is full of the beauty and fragrance of the rose, but were it not so, one could infer that the flower was held in high esteem from the fact that it has for ages been the wont of the Popes to have a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when consecrated, to present it to some Catholic monarch as a token of special regard. Thus it seems to me that were there not a single allusion to the rose by any great poet from Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theocritus, we might yet discern the love of the ancient Greeks for this flower from, let us say, a single surviving phrase such as the anonymous lovely epitaphial prayer-poem in the Anthology:--‘May many flowers grow on this newly-built tomb; not the dried-up Bramble, or the red flower loved by goats; but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus growing in water; and around thee may all Roses grow.’

In Persia and the East, from Hindustân to Palestine, from remotest Asia to Abyssinia and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved and honoured. Sâdi of the Rose-garden and many another has sung of it with ecstasy. The Hindû god Indra, even Buddha himself, suffered for robbing a paradisaical garden of a rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for plucking an apple but a rose: it was a fatal rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican legend gathered to her undoing and that of all her descendants.

What innumerable legends centre round this flower. In every country and in either hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet and the myth-maker and the legend-weaver have occupied their imaginations to enhance its beauty, to deepen its significance.

Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang from the blood of the wounded Adonis, the supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of Venus. An older Hellenic legend declares that the rose was originally white, till Eros, dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of nectar upon Venus’s flower, which thereupon became red. Christian legend, on the other hand, would have it that the red rose sprang from the brands which had been lighted at Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-martyr. Remote from Syria as from Greece, the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and Love, bled at the coming of Christ--akin to which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was white till a drop of Christ’s blood fell from the Cross ... a variant of which is that the robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ’s forehead till they stained its breast red, leaned exhausted against a wild white-rose on Calvary, which ever after was red as blood. I do not know the origin of the legend save that it is Teutonic in its present colour and shape, of how the Crown of Thorns was woven of the Briar-Rose, and how the drops that fell from the thorns became blood-hued blooms. Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that Judas made a ladder of the rose-briar with which to reach the closed doors of heaven: hence why it is that the name Judas-Stairs is given to the Briar in some parts of Germany to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called _Judasbeeren_.

Most beautiful of surviving rose-customs is that akin to what is still done in some remote parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into the hand of a dead child, so that the little one may have something to play with in Paradise. I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned fisherman in whose hand was placed a red rose, symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless youth. Against this must be set the strange and widespread aversion to throwing a rose into a grave, or even letting one fall or be lowered there. (‘It is throwing red life away’ it was explained to me once,--with the grim addition, ‘and Death will at once be hungry for more of the rose-thrower.’)

Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, long anterior to the familiar song so named: a legend of how at Samhain (Hallowmass) when of old was held the festival of summer ended and of winter begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones and, after consecration and invocation, threw it into the sea.

To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet-shadowed translucency, I dream again that old dream, and wonder what its portent then, what its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, the eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing is more strange than the life of natural symbols. We may discern in them a new illusion, a new meaning: the thought we slip into them may be shaped to a new desire and coloured with some new fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and nameless longing in the heart: but the symbol has seen a multitude of desires come and go like shadows, has been troubled with many longings and baffled wings of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the myriad wave, the illimitable host of cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol of the Lily has been the chalice of the world’s tears; the symbol of the Rose, the passion of uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire; in the symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance in a flower, the human Soul. The salt, mutable, and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom in which empires have seen Time like a shadow, the mirage by which kings have wept and nations been amorous in a great pride. The Wind, that no man has seen, on whose rushing mane no hand has been laid, and in whose mouth has been set no bridle since the world swung out of chaos on chariots of flame, ... has not that solitary and dread creature of the deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image of the Everlasting, and in our hearts been shaped to the semblance of a Spirit?

A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunfire, and thrown into the sea, with strange hymns, with supplication ... what a symbol this of the desires that do not die with nations, the longings that outlive peoples, the grass of prayer that Time has trampled upon and left and forever leaves green and virginal?

