sighs the poet, "its palaces and towers of pride... all buried in the rushing tide and deep sea waters green. Churches and convents and castles are in these islands, and those who have seen them or thought they saw them report more intimate touches

-an old woman coming out of a cabin to cut a cabbage; the bleating of sheep and lambs heard in a fog on the open sea; the apparition of "an old Scotch gentleman" wearing the raiment of another century upon an enchanted shore. Sometimes a seeming of tumult troubles these realms of shadow. There are flames and smoke and fugitives. Then the spell passes and there is naught but the slant of the gull's wing and the roll of a porpoise on a distant billow.

The inhabitants of the islands are people of a vanished time, and sealmen, and mermen, and giants, and the prisoners of giants. If you can find the golden key to one of the sunken lands it will rise to the surface and remain there; but the key has been hidden under a cairn or is buried in the ruins of a Druid temple. There are other ways of lifting the spell. Casting a clod of earth upon an island when it is above water may disenchant it. Another way is by dropping a coal of fire upon it, or knocking the glowing ashes from your pipe upon the shore, or shooting a red-hot arrow from a boat, for "fire is hostile to anything phantasmal." So was Inishbofin fixed above the surface of the sea. Fishermen landed upon it in a fog and lit a fire. Then the fog cleared and they saw an old woman driving a white cow to drink. One of them seized the cow's tail and found in his hand a spray of seaweed; and the woman and cow were turned into rocks. This was ages ago.

Where Eden Lies

Eden, Elysium, and the Fortunate Isles are one. They are upon the earth and yet not of it. They are no part of the realm of shades and it is not through the gates of death that one enters them. Mortal men have dwelt in them, or may reach them, and thither the heroes pass without leaving "the warm precincts of the cheerful day." These are the ideal lands of afternoon sunshine and airs that are at once a sigh and a caress. The poetry and pity of men created them that there might be some place of happiness with portals less somber than those of the tomb, and

without the sadness of irrevocable farewells upon the paths that lead to it.

So the realms of bliss were placed afar, at the end of difficult journeys which yet might be attained, or at least attempted. Eden lay eastward. The Fortunate Isles of the Roman and the Elysian lands of the Greek and Celt lay westward. In the conception of men these were islands, Eden almost as much as the others. The four sacred rivers flowed from it and around it, and in later times, what men who came near to it particularly noticed was the sound of falling water.

It seemed to Columbus that the rushing current of the Orinoco flowed down from Eden's steeps. It seemed to men before him that paradise might lie in the southern hemisphere, deemed "the noblest and happiest part of the globe," and perhaps in the South Seas. There were those who made Eden a coast on the northern ocean, and others who placed it among the fountains of Armenia. To most men the island of Ceylon was its seat. There Carpini heard the plash of its waters, and Maundeville drank thereof, as he reports, to his bodily betterment.

The Fortunate Isles, the Elysian abode of the heroes, were placed by the Greeks in the extreme west, near the river Oceanus. Their position receded with the advance of worldknowledge and finally was fixed in the Canary and Madeira islands, furthest outpost of Roman discovery. Satire though it is, the True History of Lucian describes the Blessed Islands in the very term men used when they were glad to believe. As his party approached these islands, odorous airs came out from shore, in which one could detect the mingled breath of the rose, the narcissus, the hyacinth, and the lily. There was music from harp and lute, and then, as the boat grounded on the beach, "the guardians of the isle immediately chained us with manacles of roses, their only fetters."

These were the same islands which the Celts called by many beautiful names and whither the coracles of legend journeyed. It is hard to tell where the sunken islands of their history give way to the imaginary islands of their geography, and these to the ideal lands of their myths. The three groups seem to lie one behind the other in the outer seas of the Imrama. The farthest group was the Celtic other-world, and yet so near was it to the

coasts of the New World, that a claim for the discovery of America is based on St. Brendan's voyage to the Land of Promise. The group may best be called an archipelago where pagan and Christian ideals shared dominion. Therein was not only the Land of Promise, but "Magh Mell of many flowers," the Land of Truth, "whose truth was sung without falsehood." There was the Land of the Living, and the sensuous Land of Fair Women. In all these happy islands music swelled, and laughter, and there was neither wailing nor treachery, and death was not; and the magic food was unsalted pork, new milk, and mead.

It was the singular fate of this god's land of the Celt to become confused with the geographical story of both Europe and America. The memory of actual Irish voyages to the New World may be in the legend, and inference from wreckage carried from afar, along with the stuff of old dreams. Of the latter is a Spanish story wherein the Celtic paradise masks itself as the Island of the Seven Cities to which seven bishops had led their flocks to escape the Moor. Men whose hap it was to sight this shadowy coast were carried in a barge to the shore and entertained in a lofty hall by men who spoke their own tongue, though with the antique accent. Europe credited the tale, nor guessed that the barge was the same as that which bore the wounded Arthur unto Avalon.

