Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

on the blasts of the wind; and pale ghosts, messengers of the unseen world, brought back the secrets of the grave." A Gaelic song has the following--"In a blast comes cloudy death, and lays his grey head low. His ghost is rolled on the vapours of the fenny field." Henri Martin speaks of "harps of bards, untouched, sound mournful over the hill."

Some ghosts were material enough. That of St. Kieran, of Clonmacnoise, managed to strike King Felim, the plunderer of his church, so effectually, with his ghostly crozier, as to give an internal wound, of which the chief died. When Finn or Fionn appeared to Osgar, on the battle-field of Gabhra, it is affirmed that "his words were not murmurs of distant streams," but loud and clear.

But the Fetch, as recognized in the scattered poems collected, or revised, in Macpherson's Ossian, is more a spirit of the air. Some of the descriptions, relating to the ghosts of Erin and Argyle, are striking:--

"She was like the new moon seen through the gathering mist--like a watery beam of feeble light, when the moon rushes sudden from between two clouds, and the midnight shower is on the heath.--Clouds, the robe of ghosts,--rolled their gathered forms on the wind--with robes of light.--Soon shall our cold pale ghosts meet in a cloud, on Cona's eddying winds.--Tell her that in a cloud I may meet the lovely maid of Toscar."

Again--"Faint light gleams over the heath. The ghosts of Arden pass through, and show their dim and distant forms.--The misty Loda, the house of the spirits of men.--Ghosts vanish, like mists on the sunny hill.--His soul came forth to his fathers, to their stormy isle. There they pursued boars of mist along the skirts of winds.--I move like the shadow of mist--The ghost of Crugal came from his cave. The stars dim--twinkled through his form. His voice was like the sound of a distant stream."

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