As life becomes more orderly,
more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the
greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to
him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in
their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as
friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and
when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There is not a
king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without
having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the
Tuatha de Danaan." When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds
of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain
that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made
king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in
the woods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and
in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him
and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,
as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal
impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in
a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the
strength of things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions
of universal nature, like the clouds that shape themselves and re-shape
themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the
gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings
them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,
and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought.
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