And Oisin, during the short span
of life that yet remained to him, told to Patrick many tales of the
Fianna and their deeds, but of the three hundred years that he had
spent with Niam in the Land of Youth he rarely spoke, for they seemed
to him but as a vision or a dream of the night, set between a sunny
and a rainy day.
THE HISTORY OF KING CORMAC
CHAPTER XVI
I
THE BIRTH OF CORMAC
Of all the kings that ruled over Ireland, none had a better and more
loyal servant than was Finn mac Cumhal, and of all the captains and
counsellors of kings none ever served a more glorious and a nobler
monarch than did Finn, for the time that he served Cormac, son of Art,
son of Conn of the Hundred Battles. At the time at which this monarch
lived and reigned, the mist of sixteen centuries hangs between us and
the history of Ireland, but through this mist there shine a few great
and sunlike figures whose glory cannot be altogether hidden, and of
these figures Cormac is the greatest and the brightest. Much that is
told about him may be true, and much is certainly fable, but the
fables themselves are a witness to his greatness; they are like forms
seen in the mist when a great light is shining behind it, and we
cannot always say when we are looking at the true light and when at
the reflected glory.
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