LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 9ANCNCQO
 
 15437
 
 IN BOHEMIA 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN BOYLE 
 
 BOSTON: 
 THE PILOT PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 597 WASHINGTON STREET.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1886, 
 BY JOHN BOYLE O REILLY, 
 
 ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
 
 CASHMAN, KEATING & Co. 
 FATETTE COURT, 603 WASHINGTON STREET.
 
 Co 
 Jour little 3Daug;I)ten$.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SONGS THAT ARE NOT SUNG 9 
 
 A LOST FIUEND 12 
 
 IN BOHEMIA 14 
 
 A TRAGEDY 16 
 
 WENDELL, PHILLIPS 17 
 
 THE KING S EVIL, 22 
 
 A WHITE ROSE 24 
 
 THE WORD AND THE DEED 25 
 
 A BUILDER S LESSON 27 
 
 THE PRICELESS THINGS .29 
 
 A DEAD MAN . . . . 33 
 
 SILENCE, NOT DEATH 34 
 
 THE UNHAPPY ONE 36 
 
 ENSIGN EPPS, THE COLOR-BEARER 41 
 
 GRANT 1885 43 
 
 THE CRY OF THE DREAMER 45 
 
 IRELAND 1882 47 
 
 THE DEAD SINGER 52 
 
 ERIN 5 s 
 
 POET AND LORD 59 
 
 A YEAR GO 
 
 AN OLD VAGABOND 61 
 
 A DISAPPOINTMENT 64 
 
 YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW 65 
 
 YES? 66 
 
 A PASSAGE 67 
 
 DISTANCE 69 
 
 THE CITY STREETS 70 
 
 THE THREE QUEENS 77 
 
 MIDNIGHT SEPTEMBER 19, 1881 84 
 
 AMERICA 88 
 
 (5)
 
 IN BOHEMIA.
 
 IN BOHEMIA. 
 
 SONGS THAT ARE NOT SUNG. 
 
 Do not praise : a smile is payment more than meet 
 
 for what is done ; 
 Who shall paint the mote s glad raiment floating in 
 
 the molten sun ? 
 Nay, nor smile : for blind is eyesight, ears may hear 
 
 not, lips are dumb ; 
 From the silence, from the twilight, wordless but 
 
 complete they come. 
 
 Songs were born before the singer : like white souls 
 
 awaiting birth, 
 They abide the chosen bringer of their melody to 
 
 earth. 
 
 Deep the pain of our demerit : strings so rude or 
 
 rudely strung, 
 Dull to every pleading spirit seeking speech but 
 
 sent unsung ;
 
 10 SONGS THAT ARE NOT SUNG. 
 
 Round our hearts with gentle breathing still the 
 
 plaintive silence plays, 
 But we brush away its wreathing, filled with cares 
 
 of common days. 
 
 Ever thinking of the morrow, burdened down with 
 
 needs and creeds, 
 Once or twice, mayhap, in sorrow, we may hear the 
 
 song that pleads ; 
 Once or twice, a dreaming poet sees the beauty as it 
 
 flies, 
 But his vision who shall know it, who shall read it 
 
 from his eyes? 
 Voiceless he, his necromancy fails to cage the 
 
 wondrous bird ; 
 Lure and snare are vain when fancy flies like echo 
 
 from a word. 
 Only sometime he may sing it, using speech as 
 
 twere a bell, 
 Not to read the song but ring it, like the sea-tone 
 
 from a shell. 
 Sometimes, too, it comes and lingers round the 
 
 strings all still and mute, 
 Till some lover s trembling fingers draw it living 
 
 from the lute.
 
 SONGS THAT ARE NOT SUNG. 11 
 
 Still, our best is but a vision which a lightning-flash 
 
 illumes, 
 Just a gleam of life elysian flung across the voiceless 
 
 glooms. 
 
 Why should gleams perplex and move us? Must 
 
 the soul still upward grow 
 To the beauty far above us and the songs no sense 
 
 may know?
 
 A LOST FRIEND. 
 
 My friend he was ; my friend from all the rest ; 
 With childlike faith he oped to me his breast ; 
 No door was locked on altar, grave or grief; 
 No weakness veiled, concealed no disbelief; 
 The hope, the sorrow and the wrong were bare, 
 And ah, the shadow only showed the fair. 
 
 I gave him love for love ; but, deep within, 
 I magnified each frailty into sin ; 
 Each hill-topped foible in the sunset glowed, 
 Obscuring vales where rivered virtues flowed. 
 Reproof became reproach, till common grew 
 The captious word at every fault I knew. 
 He smiled upon the censorship, and bore 
 With patient love the touch that wounded sore ; 
 Until at length, so had my blindness grown, 
 He knew I judged him by his faults alone. 
 
 Alone, of all men, I who knew him best, 
 Eefused the gold, to take the dross for test I 
 
 (12)
 
 A LOST FRIEND. 13 
 
 Cold strangers honored for the worth they saw ; 
 His friend forgot the diamond in the flaw. 
 
 At last it came the day he stood apart, 
 When from my eyes he proudly veiled his heart ; 
 When carping judgment and uncertain word 
 A stern resentment in his bosom stirred ; 
 When in his face I read what I had been, 
 And with his vision saw what he had seen. 
 
 Too late ! too late ! Oh, could he then have known, 
 W^hen his love died, that mine had perfect grown ; 
 That when the veil was drawn, abased, chastised, 
 The censor stood, the lost one truly prized. 
 
 Too late we learn a man must hold his friend 
 Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end.
 
 IX BOHEMIA. 
 
 I d rather live in Bohemia than in any other land ; 
 
 For only there are the values true, 
 
 And the laurels gathered in all men s view. 
 
 The prizes of traffic and state are won 
 
 By shrewdness or force or by deeds undone ; 
 
 But fame is sweeter without the feud, 
 
 And the wise of Bohemia are never shrewd. 
 
 Here, pilgrims stream with a faith sublime 
 
 From every class and clime and tune, 
 
 Aspiring only to be enrolled 
 
 With the names that are writ in the book of gold ; 
 
 And each one bears in mind or hand 
 
 A palm of the dear Bohemian land. 
 
 The scholar first, with his book a youth 
 
 Aflame with the glory of harvested truth ; 
 
 A girl with a picture, a man with a play, 
 
 A boy with a wolf he has modeled in clay ; 
 
 A smith with a marvellous hilt and sword, 
 
 A player, a king, a ploughman, a lord 
 
 And the player is king when the door is past. 
 
 The ploughman is crowned, and the lord is last ! 
 
 (14)
 
 EST BOHEMIA. 15 
 
 I d rather fail in Bohemia than win in another land ; 
 
 There are no titles inherited there, 
 
 No hoard or hope for the brainless heir ; 
 
 No gilded dullard native born 
 
 To stare at his fellow with leaden scorn : 
 
 Bohemia has none but adopted sons ; 
 
 Its limits, where Fancy s bright stream runs ; 
 
 Its honors, not garnered for thrift or trade, 
 
 But for beauty and truth men s souls have made. 
 
 To the empty heart in a jeweled breast 
 
 There is value, maybe, in a purchased crest; 
 
 But the thirsty of soul soon learn to know 
 
 The moistureless froth of the social show ; 
 
 The vulgar sham of the pompous feast 
 
 Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest ; 
 
 The organized charity, scrimped and iced, 
 
 In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ ; 
 
 The smile restrained, the respectable cant, 
 
 When a friend in need is a friend in want ; 
 
 Where the only aim is to keep afloat, 
 
 And a brother may drown with a cry in his throat. 
 
 Oh, I long for the glow of a kindly heart and the 
 
 grasp of a friendly hand, 
 And I d rather live in Bohemia than in any other land.
 
 A TRAGEDY. 
 
 A soft-breasted bird from the sea 
 Fell in love with the light-house flame ; 
 And it wheeled round the tower on its airiest wing, 
 And floated and cried like a lovelorn thing ; 
 It brooded all day and it fluttered all night, 
 But could win no look from the steadfast light. 
 
 For the flame had its heart afar, 
 
 Afar with the ships at sea ; 
 It was thinking of children and waiting wives, 
 And darkness and danger to sailors lives ; 
 But the bird had its tender bosom pressed 
 On the glass where at last it dashed its breast. 
 
 The light only flickered, the brighter to glow ; 
 
 But the bird lay dead on the rocks below. 
 
 (16)
 
 WEXDELL PHILLIPS.* 
 
 What shall we mourn ? For the prostrate tree that 
 
 sheltered the young green wood ? 
 For the fallen cliff that fronted the sea, and guarded 
 
 the fields from the flood ? 
 For the eagle that died in the tempest, afar from its 
 
 eyrie s brood? 
 
 Xay, not for these shall we weep ; for the silver cord 
 
 must be worn, 
 And the golden fillet shrink back at last, and the 
 
 dust to its earth return ; 
 And tears are never for those who die with their face 
 
 to the duty done ; 
 But we mourn for the fledglings left on the waste, 
 
 and the fields where the wild waves run. 
 
 From the midst of the flock he defended, the brave 
 
 one has gone to his rest ; 
 And the tears of the poor he befriended their wealth 
 
 of affliction attest. 
 
 * Died Saturday, Feb. 2, 1884. 
 (17)
 
 18 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 
 
 From the midst of the people is stricken a symbol 
 
 they daily saw, 
 Set over against the law books, of a Higher than 
 
 Human Law ; 
 For his life was a ceaseless protest, and his voice 
 
 was a prophet s cry 
 To be true to the Truth and faithful, though the 
 
 world were arrayed for the Lie. 
 
 From the hearing of those who hated, a threatening 
 
 voice has past ; 
 But the lives of those who believe and die are not 
 
 blown like a leaf on the blast. 
 A sower of infinite seed was he, a woodman that 
 
 hewed toward the light, 
 Who dared to be traitor to Union when Union was 
 
 traitor to Right ! 
 
 "Fanatic!" the insects hissed, till he taught them 
 to understand 
 
 That the highest crime may be written in the high 
 est law of the land. 
 
 "Disturber" and "Dreamer" the Philistines cried 
 when he preached an ideal creed,
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 19 
 
 Till they learned that the men who have changed the 
 world with the world have disagreed ; 
 
 That the remnant is right, when the masses are led 
 like sheep to the pen ; 
 
 For the instinct of equity slumbers till roused by 
 instinctive men. 
 
 It is not enough to win rights from a king and write 
 
 them down in a book. 
 New men, new lights ; and the fathers code the sons 
 
 may never brook. 
 What is liberty now were license then : their freedom 
 
 our yoke would be ; 
 
 And each new decade must have new men to deter 
 mine its liberty. 
 Mankind is a marching army, with a broadening front 
 
 the while : 
 Shall it crowd its bulk on the farm-paths, or clear 
 
 to the outward file? 
 Its pioneers are the dreamers who fear neither tongue 
 
 nor pen 
 Of the human spiders whose silk is wove from tho 
 
 lives of toiling men.
 
 20 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 
 
 Come, brothers, here to the burial ! But weep not, 
 
 rather rejoice, 
 For his fearless life and his fearless death ; for his 
 
 true, unequalled voice, 
 Like a silver trumpet sounding the note of human 
 
 right ; 
 For his brave heart always ready to enter the weak 
 
 one s fight ; 
 For his soul unmoved by the mob s wild shout or 
 
 the social sneer s disgrace ; 
 For his freeborn spirit that drew no line between 
 
 class or creed or race. 
 
