a much more elemental something, made up of moods, dreams, impressions: cloudy and bewildering glimpses into things not only beyond one's own ken, but possibly beyond the ken of every other mortal also.

Even laziness however has its limits, though they seem often difficult to meet with, and for the last half-hour I have been turning over some of the few books and maps I brought down with me; trying in a more or less feeble fashion to localise certain of the spots about here, from a would-be historical point of view. We are miserably badly off for local histories in Ireland. There are Smith's two solid volumes on Cork and Kerry, to be sure, but when did Smith flourish? I have not got him beside me, but to the best of my recollection the date in my edition is 1780, or thereabouts, which is not exactly to-day or even yesterday. Cork and Kerry moreover are a poor instalment for thirty-two counties, nearly all of which are still awaiting their Smith. Here in Clare, thanks to Mr. Frost and one or two others, we are a trifle better off, yet much remains to be done. Of the more palpably salient facts in its history the first is the descent of the Northmen, the 'Danes' of popular tradition. A chart under my hand gives the year 802 as the date of the first of these descents. This no doubt may be provisionally accepted, though perhaps for the two latter figures a couple of notes of interrogation might be substituted with safety. Accurate or not, it is a significant date enough, for it is significant of disaster, and of disaster unrelieved, so far as one's ignorance can measure, of compensatory benefits of any kind. It is not merely a question of bloodshedding, though martyrdom, red martyrdom, of the very reddest, was the lot alike of priest and layman, man and maid, but that the blood so shed should have been so absolutely, so deplorably wasted. Elsewhere, the first lust of killing over, the rover at least brought his useful brutal strength to serve as a sort of gristle or backbone to the elements which he found. In Ireland he seems, as far as one can learn, to have been always apart; always the alien; always the mere unhomely savage scourge from first to last.

Glancing for an instant to where sea-line and sky-line meet, what a startling, what an appalling vista of time one seems in that instant to catch a glimpse of! Nearly eleven hundred years since those black prows were first seen upon that very line, and in those eleven hundred years how much must have happened, and yet how remarkably little there is to show for them all! Eleven hundred years! Every year with 365 days in it; every day as long as to-day has been to me, or as to-morrow will be. Where are they, and what have they done with themselves, those eleven hundred years? After what fashion have they rolled by, and where in this visible world around me have they written the record of their interminable procession? So far as I can see, absolutely nowhere. They seem to have left little more traces of

themselves than any wave which has just tumbled shorewards. And yet it is absurd; the thing is inherently impossible. A scene so old in the history of the race must possess some stamp, some quality of its own, if one could only lay one's finger upon it. Rocks and hills upon which generations, many generations have looked for the last time; lakes and streams long lived by; stretches of coast gazed lovingly back at by eyes long passed in exile into the shadows: such things must have something surely about them not to be found in, not to be shared by any brand-new. acquisition colonised yesterday. If they have not, why, one is inclined respectfully to ask, were we called upon to take the trouble of emerging out of the primitive nebula at all?

Friday, June 23rd.

To-morrow I leave North Clare, and when I shall next see it, or whether I shall ever see its broad grey rocks again, let the Fates which dispose of mortals determine as they choose. I am glad they have been kind enough to allow me this little space of idle sauntering, and of still more idle meditation among them. To retrace one's steps along a once well-known, now nearly forgotten, bit of the turnpike of life is somehow rather a rare experience. Not many such bits are crossed over by any of us twice, and of those few still fewer, perhaps, entirely pleasurably.

