THE UNTIRING ONES

百度搜索 The Celtic Twilight 天涯 或 The Celtic Twilight 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

    It is one of the great troubles of life that we ot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our ehat we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this enta of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might<tt>..t> grow to be long-lived like them.  But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their fasation. Love with them never grows weary, nor  the circles of the stars tire out their dang feet. The Donegal peasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it that it may not be fotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries, little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came to a farmer’s house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth aing all tidy. The  night they came again, and while the farmer was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having arra round the walls, for <q>99ｌｉｂ?</q>the greater grandeur it seems, they began to dahey danced on and on, and days and days went by, and all the try-side came to look at them, but still their feet ired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, a and told them that the priest was ing. The little creatures when they heard this went back to their own try, and there their joy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say, and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.

    But it is not merely faeries who know untiring days, for there have been men and women who, falling uheir entment, have attained, perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, an even more than faery abu<bdi></bdi>ndance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have gone amid those poor happy leaves of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, blown hither and thither by the winds that awakehe stars, the dim kingdom has aowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and given them of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a cradle, and her mother sat by rog her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the faeries) came in, and said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the prince of the dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow old and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would be gifted with a faery life. The mother was to take the glowing log out of the fire  and bury it in the garden, and her child would live as long as it remained uned. The mother buried the log, and the child grew up, became a beauty, and married the prince of the faeries, who came to her at nightfall. After seven hundred years the prince died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he died also, and another prind another husband came in his stead, and so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish called upon her, and told her that she was a sdal to the whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and theold him about the log, and he went straight out and dug until he found it, and bbr>藏书网</abbr>then they bur, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and everybody leased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[FN#9] who went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, aing up a  of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, oop of the Birds’ Mountain at Sligo.

    Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself. A friend of mine found her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller’s mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.

    The two little creatures may well dan, and the woman of the log and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled hate and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with “yes” and “no,” or entaheir feet with the sorry  of “maybe” and “perhaps.” The great winds came and took them up into themselves.

百度搜索 The Celtic Twilight 天涯 或 The Celtic Twilight 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.