 Come, workers ; here was a teacher, and the lesson 
 he taught was good : 
 
 There are no classes or races, but one human broth 
 erhood ; 
 
 There are no creeds to be outlawed, no colors of skin 
 debarred ; 
 
 Mankind is one in its rights and wrongs one right, 
 one hope, one guard. 
 
 By his life he taught, by his death we learn the 
 great reformer s creed :
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS. 21 
 
 The right to be free, and the hope to be just, and 
 
 the guard against selfish greed. 
 And richest of all are the unseen wreaths on his 
 
 coffin-lid laid down 
 By the toil-stained hands of workmen their sob, 
 
 their kiss, and their crown.
 
 THE KING S EVIL. 
 
 They brought them up from their huts in the fens, 
 
 The woful sufferers gaunt and grim ; 
 They flocked from the city s noisome dens 
 
 To the Monarch s throne to be touched by him. 
 "For his touch," they whisper, "is sovereign balm, 
 
 The anointed King has a power to heal." 
 Oh, the piteous prayers as the royal palm 
 
 Is laid on their necks while they humbly kneel ! 
 
 Blind hope ! But the cruel and cold deceit 
 
 A rich reward to the palace brings : 
 A Snare for the untaught People s feet, 
 
 And a courtier s lie for the good of Kings. 
 But the years are sands, and they slip away 
 
 Till the baseless wall in the sun lies bare ; 
 The touch of the King has no balm to-day, 
 
 And the Right Divine is the People s share. 
 
 (22)
 
 THE KING S EVIL. 23 
 
 The word remains : but the Evil now 
 
 Is caused, not cured, by imperial hands, 
 The lightless soul and the narrow brow, 
 
 The servile millions in armed bands ; 
 The sweat-wrung gold from the peasant s toil 
 
 Flung merrily out by the gambling lord, 
 Who is reckless owner of serf and soil, 
 
 And master of church and law and sword. 
 
 But the night has receded : the dawn like a tide 
 
 Creeps slow round the world, till the feet of the 
 
 throne 
 Are lapped by the waves that shall seethe and ride 
 
 Where the titles are gulfed and the shields over 
 blown. 
 Our Kings are the same as the Kings of old, 
 
 But a Man stands up where there crouched a clown ; 
 The Evil shall die when his hand grows bold, 
 
 And the touch of the People is laid on the Crown !
 
 A WHITE ROSE. 
 
 The rod rose whispers of passion, 
 And the white rose breathes of love ; 
 
 Oh, the red rose is a falcon, 
 And the white rose is a dove. 
 
 But I send you a cream-white rosebud 
 With a flush on its petal tips ; 
 
 For the love that is purest and sweetest 
 Has a kiss of desire on the lips. 
 
 (24)
 
 THE WORD AND THE DEED. 
 
 The Word was first, says the revelation : 
 
 Justice is older than error or strife ; 
 The Word preceded the Incarnation 
 
 As symbol and type of law and life. 
 And always so are the mighty changes : 
 
 The Word must be sown in the heart like seed ; 
 Men s hands must tend it, their lives defend it, 
 
 Till it burst into flower as a deathless Deed. 
 
 The primal truth neither dies nor slumbers, 
 
 But lives as the test of the common right, 
 That the laws proclaimed by the sworded numbers 
 
 May stand arraigned in the people s sight. 
 The Word is great, and no Deed is greater, 
 
 When both are of God, to follow or lead ; 
 But, alas, for the truth when the Word comes later, 
 
 With questioned steps, to sustain the Deed. 
 
 (25)
 
 26 THE WORD AND THE DEED. 
 
 Not the noblest acts can be true solutions ; 
 
 The soul must be sated before the eye, 
 Else the passionate glory of revolutions 
 
 Shall pass like the flames that flash and die. 
 But forever the gain when the heart s convictions, 
 
 Rooted in nature the masses lead ; 
 The cries of rebellion are benedictions 
 
 When the "Word has flowered in a perfect Deed.
 
 A BUILDER S LESSON. 
 
 "How shall I a habit break?" 
 
 As you did that habit make. 
 
 As you gathered, you must lose ; 
 
 As you yielded, now refuse. 
 
 Thread by thread the strands we twist 
 
 Till they bind us neck and wrist ; 
 
 Thread by thread the patient hand 
 
 Must untwine ere free we stand. 
 
 As we builded, stone by stone, 
 
 "We must toil unhelped, alone, 
 
 Till the wall is overthrown. 
 
 But remember, as we try, 
 Lighter every test goes by ; 
 Wading in, the stream grows deep 
 Toward the centre s downward sweep ; 
 Backward turn, each step ashore 
 Shallower is than that before. 
 
 (27)
 
 28 A BUILDER S LESSON. 
 
 Ah, the precious years we waste 
 Levelling what we raised in haste ; 
 Doing what must be undone 
 Ere content or love be won ! 
 First across the gulf we cast 
 Kite-borne threads, till lines are passed, 
 And habit builds the bridge at last !
 
 THE PRICELESS THINGS. 
 
 Those are vulgar things we pay for, be they stones 
 
 for crowns of kings ; 
 While the precious and the peerless are unpriced 
 
 symbolic things. 
 
 Common debts are scored and cancelled, weighed 
 
 and measured out for gold ; 
 But the debts from men to ages, their account is 
 
 never told. 
 
 Always see, the noblest nations keep their highest 
 
 prize unknown ; 
 Chseronea s deathless lion frowned above unlettered 
 
 stone. 
 
 Ah, the Greeks knew ! Come their victors honored 
 
 from the sacred games, 
 Under arches red with roses, flushed to hear their 
 
 shouted names ; 
 
 (29)
 
 30 THE PRICELESS THINGS. 
 
 See their native cities take them, breach the wall to 
 
 make a gate ! 
 What supreme reward is theirs who bring such 
 
 honors to their state ? 
 
 In the forum stand they proudly, take their prizes 
 
 from the priest : 
 Little wreaths of pine and parsley on their naked 
 
 temples pressed ! 
 
 We in later days are lower ? When a manful stroKc 
 
 is made, 
 We must raise a purse to pay it making manliness 
 
 a trade. 
 
 Sacrifice itself grows venal surely Midas will sub-. 
 
 scribe ; 
 And the shallow souls are gratified when worth 
 
 accepts the bribe. 
 
 But e en here, amidst the markets, there are things 
 
 they dare not prize ; 
 Dollars hide their sordid faces when they meet 
 
 anointed eyes.
 
 THE PRICELESS THIXGS. 31 
 
 Lovers do not speak with jewels flowers alone can 
 
 plead for them ; 
 And one fragrant memory cherished is far dearer 
 
 than a gem. 
 
 Statesmen steer the nation safely ; artists pass the 
 
 burning test ; 
 And their country pays them proudly with a ribbon 
 
 at the breast. 
 
 When the soldier saves the battle, wraps the flag 
 
 around his heart, 
 Who shall desecrate his honor with the values of 
 
 the mart? 
 
 From his guns of bronze we hew a piece, and carve 
 
 it as a cross ; 
 For the gain he gave was priceless, as unpriced 
 
 would be the loss. 
 
 When the poet sings the love-song, or the song of 
 
 life and death, 
 Till the workers cease their toiling with abated 
 
 wondering breath ;
 
 32 THE PRICELESS THINGS. 
 
 When he gilds the mill and mine, inspires the slave 
 
 to rise and dare ; 
 Lights with love the cheerless garret, bids the tyrant 
 
 to beware ; 
 
 "\Vhen he steals the pang from poverty with mean 
 ings new and clear, 
 
 Reconciling pain and peace, and bringing blissful 
 visions near ; 
 
 His re ward? Nor cross nor ribbon, but all others 
 
 high above ; 
 They have won their glittering symbols he has 
 
 earned the people s love !
 
 A DEAD MAX. 
 
 The Trapper died our hero and we grieved ; 
 
 In every heart in camp the sorrow stirred. 
 "His soul was red ! " the Indian cried, bereaved; 
 
 "A white man, he !" the grim old Yankee s word. 
 
 So, brief and strong, each mourner gave his best 
 How kind he was, how brave, how keen to track; 
 
 And as we laid him by the pines to rest, 
 
 A negro spoke, with tears : His heart was black !" 
 
 (33)
 
 SILEXCE, XOT DEATH. 
 
 I start ! I have slept for a moment ; 
 
 I have dreamt, sitting here by her chair 
 Oh, how lonely ! "\Vhat was it that touched me ? 
 
 What presence, what heaven-sent air? 
 
 It was nothing, you say. But I tremble ; 
 
 I heard her, I knew she was near 
 Felt her breath, felt her cheek on my forehead 
 
 Awake or asleep, she was here ! 
 
 It was nothing a dream ? Strike that harp-string ; 
 
 Again still again till it cries 
 In its uttermost treble still strike it 
 
 Ha ? vibrant but silent ! It dies 
 
 It dies, just as she died. Go, listen 
 
 That highest vibration is dumb. 
 Your sense, friend, too soon finds a limit 
 
 And answer, when mysteries come. 
 
 (34)
 
 SILENCE, NOT DEATH. 35 
 
 Truth speaks in the senseless, the spirit ; 
 
 But here in this palpable part 
 We sound the low notes, but are silent 
 
 To music sublimed in the heart. 
 
 Too few and too gross our dull senses, 
 And clogged with the mire of the road, 
 
 Till we loathe their coarse bondage ; as seabirds 
 Encaged on a cliff, look abroad 
 
 On the ocean and limitless heaven, 
 
 Alight with the beautiful stars, 
 And hear what they say, not the creakings 
 
 That rise from our sensual bars. 
 
 O life, let me dream, let her presence 
 Be near me, her fragrance, her breath ; 
 
 Let me sleep, if in slumber the seeking ; 
 Sleep on, if the finding be death.
 
 THE UNHAPPY ONE. 
 
 "He is false to the heart!" she said, stern-lipped; 
 
 "he is all untruth ; 
 
 He promises fair as a tree in blossom, and then 
 The fruit is rotten ere ripe. Tears, prayers and 
 
 youth, 
 All withered and wasted ! and still I love this 
 
 falsest of men ! " 
 
 Comfort? There is no comfort when the soul sees 
 pain like a sun : 
 
 It is better to stare at the blinding truth : if it blind, 
 one w T oe is done. 
 
 We cling to a coward hope, when hope has the seed 
 of the pain : 
 
 If we tear out the roots of the grief, it will never 
 torment again. 
 
 Ay, even if part of our life is lost, and the deep- 
 laid nerves 
 
 (36)
 
 THE UNHAPPY ONE. 37 
 
 That carry all joy to the heart are wounded or killed 
 by the knife ; 
 
 "When a gangrene sinks to the bone, it is only half- 
 death that serves ; 
 
 And a life with a cureless pain is only half a life. 
 
 But why unhealed must the spirit endure ? There 
 
 are drugs for the body s dole ; 
 Have we wholly lived for the lower life ? Is there 
 
 never a balm for the soul ? 
 O Xight, cry out for the healer of woe, for the 
 
 priest-physician cry, 
 With the pouring oil for the bleeding grief, for the 
 
 life that may not die ! 
 
 "He is false to the heart!" she moaned ; "and I 
 
 love him and cannot hate ! " 
 Then bitterly, fiercely "What have I done, my 
 
 God, for such a fate?" 
 
 Poor heart ! " said the Teacher ; for thee and thy 
 
 sorrow the daily parables speak. 
 Thy grief, that is dark, illumes for me a sign that 
 
 was dim and weak.
 
