Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/196

164 appropriateness to the crimes committed, all foreshadowing the work of the Italian seer.

But the predominant note of the Tidings of Doomsday and of the host of visions that flooded and shadowed Europe during the middle ages, and many of which centred round the spot known as "St. Patrick's Purgatory" on Lough Derg in Donegal, is one of terror. A positive zest is evinced by the writers in conjuring up and emphasising scenes horrible in their grim detail of corporeal or spiritual tortures. The mind shudders at the lengthened description of pains from which there is no hope of release for the sufferers and no moral alleviation to be won. Here, indeed, we find fully displayed that belief in an after-death or life of souls, that gloomy sense of penitence, sin, and punishment, of which the pagan literature knew little and which the pagan Gael could in no such sense have understood. But it is not a native note, it is introduced from outside, though exaggerated and grown grotesque in the Irish mediaeval imagination. If we want the native note of the Gaelic mind dwelling on the unseen, we shall find it in such a passage as this, incorporated into a semi-Christian vision:

"They now descry a pleasant land with a good coast, and at sight of it they grow cheerful and of good courage. They row close up to it and find a fine green-bottomed estuary with sandy depths clear as a spring or like the shining whiteness of pure silver; salmon of varied hue, and brilliant in choice shades of crimson-red; delicate woods with empurpled tree tops fringing the delightful streams of this new land. 'A beauteous land is this, young men,' said Teigue: 'and happy would he be whose lot in life were cast within it! A lovely and a fruitful land is this to which we come!' Then they hauled up the currach on the beach and set out to view the country. And for all they had