Page:Poet Lore, volume 34, 1923.djvu/456

 the people that have drunk out of the rivers, and have arts and wisdom. It is not many I meet that tell me much. It is you has told me the most of all I have ever heard about such things, and in a short time like this! Tell me,—who are the people of Ireland who have drunk the most out of these rivers?

Blind Singer.—That is not hard to tell! It is the bards and the poets and the great story tellers, and the harpers that made lasting melodies for Ireland, and the learned judges that made laws that were suitable and humane so by that there was not great crime in Ireland. It is these that drank out of the Seven Rivers in the olden time, and gave the wisdom out of them to the people: from father to son it was told, and it was a long, long time ago it began.

It was these that sang, and told tales, and told all the knowledge of the country, and kept its laws known to the people from the first. (He pauses, musing, again.)

There were great bards and great poets drank from the Well of Hazels and out of the Seven Rivers that used to be running from it. (After a moment's silence.) There was one was a great bard indeed, it was said of him.—He sang in battles and before the kings and the noble, fair women, and sang by the great fires on the hills at might. He was the greatest bard ever lived in Ireland, they said.

But he came to be a poor, lonely man, wandering. He was a poor, wandering, lonely man like me—his companions gone, because out of Ireland for too great a time he went once. Lonely and wandering he was, and blindness on him, the way he was in the same distress as I.—

Boy.—And he a great man at first! It is a queer thing he would go out of the country like that, and him everywhere wanted, and stay from it the way he would have lost his friends when he came back.

Blind Singer.—This was the way of it. It was of a great fighting company he was,—the Fianna they were,—and it is a lad like you should know about them! They were passed and gone from the land when he came back to it, and there were no fighting men the like of them to keep off those that were foes to the Men of Ireland and who came upon her soil and put a ban upon the great bard's songs that he would not be giving courage and power again to the people with singing them.

(Musingly) It was great draughts indeed from the Well of Hazels the bards took,—wherever it might have been in those