 38 THE UNHAPPY OXE. 
 
 In the heart of my garden I planted a tree I had 
 
 chosen the noblest shoot : 
 It was sheltered and tended, and hope reached out 
 
 for the future s precious fruit. 
 The years of its youth flew past, and I looked on a 
 
 spreading tree 
 All gloried with maiden blossoms, that smiled their 
 
 promise to me. 
 I lingered to gaze on their color and shape I knew 
 
 I had chosen well ; 
 And I smiled at the death that was promise of life 
 
 as the beautiful petals fell. 
 But the joy was chilled, though the lip laughed on, 
 
 by the withered proof to the eye : 
 The blossoms had shielded no tender bud, but 
 
 cradled a barren lie. 
 Before me it lay, the mystery the asking, the 
 
 promise, the stone ; 
 The tree that should give good fruit was bare the 
 
 cause unseen, unknown ! 
 
 But I said : Next year it shall burgeon, my part 
 
 shall be faithfully done ; 
 My love shall be doubled I trust my tree for its 
 
 beautiful strength alone.
 
 THE UNHAPPY ONE. 39 
 
 But tenderness failed, and loving care, and the chalice 
 
 of faith was dried 
 When the next Spring blossoms had spoken their 
 
 promise smiled at the sun and lied ; 
 The heart of the petals was withered to dust. Then, 
 
 for duty, I trusted again ; 
 For who should stand if God were to frown on the 
 
 twice-told failures of men? 
 Unloving I tended, with care increased, but never a 
 
 song or smile ; 
 For duty is love that is dead but is kept from the 
 
 grave for a while. 
 
 The third year came, with the sweet young leaves, 
 
 and I could not fear or doubt ; 
 But the petals smiled at the sun and lied, and the 
 
 curse in my blood leaped out ! 
 "This corpse," I cried, "that has cumbered the 
 
 earth, let it hence to the waste be torn !" 
 That moment of wrath beheld its death while to 
 
 me was a life-truth born : 
 The straight young trunk at my feet lay prone ; 
 
 and I bent to scan the core, 
 And there read the pitiful secret the noble sapling 
 
 bore.
 
 40 THE UXHAPPY OXE. 
 
 Through the heart of the pith, in its softest youth, 
 
 it had bored its secret way, 
 A gnawing worm, a hideous grief, and the life it 
 
 had tortured lay- 
 Accursed and lost for the cruel devil that nestled its 
 
 breast within. 
 Ah, me, poor heart ! had I known in time, I had cut 
 
 out the clinging sin, 
 And saved the life that was all as good and as noble 
 
 as it seemed ! " 
 
 He ceased, and she rose, the unresigned, as one who 
 
 had slept and dreamed ; 
 Her face was radiant with insight : " It is true ! it is 
 
 true ! " she said ; 
 "And my love shall not die, like your beautiful tree, 
 
 till the hidden pain is dead ! "
 
 EXSIGN EPPS, THE COLOR-BEARER. 
 
 Ensign Epps, at the battle of Flanders, 
 Sowed a seed of glory and duty 
 That flowers and flames in height and beauty 
 Like a crimson lily with heart of gold, 
 To-day, when the wars of Ghent are old 
 And buried as deep as their dead commanders. 
 
 Ensign Epps was the color-bearer, 
 
 No matter on which side, Philip or Earl ; 
 
 Their cause was the shell his deed was the pearl. 
 
 Scarce more than a lad, he had been a sharer 
 
 That day in the wildest work of the field. 
 
 He was wounded and spent, and the fight was lost; 
 
 His comrades were slain, or a scattered host. 
 
 But stainless and scatheless, out of the strife, 
 
 He had carried his colors safer than life. 
 
 By the river s brink, without weapon or shield, 
 
 He faced the victors. The thick-heart mist 
 
 (41)
 
 42 ENSIGX EPPS, THE COLOR-BE AEER. 
 
 He dashed from his eyes, and the silk he kissed 
 
 Ere he held it aloft in the setting sun, 
 
 As proudly as if the fight were won, 
 
 And he smiled when they ordered him to yield. 
 
 Ensign Epps, with his broken blade, 
 
 Cut the silk from the gilded staff, 
 
 Which he poised like a spear till the charge was 
 
 made, 
 
 And hurled at the leader with a laugh. 
 Then round his breast, like the scarf of his love, 
 He tied the colors his heart above, 
 And plunged in his armor into the tide, 
 And there, in his dress of honor, died. 
 
 AVhere are the lessons your kingiings teach ? 
 
 And what is text of your proud commanders ? 
 
 Out of the centuries, heroes reach 
 
 With the scroll of a deed, with the word of a story, 
 
 Of one man s truth and of all men s glory, 
 
 Like Ensign Epps at the battle of Flanders.
 
 GRANT 1885. 
 
 Blessed are Pain, the smiter, 
 And Sorrow, the uniter ! 
 For one afflicted lies 
 A symboled sacrifice 
 And all our rancor dies ! 
 
 No Xorth, no South ! O stern-faced Chief, 
 One weeping ours, one cowled Grief 
 Thy Country bowed in prayer and tear 
 For Xorth and South above thy bier ! 
 
 For Xorth and South ! O Soldier grim, 
 
 The broken ones to weep for him 
 
 Who broke them ! He whose terrors blazed 
 
 In smoking harvests, cities razed ; 
 
 Whose Fate-like glance sent fear and chill ; 
 
 Whose wordless lips spake deathless will 
 
 Till all was shattered, all was lost 
 
 (43)
 
 44 GRAZSTT. 
 
 All hands dropped down all "\Yar s red cost 
 Laid there in ashes Hope and Hate 
 And Shaine and Glory ! 
 
 Death and Fate 
 
 Fall back ! Another touch is thine ; 
 He drank not of thy poisoned wine, 
 Nor blindly met thy blind-thrown lance, 
 Xor died for sightless time or chance 
 But waited, suffered, bowed and tried, 
 Till all the dross was purified ; 
 Till every well of hate was dried ; 
 And Xorth and South in sorrow vied, 
 And then at God s own calling died ! 
 
 July 23, 1885.
 
 THE CRY OF THE DREAMER. 
 
 I am tired of planning and toiling 
 
 In the crowded hives of men ; 
 Heart-weary of building and spoiling, 
 
 And spoiling and building again. 
 And I long for the dear old river, 
 
 TVhere I dreamed my youth away ; 
 For a dreamer lives forever, 
 
 And a toiler dies in a day. 
 
 I am sick of the showy seeming 
 
 Of a life that is half a lie ; 
 Of the faces lined with scheming 
 
 In the throng that hurries by. 
 From the sleepless thoughts endeavor, 
 
 I would go where the children play ; 
 For a dreamer lives forever, 
 
 And a thinker dies in a day. 
 
 (45)
 
 46 THE CRY OF THE DREAMER. 
 
 I can feel no pride, but pity 
 
 For the burdens the rich endure ; 
 There is nothing sweet in the city 
 
 But the patient lives of the poor. 
 Oh, the little hands too skilful, 
 
 And the child-mind choked with weeds I 
 The daughter s heart grown wilful, 
 
 And the father s heart that bleeds ! 
 
 No, no ! from the street s rude bustle, 
 
 From trophies of mart and stage, 
 I would fly to the woods low rustle 
 
 And the meadows kindly page. 
 Let me dream as of old by the river, 
 
 And be loved for the dream alway ; 
 For a dreamer lives forever, 
 
 And a toiler dies in a day.
 
 IRELAND 1882. 
 
 "Island of Destiny ! Innisfail!" they cried when 
 
 their weary eyes 
 First looked on thy beauteous bosom from the 
 
 amorous ocean rise. 
 
 "Island of Destiny ! Innisfail !" we cry, dear land, 
 to thee, 
 
 As the sun of thy future rises and reddens the west 
 ern sea ! 
 
 Pregnant as earth with its gold and gems and its 
 
 metals strong and fine, 
 Is thy soul with its ardors and fancies and sympathies 
 
 divine. 
 
 Mustard seed of the nations ! they scattered thy 
 
 leaves to the air, 
 But the ravisher pales at the harvest that nourishes 
 
 everywhere. 
 
 (47)
 
 48 IRELAND. 
 
 Queen in the right of thy courage ! manacled, scourged, 
 
 defamed, 
 Thy voice in the teeth of the bayonets the right of a 
 
 race proclaimed. 
 
 "Bah!" they sneered from their battlements, "her 
 
 people cannot unite ; 
 They are sands of the sea, that break before the rush 
 
 of our ordered miirht ! 
 
 And wherever the flag of the pirate flew, the Eng 
 lish slur was heard, 
 
 And the shallow of soul re-echoed the boast of the 
 taunting word. 
 
 But we O sun, that of old was our god, we look 
 
 in thy face to-day, 
 As our Druids who prayed in the ancient tune, and 
 
 with them we proudly say : 
 
 " "We have wronged no race, we have robbed no land, 
 we have never oppressed the weak ! " 
 
 And this in the face of Heaven is the nobler thing 
 to speak.
 
 IRELAND. 49 
 
 We can never unite thank God for that ! in such 
 
 unity as yours, 
 That strangles the rights of others, and only itself 
 
 endures 
 
 As the guard of a bloodstained spoil and the red- 
 eyed watch of the slave ; 
 
 ]S T o need for such robber-union to a race free-souled 
 and brave. 
 
 The races that band for plunder are the mud of the 
 
 human stream, 
 The base and the coward and sordid, without an 
 
 unselfish gleam. 
 
 It is mud that unites ; but the sand is free ay, 
 
 every grain is free, 
 And the freedom of individual men is the highest of 
 
 liberty. 
 
 It is mud that coheres ; but the sand is free, till the 
 
 lightning smite the shore, 
 And smelt the grains to a crystal mass, to return to 
 
 sand no more.
 
 50 IRELAND. 
 
 And so with the grains of our Irish sand, that flash 
 
 clear-eyed to the sun, 
 Till a noble Purpose smites them and melts them 
 
 into one. 
 
 While the sands are free, O Tyrants ! like the wind 
 
 are your steel and speech ; 
 Your brute-force crushes a legion, but a soul it can 
 
 never reach. 
 
 Island of Destiny ! Innisfail ! for thy faith is the 
 
 payment near : 
 The mine of the future is opened, and the golden 
 
 veins appear. 
 
 Thy hands are white and thy page unstained. Reach 
 
 out for the glorious years, 
 And take them from God as His recompense for thy 
 
 fortitude and tears. 
 
 Thou canst stand by the way ascending, as thy 
 
 tyrant goes to the base : 
 The seeds of her death are in her and the signs in 
 
 her cruel face.
 
 IRELAND. 51 
 
 On her darkened path lie the corpses of men, with 
 
 whose blood her feet are red ; 
 And the curses of ruined nations are a cloud above 
 
 her head. 
 
 O Erin, fresh in the latest day, like a gem from a 
 
 Syrian tomb, 
 The burial clay of the centuries has saved thy light 
 
 in the gloom. 
 
 Thy hands may stretch to a kindred world : there is 
 
 none that hates but one ; 
 And she but hates as a pretext for the rapine she 
 
 has done. 
 
 The night of thy grief is closing, and the sky in the 
 
 East is red : 
 Thy children watch from the mountain-tops for the 
 
 sun to kiss thy head. 
 
 O Mother of men that are fit to be free, for their 
 
 test for freedom borne, 
 Thy vacant place in the Nations race awaits but the 
 
 coming morn !
 