As for impressions, were I forced to declare on oath what new ones I am carrying away with me I should have to admit that, like most of one's other impressions, they are both mixed and dim. Whatever charm the Burren has for the few for whom it has any charm at all, it is an implicit one, so to speak, rather than explicit. It lurks and broods. It is not easy to point one's finger at it and say Here it is,' or 'There it is.' The butterfly-moth were the better word, for it is certainly not gaudy-escapes, just as one seems about to put one's hat over it. There is nothing very exceptional in this, seeing that most of such butterflies we pursue have the same knack of escaping just as we seem about to lay a finger on them. They are not lost, or so one vehemently assures oneself. They exist somewhere or other still, only out of reach, in the blue above one's head, or in some scarcely less inaccessible region of one's own brain. For all practicable purposes, however, they are gone, and one never sees them again. Perhaps it is as well that it is so, seeing that the thing which remains uncaught must, from the very nature of that fact, be better than the ones which we can pat, handle, and pass about to other people. And yet it seems a pity too; nay, even a trifle unreasonable. For why should the only part of oneself that is worth anything; the only part of what one sees, does, knows, feels that is in the least worth sharing with any one else, be exactly the very part that remains for ever incommunicable?

EMILY LAWLESS.

1899

A TIBETAN POET AND MYSTIC

EAGERNESS to penetrate the still-forbidden realm of Tibet increases rather than abates. And naturally so when it is remembered that this mystic land remains the only terra incognita of any size-with the exception, perhaps, of the South Polar continent-yet surviving on our well-trodden planet.

One result of the current taste for things Tibetan has been to direct attention, not only to the weird geography of the snowgirt land, but also to its literary treasures, which are known still less than its physical wonders. Personally, the writer of the present article may confess to have been long smitten with the Tibetan hobby, fascinated years ago by the inimitable narrative of the Abbé Huc. Having first studied the language so far as it was accessible, the literature of Tibet was presently found to be much more extensive than is generally supposed. It consists not merely of Sanskrit importations, but likewise embraces a mass of indigenous original compositions. The leading department of native authorship seems to be metrical biography; and a chance encounter in the bazaar at Darjiling, on the Himalayan frontier, put the writer in possession of the alleged lucubrations of one of the most popular of Tibetan verse-makers. This work, which was a native block-print of 260 loose leaves, each leaf twenty inches in length, was entitled The Memoirs and One Hundred Thousand Songs of the Most Reverend Milaraspa; and it is the contents of that volume which we would fain expound in these pages.

Mr. Gladstone, in a lecture at Oxford, once expressed wonder at the absence in Homer of all expatiation upon the beauties and grandeur of natural scenery. He endeavoured to account for this by pointing out the dire difficulties which attended the journeyings of the ancients-especially in mountainous districts -wherein the hardships ever present would suffer no idea of the poetry of Nature to arise. Upon this theory, however, let it be remarked that nothing in the past could exceed the arduous circumstances of modern Tibetan travel. Stupendous glaciers and ice-fields, summits of eternal snows, mountain-passes in altitude over 19,000 feet, pathways for miles above gorges 4,000 to 6,000 feet deep, interminable steppes watered only by mighty salt-lakes

and with little vegetation beyond the camel-thorn and tamarisk-— those, the ordinary features of the everyday journey, do not, nevertheless, deprive the Tibetan native of his sense of the picturesque and the physically sublime. He lives in an enchanted country, the natural characteristics of which,teeming with mysticism and awfulness, have all a meaning to him. Each strange-shaped peak personates some supernatural being of the past; each dark entrenched lake is peopled with aquatic demons; every valley and pass and fantastic cavern has its own special legend, as well as its own special guardian deity. Moreover, though religious fervour mainly inspires these ideas, they are always burnished with a poetic glamour and abound in graceful fancy. Even the ordinary names of Tibetan topography reveal the same spirit. Thus, among the great mountain peaks of the inner Himalaya we have Aphi-gang-sminma, 'the grandmother with the snowy eyebrows'; Kangchhendzünga, the five treasure-chests of the great snows'; Náseng, 'the uplifted nose'; Kangchanjhao, 'the bearded glacier' (in allusion to the monster icicles fringing the glaciers here); Dong-khya, 'the frozen bull-yak.' Then, every placename in Tibet means something quaint: Táshilhümpo, 'the mound of good luck'; Séwai-nyá-lung, 'the valley with the neck of roses'; Kyi-chhu, the river of happiness'; Támchhok Kha-bab, the downflowing mouth of the best horse.'

