'
'She goes by me like a little breeze of the wind.'
And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me,
'passing into a proverb':--
'It is far from one another our rising is every day.'
But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago,
joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from
the time Naoise called Deirdre 'a woman brighter than the sun,' has
brought monotony into most of the love-songs.
The ideal country girl, with her dew-grey eye and long amber hair, is
always likened to Venus, to Juno, to Deirdre. 'I think she is nine times
nicer than Deirdre,' says Raftery, 'or I may say Helen, the affliction
of the Greeks'; and he writes of another country girl, that she is
'beyond Venus, in spite of all Homer wrote on her appearance, and
Cassandra also, and Io that bewitched Mars; beyond Minerva, and Juno,
the king's wife'; and he wishes 'they might be brought face to face with
her, that they might be confused':--
'She comes to me like a star through the mist; her hair is golden
and goes down to her shoes; her breast is the colour of white
sugar, or like bleached bone on the card-table; her neck is whiter
than the froth of the flood, or the swan coming from swimming....
If France and Spain belonged to me, I'd give it up to be along with
you.'
And he gives 'a thousand praises to God, that I didn't lose my wits on
account of her.
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