 THE DEAD SINGER. 
 
 She is dead ! " they say ; she is robed for the 
 
 grave ; there are lilies upon her breast ; 
 Her mother has kissed her clay-cold lips, and folded 
 
 her hands to rest ; 
 Her blue eyes show through the waxen lids : they 
 
 have hidden her hair s gold crown ; 
 Her grave is dug, and its heap of earth is waiting to 
 
 press her down." 
 
 " She is dead !" they say to the people, her people, 
 
 for whom she sung ; 
 TThose hearts she touched with sorrow and love, 
 
 like a harp with life-chords strung. 
 And the people hear but behind their tear they 
 
 smile as though they heard 
 Another voice, like a Mystery, proclaim another 
 
 word. 
 
 (52)
 
 THE DEAD SIXGER. 53 
 
 "She is not dead," it says to their hearts; "true 
 
 Singers can never die ; 
 Their life is a voice of higher things unseen to the 
 
 common eye ; 
 The truths and the beauties are clear to them, God s 
 
 right and the human wrong, 
 The heroes who die unknown, and the weak who 
 
 are chained and scourged by the strong." 
 And the people smile at the death-word, for the 
 
 mystic voice is clear : 
 THE SIXGER WHO LIVED is ALWAYS ALIVE : WE 
 
 IIEARKEX AXD ALWAYS HEAR ! " 
 
 And they raise her body with tender hands, and 
 
 bear her down to the main, 
 They lay her in state on the mourning ship, like the 
 
 lily-maid Elaine ; 
 And they sail to her isle across the sea, where the 
 
 people wait on the shore 
 To lift her in silence with heads all bare to her home 
 
 forevermore, 
 Her home in the heart of her country ; oh, a grave 
 
 among our own 
 Is warmer and dearer than living on in the stranger 
 
 lands alone.
 
 54 THE DEAD SINGER. 
 
 No need of a tomb for the Singer ! Her fair hair s 
 
 pillow now 
 Is the sacred clay of her country, and the sky above 
 
 her brow 
 Is the same that smiled and wept on her youth, and 
 
 the grass around is deep 
 AVith the clinging leaves of the shamrock that cover 
 
 her peaceful sleep. 
 
 Undreaming there she will rest and wait, in the tomb 
 
 her people make, 
 Till she hears men s hearts, like the seeds in Spring, 
 
 all stirring to be awake, 
 Till she feels the moving of souls that strain till the 
 
 bands around them break ; 
 And then, I think, her dead lips will smile and her 
 
 eyes be oped to see, 
 AVhen the cry goes out to the Nations that the 
 
 Singer s land is free !
 
 EEIN. 
 
 "Come, sing a new song to her here while we 
 listen ! " 
 
 They cry to her sons who sing ; 
 And one sings: "Mavourneen, it makes the eyes 
 glisten 
 
 To think how the sorrows cling, 
 Like the clouds on your mountains, wreathing 
 
 Their green to a weeping gray ! " 
 And the bard with his passionate breathing 
 
 Has no other sweet word to say. 
 
 "Come sing a new song!" and their eyes, while 
 
 they re speaking, 
 Are dreaming of far-off things ; 
 And their hearts are away for the old words 
 
 seeking, 
 Unheeding of him who sings. 
 
 (55)
 
 56 ERIX. 
 
 But he smiles and sings on, for the sound so 
 slender 
 
 Has reached the deep note he knows ; 
 And the heart-poem stirred by the word so tender 
 
 Out from the well-spring flows. 
 
 And he says in his song: "O dhar dheelish! the 
 
 tearful ! 
 
 She s ready to laugh when she cries ! " 
 And they sob when they hear : Sure she s sad 
 
 when she s cheerful ; 
 And she smiles with the tears in her eyes ! " 
 
 And he asks them : What need of new poets to praise 
 
 her ? 
 
 Her harpers still sing in the past ; 
 And her first sweet old melodies comfort and raise 
 
 her 
 To joys never reached by her last. 
 
 "What need of new hero, with Brian? or preacher, 
 With Patrick ? or soldier, with Conn ? 
 
 With her dark Ollamh Fohla, what need of a teacher, 
 Sage, ruler, and builder in one?
 
 ERIX. 57 
 
 What need of new lovers, with Deirdre and Imer? 
 
 With wonders and visions and elves 
 Sure no need at all has romancer or rhymer, 
 
 When the fairies belong to ourselves. 
 
 What need of new tongues? O, the Gaelic is clear 
 est, 
 
 Like Nature s own voice every word ; 
 "Ahagur! Auushla! Savourneen!" the dearest 
 
 The ear of a girl ever heard. 
 
 They may talk of new causes ! Dhar Dhia ! our old 
 one 
 
 Is fresher than ever to-day ; 
 Like Erin s green sod that is steaming to God 
 
 The blood it has drunk in the fray. 
 
 They have scattered her seed, with her blood and 
 
 hate in it, 
 
 And the harvest has come to her here ; 
 Her crown still remains for the strong heart to 
 
 win it, 
 And the hour of acceptance is near.
 
 58 ERIN. 
 
 Through ages of warfare and famine and prison 
 Her voice and her spirit were free : 
 
 But the longest night ends, and her name has 
 
 uprisen : 
 The Sunburst is red on the sea ! 
 
 What need of new songs? When his country is 
 
 singing, 
 
 What word has the Poet to say, 
 But to drink her a toast while the joy-bells are 
 
 ringing 
 
 The dawn of her opening day ? 
 O Bride of the Sea ! may the world know your 
 
 laughter 
 
 As well as it knows your tears ! 
 As your past was for Freedom, so be your hereafter ; 
 
 And through all your coming years 
 May no weak race be wronged, and no strong robber 
 
 feared ; 
 
 To oppressors grow hateful, to slaves more endeared ; 
 Till the world comes to know that the test of a 
 
 cause 
 Is the hatred of tyrants, and Erin s applause !"
 
 POET AND LORD. 
 
 God makes a poet : touches soul and sight, 
 
 And lips and heart, and sends him forth to sing ; 
 
 His fellows hearing, OAvn the true birthright, 
 And crown him daily w 7 ith the love they bring. 
 
 The king a lord makes, by a parchment leaf; 
 
 Though heart be withered, and though sight be 
 
 dim 
 With dullard brain and soul of disbelief 
 
 Ay, even so ; he makes a lord of him. 
 
 What, then, of one divinely kissed and sent 
 
 To iill the people with ideal words, 
 Who with his poet s crown is discontent, 
 
 And begs a parchment title with the lords ? 
 
 (59)
 
 A YEAR. 
 
 In the Spring we see : 
 
 Then the buds are dear to us immature bosoms 
 
 like lilies swell. 
 In the Summer we live : 
 When bright eyes are near to us, oh, the sweet 
 
 stories the false lips tell ! 
 In the Autumn we love : 
 When the honey is dripping, deep eyes moisten and 
 
 soft breasts heave ; 
 In the Winter we think : 
 With the sands fast slipping, we smile and sigh for 
 
 the days we leave. 
 
 (60)
 
 AN OLD VAGABOND. 
 
 lie was old and alone, and he sat on a stone to rest 
 
 for awhile from the road ; 
 His beard was white, and his eye was bright, and his 
 
 wrinkles overflowed 
 With a mild content at the way life went ; and I 
 
 closed the book on my knee : 
 "I will venture a look in this living book," I 
 
 thought, as he greeted me. 
 
 And I said : "My friend, have you time to spend to 
 
 tell me what makes you glad ? " 
 " Oh, ay, my lad," with a smile ; "I m glad that I m 
 
 old, yet am never sad !" 
 
 But why ? " said I ; and his merry eye made an 
 swer as much as his tongue ; 
 
 "Because," said he, "I am poor and free who was 
 rich and a slave when young. 
 
 (61)
 
 62 AN OLD VAGABOND. 
 
 There is naught but age can allay the rage of tho 
 passions that rule men s lives ; 
 
 And a man to be free must a poor man be, for un 
 happy is he who thrives : 
 
 He fears for his ventures, his rents and debentures, 
 his crops, and his son, and his wife ; 
 
 His dignity s slighted when he s not invited ; he 
 fears every day of his life. 
 
 But the man who is poor, and by age has grown 
 sure that there are no surprises in years, 
 
 Who knows that to have is no joy, nor to save, and 
 who opens his eyes and his ears 
 
 To the world as it is, and the part of it his, and 
 who says : They are happy, these birds, 
 
 Yet they live day by day in improvident way im 
 provident? What were the words 
 
 Of the Teacher who taught that the field-lilies 
 brought the lesson of life to a man ? 
 
 Can we better the thing that is schoolless, or sing 
 more of love than the nightingale can? 
 
 See that rabbit what feature in that pretty creat 
 ure needs science or culture or care ? 
 
 Send this dog to a college and stuff him with 
 knowledge, will it add to the warmth of 
 his hair?
 
 AN OLD VAGABOND. 63 
 
 Why should mankind, apart, turn from Nature to 
 
 Art, and declare the exchange better-planned ? 
 I prefer to trust God for my living than plod for my 
 
 bread at a master s hand. 
 A man s higher being is knowing and seeing, not 
 
 having and toiling for more ; 
 In the senses and soul is the joy of control, not in 
 
 pride or luxurious store. 
 Yet my needs are the same as the kingling s whose 
 
 name is a terror to thousands : some bread, 
 Some water and milk, I can do without silk, 
 
 some wool, and a roof for my head. 
 What more is possest that will stand the grim test 
 
 of death s verdict ? What riches remain 
 To give joy at the last, all the vanities past? Ay, 
 
 ay, that s the word they are vain 
 And vexatious of spirit to all who inherit belief in 
 
 the world and its ways. 
 And so, old and alone, sitting here on a stone, I 
 
 smile with the birds at the days." 
 
 And I thanked him, and went to my study, head 
 bent, where I laid down my book on its shelf; 
 
 And that day all the page that I read was my age, 
 and my wants, and my joys, and myself.
 
 A DISAPPOINTMENT. 
 
 Her hair was a waving bronze, and her eyes 
 Deep wells that might cover a brooding soul ; 
 
 And who, till he weighed it, could ever surmise 
 That her heart was a cinder instead of a coal ! 
 
 (64)
 
 YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW. 
 
 Joys have three stages, Hoping, Having, and 
 
 Had : 
 The hands of Hope are empty, and the heart of 
 
 Having is sad ; 
 For the joy we take, in the taking dies ; and the joy 
 
 we Had is its jrhost. 
 
 o 
 
 Xow, which is the better the joy unknown or 
 the joy we have clasped and lost ? 
 
 (fir,)
 
 YES? 
 
 The words of the lips are double or single, 
 
 True or false, as we say or sing : 
 But the words of the eyes that mix and mingle 
 
 Are always saying the same old thing ! 
 
 (66)
 
 A PASSAGE. 
 
 The world was made when a man was born ; 
 He must taste for himself the forbidden springs, 
 He can never take warning from old-fashioned 
 
 things ; 
 
 He must fight as a boy, he must drink as a youth, 
 He must kiss, he must love, he must swear to the 
 
 truth 
 
 Of the friend of his soul, he must laugh to scorn 
 The hint of deceit in a woman s eyes 
 That are clear as the wells of Paradise. 
 And so he goes on, till the world grows old, 
 Till his tongue has grown cautious, his heart has 
 
 grown cold, 
 Till the smile leaves his mouth, and the ring leaves 
 
 his laugh, 
 And he shirks the bright headache you ask him to 
 
 quaff; 
 
 (67)
 
 68 A PASSAGE. 
 
 He grows formal with men, and with women polite, 
 And distrustful of both when they re out of his 
 
 sight ; 
 
 Then he eats for his palate, and drinks for his head, 
 And loves for his pleasure, and tis time he was 
 
 dead !
 
