Note (1) — IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE

I have often heard it said that what passes for folk-lore is in reality book-lore, or what began as book-lore got into the oral tradition and handed down through the generations by word of mouth. A young Ardara man, a poet and dreamer in his way, told me that poetry most frequently came to him when he was near water; wandering, say, by the edge of Lochros, or looking down from Bracky Bridge at the stream as it forced its way through impeding boulders to the sea. I asked him had he ever read “The Colloquy of the Two Sages(1)”? He said that he had not. I told him that in that MS. occurred the passage: ar bá baile fallsigthe éicsi dogrés lasna filedu for brú uisci, i.e., “for the poets thought that the place where poetry was revealed always was upon the brink of water.” Nettled somewhat, he confessed that he got the idea from his father, a seanchaidhe, since dead, who knew something of Irish MSS., and who perhaps had read the “Colloquy,” or at all events, had heard of it. But apart from the fact of the thing having been given him by his father, he felt that it was true in his own experience—that poetry always came to him more readily when he was near water.