Part 5

Truly the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptarmigan are ‘the eldest children of the hill.’ The stag may climb thus high too at times, for outlook, or for the intoxication of desolation and of illimitable vastness; sometimes the hawks soar over the wilderness; even the mountain-hares sometimes reach and race desperately across these high arid wastes. But these all come as men in forlorn and lonely lands climb the grey uninhabitable mountains beyond them, seeking to know that which they cannot see beneath, seeking often for they know not what. They are not dwellers there. The stag, that mountain-lover, cannot inhabit waste rock; the red grouse would perish where the ptarmigan thrives and is content.

How little has been written about these birds of the mountain-brow. What poetry is in their name, for those who know the hills. They dwell higher than the highest June-flight of the tireless swift, higher than the last reaches of the sunrise-leaping larks. Cities might crumble away in pale clouds of dust, floods might whelm every lowland, great fires might devour the forests and the red insatiable myriad of flame lap up the last high frontiers of bracken and climbing heather, and the ptarmigan would know nothing of it, would not care. Their grey home would be inviolate. No tempest can drive them forth. Even the dense snows of January do not starve them out. Do they not mock them by then taking the whiteness of the snow for their own? They have nothing to fear save the coming of a black frost so prolonged and deathly that even the sunfire in the eagle’s blood grows chill, and the great pinions dare no more face the icy polar breath. ‘They’ll be the last things alive when the world is cold,’ said an old gillie to me, speaking of these storm-swept lichen-fed children of the upper-wild.

The same old gillie once saw a strange sight at my mountain-tarn. He had when a youth climbed Maoldhu to its summit in midwinter, because of a challenge that he could not do what no other had ever done at that season. He started before dawn, but did not reach the lochan till a red fire of sunset flared along the crests. The tarn was frozen deep, and for all the pale light that dwelled upon it was black as basalt, for a noon-tempest had swept its surface clear of snow. At first he thought small motionless icebergs lay in it, but wondered at their symmetrical circle. He descended as far as he dared, and saw that seven wild-swans were frozen on the tarn’s face. They had alit there to rest, no doubt: but a fierce cold had numbed them, and an intense frost of death had suddenly transfixed each as they swam slowly circlewise as is their wont. They may have been there for days, perhaps for weeks. A month later the gillie repeated his arduous and dangerous feat. They were still there, motionless, ready for flight as it seemed.

How often in thought I have seen that coronal of white swans above the dark face of that far, solitary tarn: in how many dreams I have listened to the rustle of unloosening wings, and seen seven white phantoms rise cloud-like, and like clouds at night drift swiftly into the dark; and heard, as mournful bells through the solitudes of sleep, the honk-honk of the wild-swans traversing the obscure forgotten ways to the secret country beyond sleep and dreams and silence.

AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR

When one hears of ‘the dead months,’ of ‘dead December’ and ‘bleak January,’ the best corrective is to be found in the coppice or by the stream-side, by the field-thicket, in the glens, and even on the wide moors if the snow is not everywhere fallen, a coverlet so dense and wide that even the juniper has not a green spike to show, or the dauntless bunting a clean whin-branch to call from on the broomieknowe. Even the common sayings reveal a knowledge hidden from those to whom winter is ‘a dead season’ ... and it is a continual surprise to find how many people believe that from the fall of the leaf or the first sleet and snow, till the thrush doubles and trebles his note in the February wet-shine, that bird and insect and all green life have gone, that all Nature is dead or asleep. Thus, for example, ‘as keen in the hearing as a winter-plover’ must have been uttered, when first said, by a watcher of the multiform bird-life of our winter-fields and fallow lands, one who knew that the same drama of life and death is enacted in midwinter as in midspring or midsummer, a drama only less crowded, less complex and less obvious, but not less continual, not less vital for the actors. Who that has watched the pee-wits seeking worms on ploughed lands at midwinter, and seen them poise their delicate heads and listen for the phantom rustle of a worm in this clod or under yonder fallow, while the greedy but incapable seamews, inland come from frost bound coasts or on the front of prolonged gales, hear nothing of ‘the red people’ and trust only to bulk and fierce beak to snatch the prey from hungry plover-bills ... who that has seen this can fail to recognise the aptness of the saying, ‘as keen in the hearing as a winter-plover’? Who that has watched the ebb and flow of lark-life, resident and immigrant; the troubled winter-days of the field-travellers (as the familiar word ‘fieldfare’ means) and the wandering thrushes; the vagrant rooks, the barn-haunting hoodie; the yellow-hammer flocks and the tribes of the finch; the ample riverside life, where heron and snipe, mallard and moor-hen, wren and kingfisher, and even plover and the everywhere adaptable starling are to be found with ease by quick eyes and careful ears: who that has seen the sudden apparition of the bat, or the columnar dance of the ephemeridæ, or the flight of the winter-moth along the dishevelled hedgerows: or who that, besides the mistletoe and the ivy, the holly and the fir, the box and the late-flowering clematis, and many other of the green and flowering clans of the forest and the garden, has noted the midwinter-blooming shepherd’s purse, healing groundsel, bright chickweed, and red deadnettle, can think of nature as lifeless at this season? When amid the rains and storms of December an old gardener, instead of saying that spring was on the move, remarked to me that ‘’Twill be starling days soon,’ he gave voice to a truth of observation as impressive as it is beautiful. For often December has not lapsed before the mysterious breeding-change of the Vita Nuova, the New Life that spreads like a flowing wave so early in the coming year will begin to be obvious on the dun-hued lapwing, on the inland-wandering gull, and even on one or other of the small ‘clan of the bushes’ more dear and familiar to us. On none, however, is the change so marked as on the blithe starling, surely the bird of cheerfulness, for he will sing (does he ever cease that ever-varying call or flute or whistle of his?) when the lark cannot rise in the polar air, when the missel-thrush will not throw a challenge on the wet wind, and long before the most jubilant great-tit in the forest will ring his early tinkling bell under leafless boughs. For, even at Christmastide, though rarely perhaps quite so early, the dark bill will suddenly yellow, and a green and purple sheen will come over the russet plumage. Already Nature has looked northward again. And, when she looks, there is at once a first movement of the infinite sweet trouble of the New Life once more. The Creative Spirit is come again from the sun-ways of the South. ‘’Twill be starling days soon’--what is that but a homely way of saying that the old year has not lapsed before the new year has already stirred with the divine throes of rebirth. ‘The King is dead: Long live the King!’ is the human analogue. There is no interregnum. The cuckoo may have fled before the swallow, the landrail before the wild swan, but during the grey ebb of autumn ten thousand wings have rustled in the dawn as the migrants from oversea descend at last on our English and Scottish shores. A myriad host may have fled at the equinox, or lingered till the wet winds of the west and the freezing blasts of the north swept them from November; but on those east winds from Norway and the Baltic, from Jutland and Friesland, on those south winds leaping upward from the marshes of Picardy and the Breton heathlands and from all of the swarm-delivering South behind, on those south-west gales warm with the soft air of the isles of the west, and wet with the foam over lost Ys and sunken Lyonesse, what an incalculable host has come hitherward. Like great fans, the invisible pinions of the Bird-God, that Winged Spirit whom a Finnish legend images in continual suspense at the Cross ways of the Four Winds, beat this way and that: so that when already the lament of the wild-geese in storm-baffled flight from the South ulules in our norland dawns, clouds of larks are gathered like dust from the North-Sea lands, and are blown upon our shores, a multitude of thrush turn westward, the rook and the hoodie rise on the Danish wind, and yonder shadow drifting over the woods of Norway is none other than ten thousand fieldfares whose congregation will soon be spilt like rain upon our fields and pastures.