 DISTANCE. 
 
 The world is large, when its weary leagues two lov 
 ing hearts divide ; 
 
 But the world is small, when your enemy is loose 
 on the other side.
 
 THE CITY STREETS. 
 
 A City of Palaces ! Yes, that s true : a city of 
 
 palaces built for trade ; 
 Look down this street what a splendid view of 
 
 the temples where fabulous gains are made. 
 Just glance at the wealth of a single pile, the marble 
 
 pillars, the miles of glass, 
 The carving and cornice in gaudy style, the massive 
 
 show of the polished brass ; 
 And think of the acres of inner floors, where the 
 
 wealth of the world is spread for sale ; 
 Why, the treasures enclosed by those ponderous 
 
 doors are richer than ever a fairy tale. 
 Pass on to the next, it is still the same, another 
 
 Aladdin the scene repeats ; 
 The silks are unrolled and the jewels flame for 
 
 leagues and leagues of the city streets ! 
 
 (70)
 
 THE CITY STREETS. 71 
 
 Now turn away from the teeming town, and pass to 
 
 the homes of the merchant kings, 
 Wide squares where the stately porches frown, 
 
 where the flowers are bright and the foun 
 tain sings ; 
 Look up at the lights in that brilliant room, with its 
 
 chandelier of a hundred flames ! 
 See the carpeted street where the ladies come whose 
 
 husbands have millions or famous names ; 
 For whom are the jewels and silks, behold : on 
 
 those exquisite bosoms and throats they 
 
 burn ; 
 Art challenges Nature in color and gold and the 
 
 gracious presence of every turn. 
 So the "\Vinters fly past in a joyous rout, and the 
 
 Summers bring marvellous cool retreats ; 
 These are civilized wonders we re finding out as we 
 
 walk through the beautiful city streets. 
 
 A City of Palaces ! Hush ! not quite : a city 
 
 where palaces are, is best ; 
 No need to speak of what s out of sight : let us take 
 
 what is pleasant, and leave the rest :
 
 72 THE CITY STREETS. 
 
 The men of the city who travel and write, whose 
 
 fame and credit are known abroad, 
 The people who move in the ranks polite, the 
 
 cultured women whom all applaud. 
 It is true, there are only ten thousand here, but the 
 
 other half million are vulgar clod ; 
 And a soul well-bred is eternally dear it counts so 
 
 much more on the books of God. 
 The others have use in their place, no doubt ; but 
 
 why speak of a class one never meets ? 
 They are gloomy things to be talked about, those 
 
 common lives of the city streets. 
 
 Well, then, if you will, let us look at both : let us 
 weigh the pleasure against the pain, 
 
 The gentleman s smile with the bar-room oath, the 
 luminous square with the tenement lane. 
 
 Look round you now ; tis another sphere, of thin- 
 clad women and grimy men ; 
 
 There are over ten thousand huddled here, where a 
 hundred would live of our upper ten. 
 
 Take care of that child : here, look at her face, a 
 baby who carries a baby brother ; 
 
 They are early helpers in this poor place, and the 
 infant must often nurse the mother.
 
 THE CITY STREETS. 73 
 
 Come up those stairs where the little ones went : five 
 
 flights they groped and climbed in the dark ; 
 There are dozens of homes on the steep ascent, and 
 
 homes that are filled with children hark ! 
 Did you hear that laugh, with its manly tones, and 
 
 the joyous ring of the baby voice? 
 Tis the father who gathers his little ones, the nurse 
 
 and her brother, and all rejoice. 
 Yes, human nature is much the same when you 
 
 come to the heart and count its beats ; 
 The workman is proud of his home s dear name as 
 
 the richest man on the city streets. 
 
 God pity them all ! God pity the worst ! for the 
 
 worst are reckless, and need it most : 
 When we trace the causes why lives are curst with 
 
 the criminal taint, let no man boast : 
 The race is not run with an equal chance : the poor 
 
 man s son carries double weight ; 
 Who have not, aro tempted ; inheritance is a blight 
 
 or a blessing of man s estate. 
 No matter that poor men sometimes sweep the prize 
 
 from the sons of the millionnaire : 
 What is good to win must be good to keep, else the 
 
 virtue dies on the topmost stair ;
 
 74 THE CITY STREETS. 
 
 When the winners can keep their golden prize, still 
 
 darker the day of the laboring poor : 
 The strong and the selfish are sure to rise, while 
 
 the simple and generous die obscure. 
 And these are the virtues and social gifts by which 
 
 Progress and Property rank over Man ! 
 Look there, O woe ! where a lost soul drifts on the 
 
 stream where such virtues overran : 
 Stand close let her pass ! from a tenement room 
 
 and a reeking workshop graduate : 
 If a man were to break the iron loom or the press 
 
 she tended, he knows his fate ; 
 But her life may be broken, she stands alone, her 
 
 poverty stings, and her guideless feet, 
 Not long since kissed as a father s own, are dragged 
 
 in the mire of the pitiless street. 
 
 Come back to the light, for my brain goes wrong 
 
 when I see the sorrows that can t be cured. 
 If this is all righteous, then why prolong the pain 
 
 for a thing that must be endured ? 
 We can never have palaces built without slaves, nor 
 
 luxuries served without ill-paid toil ; 
 Society flourishes only on graves, the moral graves 
 
 in the lowly soil.
 
 THE CITY STREETS. 75 
 
 The earth was not made for its people : that cry has 
 
 been hounded clown as a social crime ; 
 The meaning of life is to barter and buy ; and the 
 
 strongest and shrewdest are masters of time. 
 God made the million to serve the few, and their 
 
 questions of right are vain conceits ; 
 To have one sweet home that is safe and true, ten 
 
 garrets must reek in the darkened streets. 
 
 Tis Civilization, so they say, and it cannot be 
 changed for the weakness of men. 
 
 Take care ! take care ! tis a desperate way to goad 
 the wolf to the end of his den. 
 
 Take heed of your Civilization, ye, on your pyra 
 mids built of quivering hearts ; 
 
 There are stages, like Paris in 03, where the com 
 monest men play most terrible parts. 
 
 Your statutes may crush but they cannot kill the 
 patient sense of a natural right ; 
 
 It may slowly move, but the People s will, like the 
 ocean o er Holland, is always in sight. 
 
 "It is not our fault !" say the rich ones. No ; tis 
 the fault of a system old and strong ; 
 
 But men are the makers of systems : so, the cure 
 will come if we own the wrong.
 
 76 THE CITY STREETS. 
 
 It will come in peace if the man-right lead ; it will 
 
 sweep in storm if it be denied : 
 The law to bring justice is always decreed ; and on 
 
 every hand are the warnings cried. 
 Take heed of your Progress ! Its feet have trod on 
 
 the souls it slew with its own pollutions ; 
 Submission is good ; but the order of God may 
 
 flame the torch of the revolutions ! 
 Beware with your Classes ! Men are men, and a cry 
 
 in the night is a fearful teacher ; 
 When it reaches the hearts of the masses, then they 
 
 need but a sword for a judge and preacher. 
 Take heed, for your Juggernaut pushes hard : God 
 
 holds the doom that its day completes ; 
 It will dawn like a fire when the track is barred by 
 
 a barricade in the city streets.
 
 THE THREE QUEENS.* 
 
 In the far time of Earth s sweet maiden beauty, 
 
 When Morning hung with rapture on her breast ; 
 When every sentient life paid love for duty, 
 
 And every law was Nature s own behest ; 
 When reason ruled as subtle instinct taught her ; 
 
 When joys were pure and sin and shame unseen ; 
 Then God sent down His messenger and daughter, 
 
 His kiss upon her lips, to reign as Queen ! 
 
 Her name was LIBERTY ! Earth lay before her, 
 
 And throbbed unconscious fealty and truth ; 
 Morning and night men hastened to adore her, 
 
 And from her eyes Peace drew perennial youth. 
 Her hair was golden as the stars of heaven ; 
 
 Her face was radiant with the kiss of Jove ; 
 Her form was lovelier than the sun at even ; 
 
 Death paled before her : Life was one with Love. 
 
 * Eead at the annual meeting of Phi Beta Kappa, Dartmouth 
 
 College, 1882. 
 
 (77)
 
 78 THE THREE QUEENS. 
 
 O time traditioned ! cro thy dismal sequel, 
 
 Men owned the world, and every man was free ; 
 The lowest life was noble ; all were equal 
 
 In needs and creeds, their birthright Liberty. 
 Possession had no power of caste, nor learning ; 
 
 He was not great who owned a shining stone ; 
 Xo seer was needed for the truth s discerning, 
 
 Xor king nor code to teach the world its own. 
 Distinction lived, but gave no power o er others, 
 
 As flowers have no dominion each o er each ; 
 What men could do they did among their brothers 
 
 By skill of hand or gift of song or speech. 
 
 Dear Golden Age ! that like a deathless spirit 
 Fills our traditions with a light sublime ; 
 
 Like wheat from Egypt s tombs our souls inherit 
 Sweet dreams of freedom from thy vanished time. 
 
 O Goddess Liberty ! thy sun was cleaving 
 Its golden path across a perfect sky, 
 
 TVhen lo ! a cloud, from night below upheaving, 
 And underneath a shadow and a cry !
 
 THE THREE QUEENS. 79 
 
 In lurid darkness spread the thing of error, 
 Swift ran the shudder and the fear beneath ; 
 
 Till o er the Queen s face passed the voiceless terror, 
 And Love grew pale to see the joy of Death. 
 
 Men stood benumbed to wait unknown disaster ; 
 
 Full soon its swordcd Messenger was seen ; 
 "Behold!" he cried, "(he weak shall have a master! 
 
 The Strong shall rule! There reigns another 
 
 Queen!" 
 Then rushed the forces of the night-born Power, 
 
 And seized white Liberty, and cast her down ; 
 Man s plundered birthright w T as the new Queen s 
 dower, 
 
 The sorrow of the weak ones was her crown. 
 
 Her name was LAW ! She sent her proclamation 
 
 Through every land and set her crimson seal 
 On every strangled right and revocation 
 
 Of aim and instinct of the commonweal. 
 She saw T the true Queen prisoned by her creatures ; 
 
 Who dared to speak, w r as slain by her command. 
 Her face was lustreless. With smileless features 
 
 She took the throne a w r eapon in her hand !
 
 80 THE THREE QUEEXS. 
 
 Her new code read : The earth is for the able ; " 
 
 (And able meant the selfish, strong, and shrewd ;) 
 "Equality and freedom are a fable ; 
 
 To take and keep the largest share is good." 
 Her teachers taught the justice of oppression, 
 
 That taxed the poor on all but air and sun ; 
 Her preachers preached the gospel of possession, 
 
 That hoards had rights while human souls had 
 none. 
 
 Then all things changed their object and relation ; 
 
 Commerce instead of Xature Progress instead 
 
 of Men ; 
 The world became a monstrous corporation, 
 
 Where ninety serfs ground luxury for ten. 
 The masters blessed, the toilers cursed the system 
 
 That classified and kept mankind apart ; 
 But passing ages rained the dust of custom 
 
 Where broken Xature showed the weld of art. 
 
