Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/335

Rh We owe much to the Christian scribes and poets of early mediaeval Ireland and Wales, who wrote down or re-edited the mythic tales, romantic legends, and poems of the pagan period, thus preserving them to us. These had still existed among the folk or were current in the literary class, and that they were saved from destruction is probably due to the fact that Ireland and Wales were never Romanized. Causes were at work in Gaul which killed the myths and tales so long transmitted in oral forms; and since they were never written down, they perished. Elsewhere these causes did not exist, or a type of Christianity flourished which was not altogether hostile to the stories of olden time, as when Irish paganism itself was described symbolically as desiring the dawn of a new day. The birds of Elysium were "the bird-flock of the Land of Promise," and in one story were brought into contact with St. Patrick, welcoming him, churning the water into milky whiteness, and calling, "O help of the Gaels, come, come, come, and come hither!"23

That is an exquisite fancy, more moving even than that which told how "The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament" —the mournful cry, "Great Pan is dead," at the moment of Christ's Nativity. Celtic paganism, Goidelic and Brythonic, surely bestowed on Christianity much of its old glamour, for nowhere is the history of the Church more romantic than in those regions where Ninian and Columba and Kentigern and Patrick lived and laboured long ago.