background of "The Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere, the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel Israfel"
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
or about
"magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn";
or about
"old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago";
or about hearing
"the far-off curfew sound
Over some wide-watered shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar,"
were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:—
"You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang
Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God";
and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:—
"Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel:
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
He wander the loud waters";