 But there were some who scorned to make alliance, 
 Who owned the true Queen even in the dust ; 
 
 And these, through generations, flung defiance 
 From gaol and gibbet for their sacred trust.
 
 THE THREE QUEENS. 81 
 
 Then came the Christ, the Saviour and the Brother, 
 
 With truth and freedom once again the seed ; 
 Woe to the rich ! Do ye to one another 
 
 As each desires for self" man s primal creed. 
 But, lo ! they took the Saviour and they bound 
 him, 
 
 And set him in their midst as he were free ; 
 They made His tied hands seal their deeds around 
 Him, 
 
 And His dumb lips condemn fair Liberty ! 
 
 "Then woe ! " cried those faint-hearted ; "woe for 
 dreaming, 
 
 For prayers and hopes and sufferings all in 
 
 vain!" 
 O Souls despondent at the outward seeming, 
 
 Here at the cry, behold the light again ! 
 Here at the cry, the answer and solution : 
 
 When strong as Death the cold usurper reigns, 
 When human right seems doomed to dissolution, 
 
 And Hope itself is wrung with mortal pains ; 
 When Christ is harnessed to the landlord s burden ; 
 
 His truth to make men free a thing of scorn ; 
 God hears the cry, and sends the mystic guerdon, 
 
 Earth thrills and throes another Queen is born !
 
 82 THE THREE QUEENS. 
 
 O weak she coines, a child and not a woman ; 
 
 Needing our nursing and devotion long ; 
 But in her eyes the flame divine and human, 
 
 To strengthen weak ones and restrain the strong. 
 
 Her name is LEARNING ! Her domain unbounded ; 
 
 Of all the fetters she commands the key ; 
 Through her babe-mouth man s wrong shall be 
 confounded, 
 
 And link by link her sister Queen set free. 
 Her hand shall hold the patriotic passes, 
 
 And check the wrong that zeal would do for 
 
 right; 
 Her whispered secrets shall inflame the masses 
 
 To read their planet-charter by her light. 
 Round her to-day may press the base Queen s 
 minions, 
 
 Seeking alliance and approval. Nay ! 
 The day and night shall mingle their dominions 
 
 Ere Nature s rule and Mammon s join their sway. 
 
 Our new Queen comes a nursling, thus to teach us 
 The patience and the tenderness we need : 
 
 To raise our natures that the light may reach us 
 Of sacrifice and silence for a creed.
 
 THE THREE QUEENS. 83 
 
 A nursling yet, but every school and college 
 
 Is training minds to tend the heavenly maid ; 
 And men are learning, grain by grain, the knowl 
 edge 
 
 That worlds exist for higher ends than trade. 
 Grander than Vulcan s are these mighty forges 
 
 Where souls are shaped and sharped like fiery 
 
 swords, 
 To arm the multitude till Might disgorges, 
 
 And save the Saviour from the selfish hordes. 
 
 Around us here we count those Pharos stations, 
 
 Where men are bred to do their Queen s behest : 
 To guard the deep republican foundations 
 
 Of our majestic freedom of the West ! 
 From our high place the broken view grows clearer, 
 
 The bloodstained upward path the patriots trod ; 
 Shall we not reach to bring the toilers nearer 
 
 The law of Nature, Liberty, and God?
 
 MIDNIGHT SEPTEMBER 19, 1881.* 
 
 Once in a lifetime, we may see the veil 
 
 Tremble and lift, that hides symbolic things ; 
 
 The Spirit s vision, when the senses fail, 
 
 Sweeps the weird meaning that the outlook 
 brings. 
 
 Deep in the midst of turmoil, it may be 
 A crowded street, a forum, or a field, 
 
 The soul inverts the telescope to see 
 
 To-day s event in future s years revealed. 
 
 Back from the present, let us look at Rome : 
 Behold, what Cato meant, what Brutus said. 
 
 Hark ! the Athenians welcome Cimon home ! 
 How clear they are those glimpses of the dead ! 
 
 * Death of President Garfield 
 (84)
 
 MIDNIGHT, SEPTEMBER 10, 1881. 85 
 
 But we, hard toilers, we who plan and weave 
 Through common days the web of common life, 
 
 What word, alas ! shall teach us to receive 
 The mystic meaning of our peace and strife ? 
 
 Whence comes our symbol? Surely, G.od must 
 speak 
 
 No less than He can make us heed or pause : 
 Self-seekers we, too busy or too weak 
 
 To search beyond our daily lives and laws. 
 
 From things occult our earth-turned eyes rebel ; 
 
 No sound of Destiny can reach our ears ; 
 We have no time for dreaming Hark ! a knell . 
 
 A knell at midnight ! All the nation hears ! 
 
 A second grievous throb ! The dreamers wake 
 The merchant s soul forgets his goods and ships ; 
 
 The weary workmen from their slumbers break ; 
 The women raise their eyes with quivering lips ; 
 
 The miner rests upon his pick to hear ; 
 
 The printer s type stops midway from the case ; 
 The solemn sound has reached the roysterer s ear, 
 
 And brought the shame and sorrow to his face.
 
 86 MIDNIGHT, SEPTEMBER 19, 1881. 
 
 Again it booms ! O Mystic Veil, upraise ! 
 
 Behold, tis lifted? On the darkness drawn, 
 A picture lined with light ! The people s gaze, 
 
 From sea to sea, beholds it till the dawn ! 
 
 A death-bed scene a sinking sufferer lies, 
 
 Their chosen ruler, crowned with love and pride ; 
 
 Around, his counsellors, with streaming eyes ; 
 His wife, heart-broken, kneeling by his side : 
 
 Death s shadow holds her it will pass too soon ; 
 
 She weeps in silence bitterest of tears ; 
 He wanders softly Nature s kindest boon ; 
 
 And as he murmurs, all the country hears : 
 
 For him the pain is past, the struggle ends ; 
 
 His cares and honors fade his younger life 
 In peaceful Mentor comes, with dear old friends ; 
 
 His mother s arms take home his dear young wife. 
 
 He stands among the students, tall and strong, 
 And teaches truths republican and grand ; 
 
 He moves ah, pitiful he sweeps along 
 O er fields of carnage leading his command !
 
 MIDNIGHT, SEPTEMBER 19, 1881. 87 
 
 He speaks to crowded faces round him surge 
 Thousands and millions of excited men : 
 
 He hears them cheer sees some vast light emerge 
 Is borne as on a tempest then ah, then, 
 
 The fancies fade, the fever s work is past ; 
 
 A deepened pang, then recollection s thrill ; 
 He feels the faithful lips that kiss their last, 
 
 His heart beats once in answer, and is still ! 
 
 The curtain falls : but hushed, as if afraid, 
 
 The people wait, tear-stained, with heaving 
 breast ; 
 
 Twill rise again, they know, when he is laid 
 "With Freedom, in the Capitol, at rest.
 
 AMEKICA.* 
 
 Nor War nor Peace, forever, old and young, 
 But Strength my theme, whose song is yet un 
 sung, 
 
 The People s Strength, the deep alluring dream 
 Of truths that seethe below the truths that seem. 
 
 The buried ruins of dead empires seek, 
 Of Indian, Syrian, Persian, Roman, Greek : 
 From shattered capital and frieze upraise 
 The stately structures of their golden days : 
 Their laws occult, their priests and prophets ask, 
 Their altars search, their oracles unmask, 
 Their parable from birth to burial see, 
 The acorn germ, the growth, the dense-leafed 
 tree, 
 
 (Read before the Army of the Potomac, in Detroit, 1881.)
 
 AMERICA. 89 
 
 A world of riant life ; the sudden day 
 When like a new strange glory, shone decay, 
 A golden glow amid the green ; the change 
 From branch to branch at life s receding range, 
 Till nothing stands of towering strength and 
 
 pride 
 Save naked trunk and arms whose veins are 
 
 dried ; 
 
 And these, too, crumble till no signs remain 
 To mark its place upon the wind-swept plain. 
 
 THiy died the empires ? Like the forest trees 
 Did Nature doom them ? or did sloAV disease 
 Assail their roots and poison all their springs ? 
 
 The old-time story answers : nobles, kings, 
 Have made and been the State, their names 
 
 alone 
 Its history holds ; its wealth, its wars, their 
 
 own. 
 
 Their wanton will could raise, enrich, condemn ; 
 The toiling millions lived and died for them. 
 Their fortunes rose in conquest fell, in guilt ; 
 The people never owned them, never built.
 
 90 AMERICA. 
 
 Those olden times ! how many words are spent 
 
 In weak regret and shallow argument 
 
 To prove them wiser, happier than our own ! 
 
 The oldest moment that the world has known 
 
 Is passing now. Those vaunted times were 
 
 young ; 
 
 Their wisdom from unlettered peasants sprung ; 
 Their laws from nobles arrogant and rude ; 
 Their justice force, their whole achievement 
 crude. 
 
 With men the old are wise : why change the rule 
 When nations speak, and send the old to school? 
 Respect the past for all the good it knew : 
 Give noble lives and struggling truths their due ; 
 But ask what freedom knew the common men 
 Who served and bled and won the victories then ? 
 The leaders are immortal, but the hordes 
 They led to death were simply human swords, 
 Unknowing what they fought for, why they fell. 
 
 What change has come ? Imperial Europe tell ! 
 Death s warders cry from twenty centuries peaks : 
 Plataea s field the word to Plevna speaks ;
 
 AMERICA. 91 
 
 The martial draft still wastes the peasants 
 
 farms 
 
 A dozen kings, five million men in arms ; 
 The earth mapped out estate-like, hedged with 
 
 steel ; 
 
 In neighboring schools the children bred to feel 
 Unnatural hate, disjoined in speech and creed ; 
 The forges roaring for the armies need ; 
 The cities builded by the people lined 
 With scowling forts and roadways undermined ; 
 At every bastioned frontier, every State, 
 Suspicion, sworded, standing by the gate ! 
 
 But turn our eyes from these oppressive lands : 
 Behold, one country all defenceless stands, 
 One nation-continent, from East to West, 
 With riches heaped upon her bounteous breast ; 
 Her mines, her marts, her skill of hand and 
 
 brain, 
 That bring Aladdin s dreams to light again ! 
 
 Where sleep the conquerors ? Here is chance for 
 
 spoil : 
 Such un watched fields, such endless, priceless toil !
 
 92 AMERICA. 
 
 Vain dream of olden time ! The robber strength 
 That swept its will is overmatched at length. 
 Here, not with swords but smiles the people 
 
 greet 
 
 The foreign spy in harbor, granary, street ; 
 Here towns unguarded lie, for here alone 
 Nor caste, nor king, nor privilege is known. 
 For home our farmer ploughs, our miner delves, 
 A land of toilers, toiling for themselves ; 
 A land of cities, which no fortress shields, 
 Whose open streets reach out to fertile fields ; 
 Whose roads are shaken by no armies tread ; 
 Whose only camps are cities of the dead ! 
 Go stand at Arlington the graves among : 
 No ramparts, cannons there, no banners hung, 
 No threat above the Capitol, no blare 
 To warn the senators the guns are there. 
 
 But never yet was city fortified 
 
 Like that sad height above Potomac s tide ; 
 
 There never yet was eloquence in speech 
 
 Like those ten thousand stones, a name on each ; 
 
 No guards e er pressed such claims on court or 
 
 king 
 As these Praetorians to our Senate bring ;
 
 93 
 
 The Array of Potomac never lay 
 
 So full of strength as in its carnp to-day ! 
 