When is the turn of the year? We have certainly not to wait till the missel-thrush calls down the wind on the moist south-wester that comes in February. The changing seasons are indifferent to our calendars. Autumn may burn the lime and chestnut while Summer is still in her glory; Summer may steal back upon us through the September haze, or even after we have heard the dry rustle in the woods of October. We are familiar with the return of halcyon days when St. Luke’s Peace follows the wind Euroclydon, or when St. Martin’s summer gleams like a quiet sunset on the stormy brows of Winter. In mid-December the gnat may still be seen spinning her dance by the hedgerow, the warmth-loving bat may still wheel through silent afternoon dusks, the robin will pitch his blithe song from holly to holly, the hedgesparrow will chase the winter moth, the chaffinch will challenge the marauding tit. In January, when the snow-lids open and the blue is seen, a lark will spray his sudden music from far up in the pale azure, and as the long notes tinkle and the interwoven song falls down the blue invisible ways, we almost imagine that sky-glimpse to be the very face of spring.

Thus we have to wait for no day on which to note from the calendar that the New Year is come, or on which to exclaim that Winter is gone and Spring has arrived. A day may come, in February, perhaps, when, suddenly, one will realise, as after sleep one realises one is awake, that the hands of the South are in the woods, that the eyes of the South are looking into the white sleep of blossom and flower, that the breath of the South has awakened love, has stirred music in the hearts of all the clans of song. But if we had not ourselves been asleep we should not have waited thus long for the exquisite surprise. We should have known the divine conspiracy by which the North and South are lovers, and the West comrade to the East. The conspiracy of the eternal passion by which power desires power, and dominion lusteth after dominion: so that all the effort of the North is to touch the lips of the South, all the dream of the East is to reach the sunset-gardens of the West. We should have known, when out of December frost or January snow the redbreast thrilled a canticle of joy, or the russet moth sought his wingless love in windless flame-set twilights, that the Grey Lover already felt the breath from those ardent lips. We should have realised that when across the snow-silence the fieldfares no longer edged southward, that when on the upland-pasture the lapwing began his bridal change and in the bare orchard the starling began to glisten as though he had bathed at the edge of the rainbow, or to wonder, in some ice-set mirror, at his dun beak now grown yellow as the sheltered crocus he knows of under the garden-yew ... we should have realised that while this dark-browed barbarian from the North slept, the fair woman of the South had passed smiling by, and kissed him as she passed.

The breeding-change that may be seen even before Christmas, the January stir that becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day, after the New Year is come, here and now we are at the turn of the year. By mid-January, even, here and there, the song-thrush and the missel may have begun to build, and even the great-tit’s bell may tinkle in the coppice or wind-spared russet oak-glade. Already the snowdrop and the Christmas-rose, the green-white aconite and the pale winter-iris are become old acquaintances: many a primrose may have adventured in shy retreats: any day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of music from among the first yellow spray of hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow may unloosen song under the early-opening woodbine-buds, the corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer or the wren try his new-year flute among the yellowing gorse: any day, at the sight of the first nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant dandelion, the yellow-hammer may become a lover and a poet. It is this unchanging ‘any-day’ element that redeems even the longest and dreariest midwinter; the sense of the ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins; the inward exultation at the ever-quickening and ever-slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life and death.

Yesterday, rain-fog; to-day, frost-mist. But how fascinating each. How vast and menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning gigantic over dim lapsing hedgerows. How phantom-like and processional, the elms stealing into view one after the other; the birches disclosing tresses wet with dews from the secret woods they are gliding from to regain the secret lands beyond the misty river where I can hear the mallard call, like a sudden tocsin among the falling towers and silent avalanches of Cloudland.

It is desolate here, where I stand.

“Cinnidh feanntag’s a ghàradh ’N uair thig faillinn ’san ròs”

“Nettles grow in the garden, While the roses decay.”

A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings his falling chime from the April-Tree or French-Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts of the Highlands. I know a wood where a great Bealaidh Fhrangach sleeps, to awake months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood-thrush will be its flute. Already I have to-day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum, for a friend who wants ‘a flute of the April-Tree’ (feadan na Craobh Abraon) ... for there is no timber better for the whistlewood of the bagpipe than this. And what more fit for the Strayed Pan, if perchance he follow the Phantom Call in the Hills of the North? But see ... the mist has gone like a haze from blue water. I hear starling-music over yonder in the Talamh nan Ramh, as Ossian calls the Country of the Woods. The Flute of the April-Tree, and snow at my feet! ‘The Flute of the April-Tree’: it has the yellow and white magic of spring in it.

THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND

Down thro’ the Northlands Come the White Brothers, One clad in foam And one mailed in water-- Foam white as bear-felt, Water like coat of mail. Snow is the Song of Me, Singeth the one; Silence the Breath of Me, Whispers the other.

So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant of one of the Saga-men whose songs the vikings carried to the ends of the world of that day. The song is called ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ and the allusion is to an old ballad-saga common in one form or another throughout all the countries of both the Gall and the Gael ... from Finland to the last of the island-kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic West. The White Brothers are familiar indeed, though with us they come oftener clothed with beauty than with terror, with strange and beautiful new life rather than with the solemnity and dread aspect of death.

Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose variant of ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ which I suppose is still told to children by the fireglow on winter evenings, as, when a child, the present writer was told it and retold it by the fireglow on many a winter evening when the crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near the window could be heard, or the sudden shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a tale, but sometimes the teller chants it as a duan or poem. For it is more a poem than a prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers.

The North Wind had three sons. These Sons of the North Wind were called White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands. When White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands first came into our world from the invisible palaces, they were so beautiful that many mortals died from beholding them, while others dared not look, but fled affrighted into woods or obscure places. So when these three sons of the Great Chieftain saw that they were too radiant for the eyes of the earth-bound they receded beyond the gates of the sunset, and took counsel with the Allfather. When, through the gates of dawn, they came again they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all the long grey reaches of the years, has any since been seen of mortal eyes. How are they known, these Sons of the North Wind? They were known of old, they are known still, only by the white feet of one treading the waves of the sea; and by the white rustle and sheen of a myriad tiny plumes as the other unfolds great pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and garths, and the homes of men; and by the white silence of dream that the third lays upon moving waters, and the windless boughs of trees, upon the reed by the silent loch, upon the grass by the silent tarn, upon the bracken by the unfalling hill-stream hanging like a scarf among the rock and mountain-ash. We know them no more by their ancient names or in their immortal body, but only thus by the radiance of their passing, and we call them the Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.

It is at this season, in all northern lands, that the miracle of the snow-change, the new beauty of the snow-world, is transcendent. Truly, it is miraculous, that change: that new world, what a revelation it is, showing us the familiar as we have never known it or have of it but a dreamlike remembrance, showing it to us at times as we can hardly conceive it. To the continual element of surprise much has to be attributed, in our country at least. In lands like Scandinavia and Russia the periodicity and uniformity of the snow-raiment of earth take much from this element of surprise. Hardly have the inhabitants grown used to the greenness of grass and sprouting grain and fluttering leaf, after the long months of a silent whiteness become dreadful as a shroud, when a grey pall is spun out of the east once more and out of the north comes the wind of death, and the leaf is gone away on the polar air, the grain is gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like wintry grey-green seas fading into continual foam.

Not so with us, who have those visitors, who can be so dread even here, for so short a time. The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling moving waters to silence and the blue rigour of steel, may reign for weeks in the Anglian fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover the hills of the north for months, and the foreheads of Nevis and Schiehallion be white from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo-cry: for weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare may not drink at the frozen tarns, the moor-pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and only the ptarmigan survive in the waste white places: for a week or two the boughs of the oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce and hemlock, the tresses of the larch and birch, may bend with the unmelting snowfall. But, at the worst, it is never long before a wind out of the south, or from the wet mouth of the west, breathes upon the fens, and the silence is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle; till the moveless steel is become a film, to be gathered some noon, like May-dew from the thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and gorse. It is never long till the meh-ing of the sheep is again a sweet lamentation upon the hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last snow from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the jay screams in the woodlands as from fir-plume and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy thump their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of the North Wind, as in the Highland West and North we know so well and often to such bitter cost, may come to us with suddenness of tempest, raging in their mysterious wrath, and may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in the old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of the Northern Lights trample the souls of the dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. Every year there is sorrow upon some strath, grief in the glens, lamentation by hillside and moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land’s End there may be a tale of disaster. Snow-drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse communications and bring deep anxiety or irremediable grief to an incalculable number. Yet, we must admit that even our severest winter is but a fierce reminder of times long past for us, the times of the mail-coach, the rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst we ever have is tolerable beside the bleak wretchedness of Pomerania, the frightful cold of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy--to say nothing of lands still more wild and remote.