These dream isles, at once aspiration and allegory, were found also, or rather they were sought, in the eastern seas. It is recited in the Buddhist records that the king of Udyana had a true report of the silver walls and golden roofs of an island of the sages in distant waters. The Chinese emperor, Tshe Huan Ti, of the third century before Christ, heard of a happy land seven hundred miles to the eastward in the Yellow Sea, and sent young men out to find it. They saw it on a far horizon and a roseate light was upon it. But storms drove them back. The Japanese tell of such a land lying toward the sunrise, and call it Oraisan.

Maundeville knew of an island in the eastern ocean. It was something like the places of eternal bliss in the far west, and yet was the home of people who were much as other men are except that they were better. When Alexander would have con

quered them, an embassy bore him this message, "Nothing may thou take from us but our good Peace," and he let them alone. In this isle of Bragman was "No Thief, nor Murderer, nor common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever was Man slain in that Country. And because they be so true and so righteous, and so full of all good Conditions, they were never grieved with Tempests, nor with Thunder, nor with Lightning, nor with Hail, nor with Pestilence, nor with War, nor with Hunger, nor with any other Tribulation, as we be, many Times, amongst us, for our Sins."

The island paradises of mankind lie upon many waters and in every quarter of the earth. Alike for the Indians of Chile and of the American Northwest, Elysium was in the distant Pacific. The natives of Haiti believed it was in western valleys of their own island. The natives of Australia called it "the gum-tree country." The Semang of the Malay Peninsula said it was across the sea in a land of screw pines and thatch palms. It was their ancient island home, said the people of the Celebes. It was northwest of Tonga, the Friendly Islanders thought, and Bulotu was the name they gave it; yams and breadfruit were plentiful there, hogs abounded, and there were reefs for sharkcatching. Many Kanaka tribes named it Havaika, which is perhaps Java, or the Samoan island of Savaii, points of dispersion in their migrations. The natives of Torres Straits called it the island of Kibu; in its treetops ghosts sat twittering. But the Solomon Islander could hear their laughter as they bathed in the surf of his own sea-befriended paradise. "These Marquesans," a nun said to Frederick O'Brien, "make no more of death than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a journey to Tahiti."

Among races of higher culture Elysium takes on a more ordered beauty, yet remains naïve. Annwfn is its Brythonic name and it lies at the end of a long voyage; no infirmity is there, and sweeter than white wine is the drink from its mighty well. Before men embarked for it, they said in Babylon, there was a formidable land journey to take, over a high pass guarded by scorpion men in the mountains of Masu, along a road of black darkness, through a park of precious stones, across a bitter river—and then the waters of death; these may have been

the Atlantic, or the sea of the Arabs. Elysium was far to the east in some mellow clime beyond the ocean, so the Slavs thought; and thither the birds and insects went in autumn. It is a land of lotus lakes in the west, and its name is Sukhavati, say the Buddhists of Nippon; out of it comes a continual harmony of flowing rivers, murmuring leaves, and soft bells swung by softer winds. It is a kingdom in the northern ocean and its name is Vaikuntha, some Hindus say. Others speak of a paradise which they call Svetadvipa, "the white island" that is somewhere in the north beyond the Sea of Milk.

For inland peoples the thought of a sea to be crossed, as every day the sun crosses the sea to its rest, gave way at times to the thought of a river with a difficult bridge, and paradise on the farther side. Such in the Hindu classics was the land of the Uttarakarus which lay on the shores of the northern ocean beyond the radiance of the sun and the moon. A river that petrified whatever entered it flowed between it and the countries of the south. Lakes with golden lotuses and tanks of crystal water shimmered in the light airs of this favored land. In its odorous orchards birds always sang, and beautiful maidens, hanging by their long hair, grew among the blossom-burdened branches-another glimpse of the enigmatic women of Wakwak. Amid the sound of music and laughter these Indian Hyperboreans did their pious deeds, nor shed the god-unlawful tear, until ten thousand and ten hundred years had passed. Then they died, and fowls with sharp beaks carried their bodies to mountain caves.

An Irish myth of the Middle Ages holds closer to the facts of existence than any of these stories of terrestrial felicity, and there is a note of sadness in the beauty of it. In a lake in Munster were the islands of life and death. There was no port for death to enter the first island, but age and pain and sickness were there, and all the wearinesses of years. Its inhabitants learned at last to look on the opposite island as the place of repose, and, steering their barks to its shore, they entered upon eternal rest.