Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
Swipe or use the arrow keys.
English Edition · Branch 11 of 22
A Dream of Angus Oge · ¶¶ 1–8
The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories
p. 12A DREAM OF ANGUS OGE
The day had been wet and wild, and the woods looked dim and drenched from the window where Con sat. All the day long his ever restless feet were running to the door in a vain hope of sunshine. His sister, Norah, to quiet him had told him over and over again the tales which delighted him, the delight of hearing which was second only to the delight of living them over himself, when as Cuculain he kept the ford which led to Ulla, his sole hero heart matching the hosts of Meave; or as Fergus he wielded the sword of light the Druids made and gave to the champion, which in its sweep shore away the crests of the mountains; or as Brian, the ill-fated child of Turann, he went with his brothers in the ocean-sweeping boat farther than ever Columbus traveled, winning one by one in dire conflict with kings and enchanters the treasures which would appease the implacable heart of Lu.
He had just died in a corner of the room from his many wounds when Norah came in declaring that all these famous heroes must go to bed. He protested in vain, but indeed he was sleepy, and before he had been carried half-way to the room the little soft face drooped with half-closed eyes, while he drowsily rubbed his nose upon her shoulder in an effort to keep awake. For a while she flitted about him, looking, with her dark, shadowy hair flickering in the dim, silver light like one of the beautiful heroines of Gaelic romance, or one of the twilight, race of the Sidhe. Before going she sat by his bed and sang to him some verses of a song, set to an old Celtic air whose low intonations were full of a half-soundless mystery:
Line MOA-AO-P0003: Over the hill-tops the gay lights are peeping;Line MOA-AO-P0003: Down in the vale where the dim fleeces strayLine MOA-AO-P0003: Ceases the smoke from the hamlet upcreeping:Line MOA-AO-P0003: Come, thou, my shepherd, and lead me away."Who's the shepherd?" said the boy, suddenly sitting up.
"Hush, alannah, I will tell you another time." She continued still more softly:
Line MOA-AO-P0006: Lord of the Wand, draw forth from the darkness,Line MOA-AO-P0006: Warp of the silver, and woof of the gold:Line MOA-AO-P0006: Leave the poor shade there bereft in its starkness:Line MOA-AO-P0006: Wrapped in the fleece we will enter the Fold.Line MOA-AO-P0007: There from the many-orbed heart where the MotherLine MOA-AO-P0007: Breathes forth the love on her darlings who roam,Line MOA-AO-P0007: We will send dreams to their land of anotherLine MOA-AO-P0007: Land of the Shining, their birthplace and home.He would have asked a hundred questions, but she bent over him, enveloping him with a sudden nightfall of hair, to give him his good-night kiss, and departed. Immediately the boy sat up again; all his sleepiness gone. The pure, gay, delicate spirit of childhood was darting at ideas dimly perceived in the delicious moonlight of romance which silvered his brain, where may airy and beautiful figures were moving: The Fianna with floating locks chasing the flying deer; shapes more solemn, vast, and misty, guarding the avenues to unspeakable secrets; but he steadily pursued his idea.
Socrates
Reading The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories · A Dream of Angus Oge · ¶¶ 1–8
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Æ’s The Mask of Apollo and Other Stories gathers seven visionary tales in which Greek gods, Celtic memory, Indian wisdom, cosmic birth, and the moral power of imagination cross the borders between ordinary life and spiritual perception. This single-language Literary Fiction edition presents the complete supplied English working text in a continuous reader.
Historical Text
The stories were first gathered in Dublin by Whaley in an undated edition conventionally assigned to 1904. The reading text follows the seven tales as supplied in an editable transcription derived from Project Gutenberg eBook No. 8105, Imaginations and Reveries (1915). The transcription restores the collection’s compact form while noting that the later collected text may contain revisions and has not been line-by-line collated against every first-edition page image.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the supplied story sequence, paragraph boundaries, verse lineation, scene breaks, and authorial note. Its twenty-two branches follow the numbered working-text pages for comfortable reading and stable saved places; those page references are approximate rather than claims of facsimile-exact first-edition pagination.
Rights
The collection was published no later than 1905, and George William Russell died in 1935. The underlying English-language text is in the public domain in the United States and in jurisdictions using an ordinary life-plus-70 term.