This is very pleasant to the imagination, and especially so if the myths, as in Ireland, have some poetic beauty or strangeness, as in the myth I have referred to--of the deep spring of clear water and the nine hazels of wisdom that encompass it.

This mingling of the beauty of youth and the honour of ancientry runs through all the Irish tales.

Youth and the love of it, of its beauty and strength, adorn and vitalize their grey antiquity.

But where, in their narrative, the hero's youth is over and the sword weak in his hand, and the passion less in his and his sweetheart's blood, life is represented as scarcely worth the living.

The famed men and women die young--the sons of Turenn, Cuchulain, Conall, Dermot, Emer, Deirdre, Naisi, Oscar.
Oisin has three hundred years of youth in that far land in the invention of which the Irish embodied their admiration of love and youth.