The Wild girl of the mouth of red berries, with voice 

 Apple. sweeter than the string's of a curved harp, and 

 skin showing like the snow of a single night ' ? 

 And there, vanishing in the sunlit cataract of 

 gold itself, like a rainbow behind falling water, 

 was not that Niamh of the Golden Tresses ? 

 . . . Niamh, whose beauty was so great that 

 the poets of the Other-world and those who 

 died of love for her called her Love Entangled, 

 she whose beauty filled three hundred years in 

 the single hour that Fionn thought he was 

 with her, in the days when the ancient world 

 had suddenly grown old, and the little bell of 

 Patrick the Christ-Bringer had tinkled sorrow 

 and desolation and passing away across the 

 Irish hills. Up among the devious green path- 

 ways of the travelling wood what lost king's 

 voice was that ? . . . 



" Say, down those halls of Quiet 



Doth he cry upon his Queen ? 

 Or doth he sleep, contented 



To dream of what has been ? " 



. . . what poet of long ago, living in a flame 

 of passion still, a wandering breath for ever, 

 went by on that drowsy wind ? 



" Across the world my sorrow flies, 

 A-hunger for the grey and wistful 

 Beauty of Feithfailge's eyes." 

 130 



