The * The returning one ' the cuckoo is called in an 



Cuckoo's o id saga. It is the ancient mystery, Love, the 

 Silence. SQn of Earth . the wi i dwood brother of him, 



that other Love, who puts aside the green 

 branches of home to long for the shining stars, 

 who sighs unappeased by white breasts and 

 dreams of one beautiful and far-off, made of 

 the wandering rainbow, of the dew, of the 

 fragrance of flowers. The one comes with the 

 green wind and goes with the grey wind : the 

 other puts on blindness as divine vision, and 

 deafness as a sacred veil, and wooes Psyche. 



All old primitive tales know the advent of 

 this mysterious bird. Was not, as I have said, 

 the divine Hera herself wooed thus by Zeus ? 

 In that ancient Heraion, in the heart of the 

 Peloponnesos which Pausanias saw, he tells us 

 of a statue of the goddess whose sceptre bore 

 the image of this spring-born voice of eternal 

 love and eternal illusion. The people loved it 

 not, for in their eyes the story covered an evil 

 thing : but the priests bowed before an ancient 

 mystery, and the poets smiled, and the 

 musicians paused and wondered and struck a 

 new vibrant note. In every country there are 

 oldtime tales of the cuckoo with the attributes 

 of a god, or demigod, or at least of magic and 

 illusion. When, in the great Northern saga, 

 Ilmarinen, the son of Wondersmith and the 

 182 



