Do we not always
fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that why we think
them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in
"Pauline":
"An old hunter
Talking with gods; or a nigh-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos"
IV
One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many
incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the
War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at
Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a long story, has nothing
of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed but a succession of
detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination
of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder, heaped another
on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own
childhood--do not understand large design, and they delight in little
shut-in places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses
where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression of a thought. The
wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us, for
they creep towards our light by little holes and crevices. When they
imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can
wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what
another will be like, or know from the one day's adventure what may meet
one with to-morrow's sun.
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