

old sea-divinities lie there asleep, and perilous The 

 phantoms come out of sunken ships and Gardens 

 ancient weed -grown towns; and how there g e 

 roams abroad, alike in the flowing wave and 

 along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, 

 an incalculable Terror that may be manifold, 

 the cold implacable demons of the deep, or 

 may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom 

 men have called Poseidon and Mananan and 

 by many names. 



What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn, 

 this Land- Under- Wave. How little we know 

 of it, for all that wise men have told us con- 

 cerning the travelling tides, of currents as 

 mysteriously steadfast in their comings and 

 goings as the comets that from age to age 

 loom briefly upon the stellar roads : how little, 

 though they have put learned designations to 

 a thousand weeds, and given names to ten 

 thousand creatures to whom the whole world 

 of man and all his hopes and dreams are less 

 than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic 

 poet who said that the man who goes to Tir- 

 fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where the 

 human soul is sand, and God is but the 

 unloosened salt, tells us as much as the scientist 

 who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim 

 crustacean life where one had believed to be 

 only a lifeless dark. Above the weed-held 



217 



