Sheumais, on whose brow lay "the dusk of the shadow." Gloom [pg 032] was the wisest of the brothers, and played upon an oaten flute, which is called a feadan; and men were afraid of the cold, white notes of his barbaric runes, as he played his feadan from rock to rock and on the seashore, but most of all they feared the playing of the Dán-nan-Rón, which is the Song of the Seal and calls men to their death in the sea. And when the eldest brother Marcus was killed with the throwing of a knife, the murderer heard the woods of Gloom, which said that he would hear the Dán-nan-Rón the night before he died, and lest he should doubt those words, he would hear it again in the very hour of his death. It happened as Gloom said: for one night the playing of the feadan drove the slayer, Manus MacCodrum, down into the sea, and as he battled madly in the water, and the blood gushed out of his body as the teeth of seals tore the life out of him, he heard from far away the cold, white notes of the Dán-nan-Rón. [pg 030] [pg 031] [pg 032] This tale always brings to me that many men, in some sudden moment which even M. Maeterlinck would hesitate to define as "a treasure of the humble," hear the playing [pg 033] of a tune such as that, which tells them of some ending, unknown and indefinite, just as, in the moments of greatest love, a man will feel for a terrible second the shivering white ice of sanity, which tells him a different tale to that which he is murmuring to the woman in his arms. Men who have heard it must have become morose with the fear this distant dirge brought upon them; but of that foreboding nothing certain can be known, and it is only in such a mood as this, and to a Shelmerdene of women, that a fool will loosen his foolishness to inquire into such things. Clarence Mangan must have heard the tune as he lay drunk and wretched in his Dublin garret, for there is more than Celtic gloom in the dirge of his lines. John Davidson, whose poetry you so love, and who wrote in a moment of madness "that Death has loaded dice," must have heard it, perhaps when first he came to venture his genius in London, a young man with a strange, bad-tempered look in his eyes; and he must have heard the exulting notes, as clearly as did Manus MacCodrum, when he walked into the sea from Cornwall. Charles [pg 034] Meryon must have heard it as he walked hungrily about the streets of Paris, and wondered why those gargoyles—strange things to beautify!—on Notre Dame, into which he had put so much life, could not scream aloud to the people of Paris that a genius was dying among them for
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