Now it is that recognition of an inner meaning in God's handiwork which allows us to admit this Milaraspa to be what he assumes to be, namely, a poet as well as a Buddhist mystic. His book is in great measure taken up with expositions of the necromantic side of Buddhist philosophy; yet he is ever conscious of the sublimity of the forces besetting his wanderings, and we find descriptions of scenery and illustrations from Nature frequently interwoven with both the narrative and the so-called songs.'

Milaraspa is a Buddhist of the later Tantrik school. He is a Naljor, or Tibetan yogi, and travels from place to place amid the mountains of South-western Tibet, generally attended by a small band of disciples. He instructs his votaries, preaches to the people met on his journey, works spells and miracles, and falls in with divers adventures. His practice, when asked a question or when relating past experiences, is to drop at once into verse. Thus the work before us takes the form of a narrative of travels in which the songs are perpetually recurring. As a specimen of the favourite style of Tibetan authorship, and as setting forth the recondite philosophy and the magic of the Northern cult of Buddhism, it is full of interest and novelty. However, the best evidence of this will be to plunge at once in medias res; and our first translation shall be taken from the opening pages. The narrative begins in this way :

'Hail, teacher!' The rich power of meditation, the Reverend Milaraspa himself, under the influence of the Great Translucent

Charm, was sojourning in the district of Chhong-lung-jhung. It happened one night he rose up to prepare his food; but there was not even a piece of wood in the outhouse-not to mention any flour, salt, water, or herbs. As there was neither water nor fire on the hearth, he revolved: Having let go my thoughts to a degree so great as this, it is indeed too much for me, and it will be necessary to go and find room for some faggots in my coat-flap.' Having departed, when he had found as much wood as he could manage, a high wind arose. While he carried the wood, it seized on his garments, and when he held his garments, it seized on the wood. Then the thought sprang up in his mind: Though I have been sitting so long a space on that ridge of hills in times past, yet was I mentally absorbed in attachment to self. I may have succeeded with the doctrine of mental absorption within my very self, but what do I now propose to do? Then, let me say: "If the garment be pleasing to me, let the garment be taken away; or, if the wood be pleasing, let the wood be taken." Having seated himself, he lost consciousness from the effects of poor feeding and the cold. When he roused himself the wind had lulled and his garment was fluttering from the top of a treestem. In the depth of the mental weariness which succeeded he placed himself flat against the perpendicular surface of a boulder of the size of the body of a sheep. Just then there floated up from out a reddish-grey valley on the eastern side a white cloud. Below the white cloud in the reddish-grey valley was a gompa (i.e. monastery). He revolved: There did my lama, the interpreter Marpa, sit translating. In the midst of the group of my father, mother, and fellowdisciples-the brethren of the Dorje-was he.' And recalling the substance and style of his precepts, together with his powerful expositions of the Tantras, he thought: If only he were seated there now, whatever might intervene, I would go to salute him.' Being carried beyond bounds with despondency at these vivid memories of his teacher, many tears were shed, and he uttered this ode-a song of yearning grief-in his keen remembrance of the lama :—

6

Recalling my father, and following the steps of Marpa-
He who was the remover of longings-

Yearning dirges should vanish away.

O Marpa the Master, on the red rock to the east of the valley of Chhong!
Ah, that rock beneath yon holder of water,

The white cloud soaring upwards,

The floating white cloud!

On a rock backed by a hill beside which huge elephants are despicable;

On one which is faced by a hill beside which great lions seem but pigmies;

In the Gompa of the red-grey valley, a mighty residence,

On a stone prodigious, the throne of Amolika

A divan covered with the skins of lions' ears,

On which to be seated is not to sit

It was there sate Marpa the translator;

Oh, if now he were sitting, how would I rejoice!