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WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD")
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nation, however, in relation to himself, he thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,—picturesque raiment after all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of him,—was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his "Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after morning on the cold