Christian influences, a level of good, I can scarcely say excellent,
work, at a time when no other lyrical poetry in any vernacular existed
in Europe or the Islands. It was religious, mystic, and chiefly
pathetic--prayers, hymns, dirges, regrets in exile, occasional stories
of the saints whose legendary acts were mixed with pagan elements, and
most of these were adorned with illustrations drawn from natural
beauty or from the doings of birds and beasts--a great affection for
whom is prominent in the Celtic nature. The Irish poets sent this
lyric impulse into Iceland, Wales, and Scotland, and from Scotland
into England; and the rise of English vernacular poetry instead of
Latin in the seventh and eighth centuries is due to the impulse given
by the Irish monasteries at Whitby and elsewhere in Northumbria. The
first rude lyric songs of Cædmon were probably modelled on the hymns
of Colman.

One would think that poetry, which arose so early in a nation's life,
would have developed fully. But this was not the case in Ireland. No
narrative, dramatic, didactic, or epic poetry of any importance arose,
and many questions and answers might be made concerning this curious
restriction of development. The most probable solution of this problem
is that there was never enough peace in Ireland or continuity of
national existence or unity, to allow of a continuous development of
any one of the arts into all its forms. Irish poetry never advanced
beyond the lyric. In that form it lasted all through the centuries; it
lasts still at the present day, and Douglas Hyde has proved how much
charm belongs to it in his book on the _Love Songs of Connacht_.

It has had a long, long history; it has passed through many phases; it
has sung of love and sorrow, of national wars and hopes, of Ireland
herself as the Queen of Sorrow, of exile regrets from alien shores, of