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that have survived to our day from the wreck of ancient Celtic literature. They make live again for us peculiar racial traits of belief and imagination. They tell the true tale of a remarkable racial impulse. In what may be called the heroic age of Irish Christianity a strange love of wandering, combined with severe asceticism, desire for solitude, eager imagination and fearless daring, sent forth Irish monks and their disciples in frail skin-covered boats to traverse stormy oceans and to find a wild home in lonely islets. We read of such an expedition preceding even the preaching of S. Patrick,—when S. Ailbe devised an expedition to visit the "Ultima Thule" which we now call Iceland. S. Cormac, called "the Navigator," sailed far into the northern seas, nor desisted till at last the sight of huge whales frightened his crew homewards again. But more wonderful are the detailed voyages of Maeldune, of the O'Corras, of Brendan; for in these the boundary separating the real from the ideal, the visible material world from the unearthly and spiritual, seems to have vanished. We sometimes do not know whether the fearless voyagers are landing upon some new island of the Atlantic or entering some new region of purgatory; whether they move in the realms of geographical exploration, or of mystical vision, or of simple fairy tale.
It is not surprising to find that the Bollandists decline altogether to admit into the serious tomes of their Acta Sanctorum the "Acta Brandani," declaring them to be romance, not history.
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