 On fatal Chreronea s field the Greeks 
 A lion raised a sombre tomb that speaks 
 Xo word, no name, an emblem of the pride 
 Of those that ruled the insect host that died. 
 
 But by her soldiers graves Columbia proves 
 How fast toward morn the night of manhood 
 
 moves. 
 
 Those low white lines at Gettysburg remain 
 The sacred record of her humblest slain, 
 Whose children s children in their time shall 
 
 come 
 
 To view with pride their hero-father s tomb, 
 While down the ages runs the patriot line, 
 Till rich tradition makes each tomb a shrine. 
 
 Our standing army these, with spectre glaives ; 
 Our fortressed towns their battle-ordered graves. 
 Here sleep our valiant, sown like dragon s teeth ; 
 Here new-born sons renew the pious wreath ;
 
 94 AMERICA. 
 
 Here proud Columbia bends with tear-stirred 
 
 mouth, 
 
 To kiss their blood-seal, binding North and South, 
 Two clasping hands upon the knot they tied 
 When Union lived and Human Slavery died ! 
 
 Who doubt our strength, or measure it with those 
 Whose armed millions wait for coming foes, 
 They judge by royal standards, that depend 
 On hireling hands to threaten or defend, 
 That keep their war-dogs chained in time of peace, 
 And dread a foe scarce less than their release. 
 W T ho hunt wild beasts with cheetahs, fiercely 
 
 tame, 
 Must watch their hounds as well as fear their 
 
 game. 
 
 Around our veterans hung no dread nor doubt 
 When twice a million men were mustered out. 
 As scattered seed in new-ploughed land, or flakes 
 Of Spring-time snow descend in smiling lakes, 
 Our war-born soldiers sank into the sea 
 Of peaceful life and fruitful energy. 
 No sign remained of that vast army, save 
 In field and street new workmen, bronzed and 
 grave ;
 
 AMERICA. 95 
 
 Some whistling teamsters still in army vest ; 
 Some quiet citizens with medalled breast. 
 
 So died the hatred of our brother feud ; 
 The conflict o er the triumph was subdued. 
 What victor King e er spared the conquered foe ? 
 How much of mercy did strong Prussia show 
 When anguished Paris at her feet lay prone ? 
 The German trumpet rang above her moan, 
 The clink of Uhlan spurs her temples knew, 
 Her Arch of Triumph spanned their triumph, too. 
 
 Not thus, O South ! when thy proud head was 
 
 low, 
 
 Thy passionate heart laid open to the foe 
 Not thus, Virginia, did thy victors meet 
 At Appomattox him who bore defeat : 
 No brutal show abased thine honored State : 
 Grant turned from Richmond at the very gate ! 
 
 O Land magnanimous, republican ! 
 The last for Nationhood, the first for Man ! 
 Because thy lines by Freedom s hand were laid 
 Profound the sin to change or retrograde.
 
 96 AMERICA. 
 
 From base to cresting let thy work be new ; 
 Twas not by aping foreign ways it grew. 
 To struggling peoples give at least applause ; 
 Let equities not precedent subtend your laws ; 
 Like rays from that great Eye the altars show, 
 That fall triangular, free states should grow, 
 The soul above, the brain and hand below. 
 Believe that strength lies not in steel nor stone ; 
 That perils wait the land whose heavy throne, 
 Though ringed by swords and rich with titled 
 
 show, 
 
 Is based on fettered misery below ; 
 That nations grow where every class unites 
 For common interests and common rights ; 
 Where no caste barrier stays the poor man s son, 
 Till step by step the topmost height is won ; 
 Where every hand subscribes to every rule, 
 And free as air are voice and vote and school ! 
 A Nation s years are centuries. Let Art 
 Portray thy first, and Liberty will start 
 From every field in Europe at the sight. 
 "Why stand these thrones between us and the 
 
 light?" 
 Strong men will ask : Who built these frontier 
 
 towers 
 To bar out men of kindred blood with ours ? "
 
 AMERICA. 97 
 
 O, this thy work, Eepublic ! this thy health, 
 To prove man s birthright to a commonwealth ; 
 To teach the peoples to be strong and wise, 
 Till armies, nations, nobles, royalties, 
 Are laid at rest with all their fears and hates ; 
 Till Europe s thirteen Monarchies are States, 
 Without a barrier and without a throne, 
 Of one grand Federation like our own !
 
 THE 
 
 STATUES IN THE BLOCK, 
 
 AND OTHER POEMS. 
 
 BY JOHN BOYLE O REIL L.Y. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the Boston Daily Advertiser. 
 
 " Mr. O Reilly excels in dramatic poetry. When he has an heroic story to 
 tell, he tells it with ardor and vigor; he appreciates all its nobleness of 
 soul, as well as its romantic and picturesque situations; and his Song for 
 the Soldiers, and The Mutiny of the Chains, in his last volume, show 
 with what power he can portray the daring and heroism that have stirred 
 his own heart. He writes with ease and freedom, but his poems of love 
 and of discontent are not superior to those of other well-known English 
 poets. His best work in this way are Her Kef rain, a sweet, tender 
 poem, true to life; and Waiting, that is far more impassioned. The 
 cynical verses and epigrams scattered through the book are piquant, and 
 enhance its sweetness, as bitter almonds do the richness of confectionery. 
 There is another side still to Mr. O Reilly s poetry, rnd it would be easy to 
 represent him as chiefly religious, earnest and tender. His poems abound 
 in passages like the following from Living : 
 
 " Who waits and sympathizes with the pettiest life, 
 And loves all things, and reaches up to God 
 With thanks and blessing he alone is living." 
 
 " And From the Earth a Cry, this line: 
 
 " God purifies slowly by peace, and urgently by fire. 
 " From The Statues in the Block : 
 
 " And I know 
 
 That when God gives to us the clearest sight, 
 He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow. "
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the New York World. 
 
 " Nobody can look over Mr. O Reilly s poems -without being convinced that 
 they are poems; that is to say, that the writer has really something to say, 
 and something which could not be said so well and so completely in prose. 
 Those who are in the habit of looking over current volumes of verse will 
 recognize that this is very much to say of them. Mr. O Reilly s verses are, 
 indeed, quite out of the common. There is not one of the poems in this 
 thin volume that is not a genuine poem in the sense that it records a 
 genuine and poetical impression. His talent is essentially, we should say 
 almost exclusively, dramatic, as strictly dramatic as Browning s. The 
 most successful of these poems are those which are professedly dramatic 
 rather than those which are contemplative. This excellence in dramatic 
 verse is national. From Thomas Davis down, the Irish lyrists, who are 
 worthy of classification at all in poetry, excel in representation of rapid 
 action and of the emotion which is connected with rapid action; and this 
 is what we call dramatic excellence. Mr. O Reilly s chief successes are in 
 such poems as A Song for the Soldiers, and The Mutiny of the 
 Chains, in the present volume." 
 
 Newark (N. J.) Morning Register. 
 
 " Roberts Brothers, Boston, have just published The Statues in the 
 Block, and Other Poems, by John Boyle O Reilly. The poem that gives 
 the book its title is the story of four persons looking at a block of marble 
 and seeing an ideal in it. One, her he loved, his jewel, and the jewel of 
 the world. Another, her upon whom he lavished coin he drank the wine 
 she filled and made her eat the dregs, and drenched her honey with a sea 
 of gall; he, however, was but one who swooned with love beside her. The 
 third was suffering " Motherland," and, as may be supposed, the author s 
 pen waxes strong at picturing the sorrow, because 
 
 " No love but thine can satisfy the heart, 
 For love of thee holds in it hate of wrong, 
 And shapes the hope that moulds humanity." 
 
 " The fourth sees in the block his lost child, and the pen softens as he 
 sees 
 
 " The little hands still crossed a child in death; 
 My link with love my dying gift from her 
 "Whose last look smiled on both when I was left 
 A loveless man, save this poor gift, alone. 
 
 I see my darling in the marble now 
 
 My wasted leaf her kind eyes smiling fondly, 
 
 And through her eyes I see the love beyond, 
 
 The binding light that moves not; and l know 
 
 That when God gives to us the clearest sight, 
 
 He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow. "
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 3 
 
 " Here and there through the collection are little unnamed wavelets, of 
 which these four lines are a good example : 
 
 " You gave me the key of your heart, my love; 
 
 Then why do you make me knock ? 
 O, that was yesterday, saints above! 
 
 And last night I changed the lock! " 
 
 Dr. Shelton M Eenzie in the Philadelphia Evening News. 
 
 " Good poetry, which constitutes a considerable portion of literature, has 
 been rather scarce of late. The odds and ends of verse which get into the 
 magazines are generally aimless and crude. The poet sits down to write 
 what Ii3 has thought, but the poetaster takes pen in hand to think what he 
 shall think. There is a world of difference between the results that is, 
 between true poesy and merely mechanical verse. .... 
 
 The poem which leads off, covering only thirteen pages, is the longest in 
 the volume, and is full of deep-thoughted expression; but it is probable 
 that Muley Malek, the King, a lay of chivalry, will have more numerous 
 admirers. There is also From the Earth a Cry, reviewing the leading 
 events of the decade which closed in 1870. The heart-poems here are 
 highly impressive in their truth. Hero and there, on casual fly-leaves, we 
 lind curt truths; thus: 
 
 " Life is a certainty, 
 
 Death is a doubt; 
 Men may be dead 
 
 While they re walking about. 
 Love is as needful 
 
 In being as breath; 
 Loving is dreaming, 
 
 And waking is death. 
 
 " Here is another leaflet; an epigram if you please to call it so: 
 
 " You gave me the key of your heart, my love, 
 Then why do you make me knock? 
 O, that was yesterday, saints above! 
 And last night I changed the lock! 
 
 "Apropos of the season, which holds back its beauty and bloom, here is 
 a bit of truth: 
 
 " O, the rare spring flowers! take them as they come; 
 ]1o not wait for Slimmer buds, they may never bloom; 
 Kvery sweet to-day sends, we are wise to save; 
 Roses bloom for pulling, the path is to the grave." 
 
 " In conclusion, we earnestly hope that Mr. Boyle O Reilly, who writes so 
 well, will challenge our attention, our admiration, far more frequently 
 than he yet has done."
 
 4 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the New York Herald. 
 
 " Mr. O Reilly has treated with a beautiful purpose the theme of four men, 
 each imagining the statue that may be carved from a block of marble. 
 Love is the first, Revenge the second, Suffering Motherland the third, and 
 Sorrow the last. All these are strongly, nay, passionately drawn, with that 
 inner relation to actual experience in the narrator, which so intensities the 
 interest. The first is a lovely woman: 
 
 " O Love ! still living, memory and hope, 
 
 Beyond all sweets, thy bosom, breath and lips 
 My jewel and the jewel of the world. 
 
 "The second, a faithless woman, cowering above the form of her iiewly- 
 slain paramour: 
 
 " O balm and torture! he must hate who loves, 
 And bleed who strikes to seek thy lace, Revenge. 
 
 " The third a chained woman Mother and Motherland: 
 
 " O star 
 
 That lightens desolation, o er her beam, 
 . . . Till the dawn is red 
 Of that white noon when men shall call her Queen. 
 
 "The fourth is the figure of a dead child: 
 
 " I know 
 
 That when God gives to us the clearest sight 
 He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow. 
 
