The Druid Path

PHADRAIG, son of Nihil of the Ua Dinan, held silent his white hound on the hill of Cromm Cru, and looked down the far valley of blue mists where the sea of the west rolled in. Back beyond the sweet-smelling reaches of the heather he could hear the bay of the hounds of his uncle Kieran, Tiern over North Tormond. He could no longer hear the clink of their silver bridles, nor the laughter of their ladies, nor the scream of hawk on dove. But the hill of the ancient god was a sweet place in the silence, and he rested there, and made him a pillow of fern--and listened to the soft breath of the wind in the rowan tree. Its sigh of love for the green earth was a sweet song, and he slept there to that music, while the sun rushed beyond the wide seas of the west, and soft-footed dusk crept after, filling all the hollows with the gray web in which the night is held. A curious dream of white birds came to him there; the dream had come to him before, yet not with clearness--and in the dream was a dusk path in an ancient wood, and a well there--a well rising and sinking with the tide, and a vision of a maid moving before him into the shadows--a vision swathed in a white cloud, with hidden face but a voice in which was held all the music of beauty of life in all the world. His soul was as a harp on which that music played, and his body was but as a shell left behind while the wings of harmony lifted him--lifted until he was borne as a cloud far from the touch of the earth--and he heard a word over and over in his ear, until he strove with might to echo it, and then, in the striving, the smell of the heather was again in his nostrils, and the forefeet of the white hound were on his breast, and above him a star shone in the soft rose of the sky. He lay entranced, thrilled by the ecstasy of the perfect dream, and somewhere from the very earth came a song to his ear and an earth echo of the word he had striven for and missed. And this was the song he heard-—Make strong your charms against Danaan, Danaan of the snowy breast, Who lured the souls of the Gods of Old To the land of the mystic west