One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest, here is ice in a unique beauty. Frozen lochs by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale azure of cloudless noons, dark winding rivers, lifeless seemingly in the grip of frost, traversed by starshine under overhanging boughs, lagoons where the dark-blue or steel-blue ice mirrors the drifting cloud or the flying skater, village-ponds, canals, the water-ways of towns and cities, in all, in each, the radiant miracle is evident. Like moonshine, this beauty of ice or snow may be omnipresent. If it inhabits the wilderness, it is fulfilled also in the streets of cities. Who has not looked out on the sordid thoroughfares of a town, and seen the poor ignoble disarray of chimney-tops and slated roofs and crude angles and ornamentations take on a new and entrancing aspect, so that even the untidy shops and tawdry dwellings assume a crown of loveliness, and the long, dull, perspectives of monotonous roads might be the trampled avenues about the gates of fairyland? The most sordid hamlet in the dreariest manufacturing-region may, suddenly, awake to a dawn so wonderful in what it reveals that the villagers might well believe, as in the old folk-tale, that Christ had passed that way in the night and left the world white and husht, stainlessly pure. But, of course, we have each of us our preferences. Some love best to see the long swelling reaches of ploughed lands covered with new fallen snow not too heavy to hide the wave-like procession of the hidden furrows. Some love best to look on wide interminable wolds, a solitude of unbroken whiteness, without even the shadow of a cloud or the half-light of a grey sky: some, upon familiar pastures now changed as though in the night the fields had receded into the earth and the fields of another world had silently sunk into their place: some, upon mountain-slopes, on whose vast walls the shadows of wheeling hawks and curlews pass like pale blue scimetars: some, on woodlands, where from the topmost elm-bough to the lowest fir-plume or outspread bough of cedar the immaculate soft burthens miraculously suspend. For myself--after the supreme loveliness of snowy mountain-ranges at dawn or sunset or moon-glow--I am most entranced by snow in a pine-forest. The more so if, as in one my mind recreates for me as I write, there are glades where I can come to a rock whence an over-leaning white hill may be seen as though falling out of heaven, with white mountains beyond, white shoulders lapsing on white shoulders, white peaks rising beyond white peaks, white crests fading into further snowy crests, and, nearer, it may be, glens sinking into glens, no longer a sombre green, but as though stilled avalanches awaiting a magician’s unloosening spell. Once, just there, in just such a place, I saw a wonderful sight. The January frosts had gone, and February had come in with the soft sighing of a wind out of the south. The snows faded like morning-mists. But after three days the north wind came again in the night. At dawn it veered, and a light snow fell once more, then thick and moist and flaky, and by noon had changed to rain. But an hour or so later the polar breath once more came over the brows of the hills, and with midwinter intensity. The rain was frozen on every bough, on every branch, on every spray, on every twig, on every leaf, on every frond of bracken, on every spire of reed, on every blade of grass. The world had become cased in shining ice, crystalline, exquisite in radiant beauty, ineffable, as in a trance, the ecstasy of the Unknown Dreamer. At sundown the vast orb of blood-red flame sank over the glens and burned among the aisles of the forest. Looking at the ice-mailed wilderness of bole and bough and branch between me and the sun I saw a forest of living fire, wherein, as a wind stirred and threw sudden shadows, phantoms of flame moved to and fro, or stood, terrible children of light, as though entranced, as though listening, as though looking on Life or on Death. When at last the flame was all gathered up out of the west, and an aura of faint rose hung under the first glittering stars, an extraordinary ocean of yellow spread from the horizons serrated with immense mauve peninsulas and long narrow grass-green lagoons. But the mass of the western firmament was yellow, from the orange-yellow of lichen and the orange-red of the dandelion to the faint vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose. How lovely then were the trees which had been set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the sunset: what a fairyland, now, of delicate amber and translucent topaz. What mysterious colonnades, what avenues of lovely light! And then, later, to turn, and see the chill grey-blue ice-bound trees behind one filling slowly with moonshine, as the immensity of ocean fills, wave after wave, at moonrise, when a cloud is slowly uplifted by mysterious withdrawing airs! Then, truly, was Dreamland no longer a phantasy of sleep, but a loveliness so great that, like deep music, there could be no words wherewith to measure it, but only the breathless unspoken speech of the soul upon whom has fallen the secret dews.

ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES

I have heard many names of St. Bridget, most beloved of Gaelic saints, with whom the month of February is identified ... the month of ‘Bride min, gentle St. Bride’ ... Brighid boidheach Muime Chriosd, Bride the Beautiful, Christ’s Foster Mother ... but there are three so less common that many even of my readers familiar with the Highland West may not know them. These are ‘the Fair Woman of February,’ ‘St. Bride of the Kindly Fire,’ and ‘St. Bride (or Bridget) of the Shores.’ They are of the Isles, and may be heard in some of the sgeulachdan gàidhealach, or Gaelic tales, still told among seafaring and hill folk, where the curse of cheap ignoble periodicals is unknown and books are rare. True, in several of the isles ... Colonsay, Tiree, the Outer Hebrides ... ‘St. Bride of the Shores’ is not infrequent in songs and seasonal hymns, for when her signals are seen along the grey beaches, on the sandy machars, by the meadow path, the glen-track, the white shore-road, the islanders know that the new year is disclosed at last, that food, warmth, and gladness are coming out of the south. As ‘the Fair Woman of February,’ though whatever other designation St. Bride goes by, she is often revealed. Her humble yellow fires are lit among the grasses, on the shore-ways, during this month. Everywhere in the Gaelic lands ‘Candlemas-Queen’ is honoured at this time. Am Fheill Bhride, the Festival of St. Bridget, was till recently a festival of joy throughout the west, from the Highland Line to the last weedy shores of Barra or the Lews: in the isles and in the remote Highlands, still is.

It is an old tale, this association of St. Bridget with February. It goes further back than the days of the monkish chroniclers who first attempted to put the disguise of verbal Christian raiment on the most widely-loved and revered beings of the ancient Gaelic pantheon. Long before the maiden Brigida (whether of Ireland or Scotland matters little) made her fame as a ‘daughter of God’; long before to Colum in Iona or to Patrick ‘the great Cleric’ in Ireland ‘Holy St. Bride’ revealed in a vision the service she had done to Mary and the Child in far-away Bethlehem in the East; before ever the first bell of Christ was heard by startled Druids coming across the hills and forest lands of Gaul, the Gaels worshipped a Brighde or Bride, goddess of women, of fire, of poetry. When, to-day, a Gaelic islesman alludes to Bridget of the Songs, or when a woman of South Uist prays to Good St. Bride to bless the empty cradle that is soon to be filled, or when a shennachie or teller of tales speaks of an oath taken by Bridget of the Flame, they refer, though probably unconsciously, to a far older Brighid than do they who speak with loving familiarity of Muime Chriosd, Christ’s Foster Mother, or Brighid-nam-Bratta, St. Bride of the Mantle. They refer to one who in the dim, far-off days of the forgotten pagan world of our ancestors was a noble and great goddess. They refer to one to whom the women of the Gael went with offerings and prayers, as went the women of ancient Hellas to the temples of Aphroditê, as went the Syrian women to the altars of Astarte, as went the women of Egypt to the milk-fed shrines of Isis. They refer to one whom the Druids held in honour as a torch bearer of the eternal light, a Daughter of the Morning, who held sunrise in one hand as a little yellow flame, and in the other held the red flower of fire without which men would be as the beasts who live in caves and holes, or as the dark Fómor who have their habitations in cloud and wind and the wilderness. They refer to one whom the bards and singers revered as mistress of their craft, she whose breath was a flame, and that flame song: she whose secret name was fire and whose inmost soul was radiant air, she therefore who was the divine impersonation of the divine thing she stood for, Poetry.

