Ossian Collection > Waifs and strays of Celtic tradition > Volume 4

Inij'oduction.
savagely rebellious against the slings and arrows of
outrageous age, bitterly mindful of the pride and lust
of their youth.
" Wooden crook ! is it not the spring,
When cuckoos are brown, when the foam is bright.
And I, lack a maid's love ?
What I loved when a youth are hateful to me now, .
A stranger's daughter and a gray steed.
Am I not for them unmeet ?
I am old, I am lonely, I am decrepit and cold.
After lying on fair rich couches,
I am miserable, thrice bent !'' (Skene, F. A. B., 328.)
Thus the Kymro complains —
" No soft wooing, and no chase
In both of which I took delight.
Without the battle-march or fight,
Alas, how sorrowful life's close." {Lismore, 5.)
Or again :
" Feeble this night is the power of my arm,
My strength is no more as it was ;
No wonder though I should mourn,
Poor, old relic that I am." {Lisinorc, 13.)
answers the Gael.
Now the Welsh poems are assuredly far older Jhan the
fifteenth century, and it seems more reasonable to hold
that this kinship of situation and temper between the two
literatures is due to some special impulse which afifected
alike the bards of Gaeldom and those of Wales, than to
look upon it as a simple coincidence. But this impulse
could hardly have stirred Ireland two or three centuries
later than Wales.
One thing finally should be noticed. If the ballad-
poetry be a late and specifically Northern Gaelic dcve-