To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the sea.--Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty, that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul, of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn, that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires, and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery, still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the unanswering Deep.

THE STAR OF REST

A FRAGMENT

_REST_--what an OCEANIC word! I have been thinking of this unfathomable, unpenetrable word with mingled longing, and wonder, and even awe.

What depths are in it, what infinite spaces, what vast compassionate sky, what tenderness of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what quiet sinkings and fadings into peace.

Waking early, I took the word as one might take a carrier-dove and loosed it into the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind--and it rose again and again in symbolic cloud-thought, now as an infinite green forest murmurous with a hidden wind, now in some other guise and once as Ecstasy herself, listening.

_Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills,
Good-night!_

“... _a change
from dream of Beauty, to
Beauty_.”

_F. M._]

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

SOME PRESS NOTICES

“Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty which Mr. Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic art--it is this which gives to Miss Macleod’s work its peculiar æsthetic charm.”--_Mr. Ashcroft Noble._

* * * * *

“Miss Macleod is a poet. Her prose _is_ prose--it is a poet’s prose.... She excels in the very quality most Celtic literature so signally wants--namely, _form_.... But more than a sense of form is evident in her stories. She has the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the attentive spirit, the brooding mind. She has caught and construed into sweet words all the magical beauty of the themes, nor has she shrunk from their horror; and in almost all one is conscious of that unknown something that ‘moves in the shadow of life.’ ‘It is Destiny,’ she tells us, ‘that is the Protagonist in the Celtic drama.’”--_To-day._

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“Miss Macleod’s genius has long been recognised as representing most completely the revival of the Celtic spirit in modern English literature.”--_The Manchester Guardian._

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“Miss Macleod is a Celt of the Celts; her theme is the ancient trouble of her race.... She appeals to a little clan of her own, to whom the wild bees of the spirit come, as secret wings in the dark, with the sound and breath of forgotten things. To that clan _The Winged Destiny_ will be more than welcome. It shows in abundance all the writer’s usual qualities of charm and manner.... Criticism bends before the magic glamour of the north, where the sea foam is white and the skies are dark with cloud and wind. The land of the Gael is something rare and apart; and rare and apart, judge it as you will, is the art of Fiona Macleod.”--_The Glasgow Herald._

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“What I admire in the work of Miss Fiona Macleod is her infinite sympathy for all that is beautiful, either in what we usually call inanimate nature, or in the deeds and words of men. She too--and this is no mean compliment--respects her own gift, and bestows it royally.”--_Country Life._

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“‘There is no mystery in them, or anywhere, except the eternal mystery of beauty’--and Miss Macleod certainly possesses the master key to the heart of that mystery.”--_The Daily Chronicle._

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“Miss Macleod persuades one more than ever that she is the possessor of that rare and precious thing, genius.... Her work has energy, passion, beauty, and sweetness.”--_The National Observer._

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“‘J’avais le sentiment de l’infini et de l’éternel et de là mes sourires pour les choses qui passent. Mais l’Esprit ne passe point.’ Cette belle phrase de Renan s’applique assez exactment à l’auteur de _The Winged Destiny_, Miss Fiona Macleod. Ce livre qui s’est ‘dressé comme un fantôme hors des bois hautés’ a le charme indicible des précédents œuvres de cet auteur. Miss Macleod a quelque chose de visionnaire et d’indéfini, d’étrangement mélancolique, de profondément émouvant.... Tout cela, c’est bien ‘le rêve de la vie vue en beauté,’ et voir les choses dans leur beauté c’est les voir dans leur vérité, comme l’a dit Matthew Arnold.”--_Le Mercure de France._

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation errors have been fixed.

A couple of instances of repeated words have been fixed.

Page 58: “dear and familar to us” changed to “dear and familiar to us”

Page 225: “French poet or romancist” changed to “French poet or romanticist”

Page 344: “to enchance its beauty” changed to “to enhance its beauty”