‘St. Bride of the Kindly Fire,’ of whom one may hear to-day as ‘oh, just Bhrighde mìn Muim (gentle St. Bride the Foster Mother), she herself an’ no other,’ is she, that ancient goddess, whom our ancestors saw lighting the torches of sunrise on the brows of hills, or thrusting the quenchless flame above the horizons of the sea: whom the Druids hailed with hymns at the turn of the year, when, in the season we call February, the firstcomers of the advancing Spring are to be seen on the grey land or on the grey wave or by the grey shores: whom every poet, from the humblest wandering singer to Oisìn of the Songs, from Oisìn of the Songs to Angus Og on the rainbow or to Midir of the Under-world, blessed, because of the flame she put in the heart of poets as well as the red life she put in the flame that springs from wood and peat. None forgot that she was the daughter of the ancient God of the Earth, but greater than he, because in him there was but earth and water, whereas in her veins ran the elements of air and fire. Was she not born at sunrise? On the day she reached womanhood did not the house wherein she dwelled become wrapped in a flame which consumed it not, though the crown of that flame licked the high unburning roof of Heaven? In that hour when, her ancient divinity relinquished and she reborn a Christian saint, she took the white veil, did not a column of golden light rise from her head till no eyes could follow it? In that moment when she died from earth, having taken mortality upon her so as to know a divine resurrection to a new and still more enduring Country of the Immortal, were there not wings of fire seen flashing along all the shores of the west and upon the summits of all Gaelic hills? And how could one forget that at any time she had but to bend above the dead, and her breath would quicken, and a pulse would come back into the still heart, and what was dust would arise and be once more glad.

The Fair Woman of February is still loved, still revered. Few remember the last fading traditions of her ancient greatness: few, even, know that she lived before the coming of the Cross: but all love her, because of her service to Mary in Her travail and to the newborn Child, and because she looks with eyes of love into every cradle and puts the hand of peace on the troubled hearts of women: and all delight in her return to the world after the ninety days of the winter-sleep, when her heralds are manifest.

What, then, are the insignia of St. Bridget of the Shores? They are simple. They are the dandelion, the lamb, and the sea-bird popularly called the oyster-opener. From time immemorial, this humble, familiar yellow plant of the wayside has been identified with St. Bride. To this day shepherds, on Am Fheill Bhrighde, are wont to hear among the mists the crying of innumerable young lambs, and this without the bleating of ewes, and so by that token know that Holy St. Bride has passed by, coming earthward with her flock of the countless lambs soon to be born on all the hillsides and pastures of the world. Fisher-folk on the shores of the west and on the far isles have gladdened at the first prolonged repetitive whistle of the oyster-opener, for its advent means that the hosts of the good fish are moving towards the welcoming coasts once more, that the wind of the south is unloosened, that greenness will creep to the grass, that birds will seek the bushes, that song will come to them, and that everywhere a new gladness will be abroad. By these signs is St. Bridget of the Shores known. One, perhaps, must live in the remote places, and where wind and cloud, rain and tempest, great tides and uprising floods are the common companions of day and night, in order to realise the joy with which things so simple are welcomed. To see the bright sunsweet face of the dandelion once more--an dealan Dhé, the little flame of God, am bearnan Bhrighde, St. Bride’s forerunner--what a joy this is. It comes into the grass like a sunray. Often before the new green is in the blade it flaunts its bright laughter in the sere bent. It will lie in ditches and stare at the sun. It will climb broken walls, and lean from nooks and corners. It will come close to the sands and rocks, sometimes will even join company with the sea-pink, though it cannot find footing where later the bindweed and the horned poppy, those children of the seawind who love to be near and yet shrink from the spray of the salt wave, defy wind and rain. It is worthier the name ‘Traveller’s Joy’ than the wild clematis of the autumnal hedgerows: for its bright yellow leaps at one from the roadside like a smile, and its homeliness is pleasant as the gladness of playing children.