'
"Golden curls on the proud young head,
And pearls in the tender mouth;
Manhood, womanhood, white and red,
And love that grows not loth
When all the world's desires are dead,
And all the dreams of youth.
"Away from the cloud of Adam's sin!
Away from grief and care!
This flowery land thou dwellest in
Seems rude to us, and bare;
For the naked strand of the Happy Land
Is twenty times as fair."
When Etain heard this she stood motionless and as one that dreams
awake, for it seemed to her as if she must follow that music
whithersoever it went on earth or beyond the earth. But at last
remembrance came upon her and she said to the stranger, "Who art thou,
that I, the High King's wife, should follow a nameless man and betray
my troth?" And he said, "Thy troth was due to me before it was due to
him, and, moreover, were it not for me thou hadst broken it already. I
am Midir the Proud, a prince among the people of Dana, and thy
husband, Etain. Thus it was, that when I took thee to wife in the Land
of Youth, the jealousy of thy rival, Fuamnach, was awakened; and
having decoyed me from home by a false report, she changed thee by
magical arts into a butterfly, and then contrived a mighty tempest
that drove thee abroad. Seven years wast thou borne hither and thither
on the blast till chance blew thee into the fairy palace of Angus my
kinsman, by the waters of the Boyne.
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