Lastly, on this matter, the Irish tale-tellers, even to the present day, dwell with persistence on the colour of the human body as a special loveliness, and with as much love of it as any Venetian when he painted it.  And they did this with a comparison of its colour to the colours they observed in Nature, so that the colour of one was harmonised with the colour of the other.  I might quote many such descriptions of the appearance of the warriors—­they are multitudinous—­but the picture of Etain is enough to illustrate what I say—­“Her hair before she loosed it was done in two long tresses, yellow like the flower of the waterflag in summer or like red gold.  Her hands were white as the snow of a single night, and her eyes as blue as the dark hyacinth, and her lips red as the berries of the rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of the sea-waves.  The radiance of the moon was in her face and the light of wooing in her eyes.”  So much for the Irish love of colour.[6]

[6] I give one example of the way colour was laid on to animals just for the pleasure of it.  “And the eagle and cranes were red with green heads, and their eggs were pure crimson and blue”; and deep in the wood the travellers found “strange birds with white bodies and purple heads and golden beaks,” and afterwards three great birds, “one blue and his head crimson, and another crimson and his head green, and another speckled and his head gold.”

Their love of music was equally great; and was also connected with Nature.  “The sound of the flowing of streams,” said one of their bardic clan, “is sweeter than any music of men.”  “The harp of the woods is playing music,” said another.  In Finn’s Song to May, the waterfall is singing a welcome to the pool below, the loudness of music is around the hill, and in the green fields the stream is singing.  The blackbird, the cuckoo, the heron and the lark are the musicians of the world.  When Finn asks his men what music they thought the best, each says his say, but Oisin answers, “The music of the woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird, and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron.”  And Finn himself, when asked what was his most beloved music, said first that it was “the sharp whistling of the wind as it went through the uplifted spears of the seven battalions of the Fianna,” and this was fitting for a hero to say.  But when the poet in him spoke, he said his music was the crying of the sea-gull, and the noise of the waves, and the voice of the cuckoo when summer was at hand, and the washing of the sea against the shore, and of the tide when it met the river of the White Trout, and of the wind rushing through the cloud.  And many other sayings of the same kind this charming and poetic folk has said concerning those sweet, strong sounds in Nature out of which the music of men was born.