 " In Mnley Malek, the King, Mr. O Reilly bursts over tho bounds of 
 metre; but in the swing of his utterance there is a certain forceful 
 rhythm, indicating an earnest endeavor to preserve some of the character 
 istics of song. In From the Earth a Cry, however, all reserve is thrown 
 off, and he launches formlessly forth. "Walt Whitman chopped up 
 Carlylesque sentences into lines at hazard, but rapidly debased the model. 
 Mr. O Reilly takes a high strident key, and follows Whitman s most 
 ambitious endeavors. It is an eloquent invective, and its fitfulness and 
 spasmodics have a certain relation to its grievous story of human oppres 
 sion. It is as formless and as forcible as the onrushing mob it invokes. 
 All that is, is wrong; what need of nice measuring of feet? It is not the 
 measured tramp of an army that can be expected where the undisciplined 
 millions rise to bear down drilled thousands. 
 
 " O Christ! and O Christ! In thy name the law! 
 
 In thy mouth the mandate! In Thy loving hands the whip! 
 
 They have taken Thee down from Thy cross and sent Thee to scourge the 
 
 people; 
 
 They have shod Thv feet with spikes, and jointed Thy dead knees with iron, 
 And pushed Thee, hiding behind, to trample the poor dumb faces. 
 
 " Oppression has its leagues and its triumphs, but 
 
 " Never, while steel is cheap and sharp, shall thy kiuglings sleep without 
 dreaming." "
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the Buffalo Union. 
 
 " The strength, tenderness, and exceeding power and aptness of expres 
 sion conspicuous in a former volume ( Songs, Legends, and Ballads ") 
 are all here, intensified. The poet goes beyond the limits of any one land 
 or nationhood. He sings here for all time and for every nation. His in 
 spiration is Humanity, wherever it agonizes under tyrannical bonds or 
 struggles to break them. From the Earth a Cry, is a very epitome of 
 the history of the manifold uprisings, all the world over, of the weak 
 against the strong during the decade just ended the voice of the 
 oppressed clamoring to Heaven for vengeance an arraignment of the 
 
 " Landlords and Lawlords and Tradelords, 
 before the bar of justice, and in face of the terrible growth of 
 
 " Communists, Socialists, Nihilists, Rent-rebels, Strikers 
 
 from the seed themselves have sown. 
 
 " We wish we could speak in detail of some of the other poems, with 
 their rugged but splendid versification, in which the poet has taken 
 
 " No heed of the words, nor . . . 
 the style of the story," 
 
 but 
 
 " Let it burst out from the heart, like a spring from the womb of the 
 mountain; 
 
 or of that majestic opening poem. The Statues in the Block, through 
 which this true note rings: 
 
 " When God gives to us the clearest sight, 
 He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow. 
 
 " We strike on a vein of keen but kindly sarcasm at the expense of poor 
 human nature here and there through the collection, especially in a few 
 of those gem-like stanzas that prelude the different sections. But the 
 poet has a sweet voice for tender themes; and there are some exquisite 
 lyrics here, too, like fragrant, delicate flowers, blooming in the clefts of 
 the massive rock. Such, notably, are Her Refrain, Waiting, Jacque 
 minots and The Temple of Friendship. The book is inscribed To the 
 Memory of Eliza Boyle ; My Mother. " 
 
 From the Boston Journal. 
 
 " The little volume containing The Statues in the Block, and Other 
 1 oems, by John Boyle O Reilly, will commend itself to those for whom 
 fresh and spirited verse has charms. The pieces, which number about
 
 6 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 twenty, are of two very different styles; the one graceful in form, and con 
 veying some light fancy or suggestion, and the other careless as to form, 
 usually barren of rhyme, and irregular with the pulses of stern and pas 
 sionate emotion. Of the former type are Jacqueminots, Her Refrain, 
 and The Temple of Friendship ; of the latter, From the Earth a Cry, 
 A Song for the Soldiers, and The Mutiny of the Chains. The first poem 
 mentioned in the latter group, and indeed some others belonging to the 
 same group, have a Walt AVhitmanish turn to them which, wo are free to 
 confess, we do not like. Take, for example, such lines as these: 
 
 " Lightning! the air is split, the crater bursts, and the breathing 
 
 Of those below is the fume and fire of hatred. 
 
 The thrones are stayed with the courage of shotted guns. The warnin 
 
 dies, 
 
 Hut queens are dragged to the block, and the knife of the guillotine sinks 
 In the garbage of pampered flesh that gluts its bed and its niiiges. 
 
 " The story of the mutiny in the final poem is finely told, as is also the 
 story of the defence of the Cheyeimes, in the poem preceding it. Mr. 
 O Reilly is at his best when his blood is hot and his indignation roused by 
 the thought of human wrongs; and some of his pieces, written under this 
 inspiration, have a ring like anvil strokes, and stir the blood of the reader 
 as by the sound of trumpets."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PEESS. 
 
 "SONGS FROM THE SOUTHERN SEAS: 
 
 BY JOHN BOYLE O REILLY. 
 
 New York Arcadian. 
 
 " Like the sinell of new-mown hay, or the first breath of spring, or an 
 unexpected kiss from well-loved lips, or any other sweet, fresh, whole 
 some, natural delight, is to the professional reviewer the first perusal of 
 genuine poetry by a new writer. Not for a long time have we experienced 
 so fresh and joyous a surprise, so perfect a literary treat, as has been given 
 us by these fresh and glowing songs by this young and hitherto utterly 
 unknown poet. There is something so thoroughly new and natural and 
 lifelike, something so buoyant and wholesome and true, so much original 
 power and boldness of touch in these songs, that we feel at once that we 
 are in the presence of a new power in poetry. This work alone places its 
 author head and shoulder above the rank and file of contemporary versi 
 fiers. . . . The closing passages of Uncle Ned s second tale, are in the 
 highest degree dramatic, thrilling the reader like the bugle-note that 
 sounds the cry to arms. Finally, several of the poems are animated by a 
 spirit so affectionate and pure, that we feel constrained to love their writer, 
 offering, as they do in this respect, so marked and pleasant a contrast with 
 too much of the so-called poetry of these modern times." 
 
 Baltimore Bulletin. 
 
 " Mr. O Reilly is a true poet no one can read his stirring measures and 
 Lis picturesque descriptive passages without at once recognizing the true 
 singer, and experiencing the contagion of his spirit. Ho soars loftily and 
 grandly, and his song peals forth witli a rare roundnesss and mellowness 
 of tone that cheers and inspirits the hearer. His subjects belong to the 
 open air, to new fields or untrod wilds, and they are full of healthy 
 freshness, and the vigor of sturdy, redundant life. We hail Mr. O Reilly 
 with pleasure, and we demand for him the cordial recognition he d- 
 erre."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 Chicago Inter-Ocean. 
 
 " We may safely say that we lay these poems down will a feeling of de 
 light that there has come among us a true poet, who ca.i enchant by the 
 vivid fire of his pictures without having recourse to a trick of words, or 
 the re-dre*aing and re-torturing of old forgotten ideas. These poems, for 
 the most part, are fresh and lifelike as the lyrics which led our forefathers 
 to deeds of glory. With scarce a line of mawkish sentiment, there is the 
 deep heart-feeling of a true poet. His descriptions bear the impress of 
 truth and the realism of personal acquaintance with the incidents de 
 scribed. There is the flow of Scott in his narrative power, and the fire of 
 Macaulay in his trumpet-toned tales of war. We are much mistaken if 
 this man does not in the course of a few years walk the course, -and show 
 the world how narrative poetry should be written. He has it in him, and 
 genius cannot be kept under hatches. Passing over The Dog Guard, a 
 fearful picture, we come to The Amber Whale. It is impossible to 
 describe the intense interest that surrounds this dramatic description. A 
 more eiciting chase could hardly be conceived, and as we stand with 
 bated breath, while the mate drives his lance home to the vitals, and the 
 boats go hissing along in the wake of the wounded monster, we seem to 
 behold the sea red with blood, and mark the flukes as they sweep the cap 
 tain s boat into eternity. Here is a portion of the story: 
 
 " Then we heard the captain s order, " Heave! " and saw the harpoon fly, 
 As the whales closed in with their open jaws: a shock, and a stilled cry 
 "Was all that we heard; then we looked to see if the crew were still 
 
 afloat, 
 
 But nothing was there save a dull red patch, and the boards of the shat 
 tered boat. 
 
 " Hut that was no time for mourning words: the other two boats came in, 
 And one got fast on the quarter, and one aft the starboard fin 
 Of the Amber Whale. For a minute he paused, as if he were in doubt 
 As to whether twas best to run or fight. " Lay on! " the mate roared 
 
 out, 
 " And I ll give him a lance! " The boat shot in; and the mate, when he 
 
 saw his chance 
 Of sending it home to the vitals, four times he bnried his lance. 
 
 " We next come to The Dukite Snake, a tale so simply told, so beauti 
 fully sad, that the heart goes out in pity to the poor young husband in his 
 terrible grief. The Dukite Snake never goes alone. When one is killed 
 the other will follow to the confines of the earth, but he will have revenge. 
 Upon this fact the poet has wrought a picture so true and so dramatic that 
 it almost chills the blood to read a tale so cruel and so life-like. . . . Among 
 the remaining poems of length, we have The Fishermen of Wexford, The 
 Flying Dutchman, and Uncle Ned s Tales. All are good; but the last ar
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 limply superb. We doubt if more vivid pictures of war were ever drawn. 
 The incidents are detailed with such lifelike force, that to any one who had 
 ever felt the enthusiastic frenzy of battle, they bring back the sounds of the 
 sheila and the shout of advancing columns. They are lifelike as the pages 
 of Tacitus, and stir the blood to a fever heat of warlike enthusiasm. They 
 are strains to make soldiers." 
 
 London Athenceum. 
 
 " MR. O REILLY is the poet of a far land. He sings of Western Aus 
 tralia, that poorest and loveliest of all the Australias, which has received 
 from the mother country only her shame and her crime. Mr. O Reilly, 
 in a short poem, speaks of the land as discovered ere the fitting time, 
 endowed with a peerless clime, but having birds that do not sing, flowers 
 that give no scent, and trees that do not fructify. Scenes and incidents, 
 however, known to the author, in this perfumeless and mute land, have 
 been reproduced by him in a series of poems of much beauty. The 
 King of the Vasse, a legend of the bush, is a weird and deeply pathetic 
 poem, admirable alike for its conception and execution." 
 
 Atlantic Monthly. 
 " In a modest, well- worded prelude, the poet says: 
 
 " "From that fair land and drear land in the South, 
 
 Of which through years I do not cease to think, 
 I brought a tale, learned not by word of mouth, 
 
 But formed by finding here one golden link 
 And there another; and with hands unskilled 
 
 For Mich tine work, but patient of all pain 
 For love of it, I sought therefrom to build 
 
 What might have been at first the goodly chain. 
 
 " It is not golden now: my craft knows more 
 
 Of working baser metal than of tine; 
 But to those fate-wrought rings of precious ore 
 I add these rugged iron links of mine. 
 
 " This is not claiming enough for himself, but the reader the more 
 gladly does him justice because of his modesty, and perhaps it is this 
 quality in the author which oftenest commends his book. The King of 
 the Vasse is the story of a child of the first Swedish emigrants to Aus 
 tralia, who lies dead in his mother s arms when they land. A native chief, 
 coming with all his people to greet the strangers, touches the boy s fore 
 head with a great pearl, which he keeps in a carven case or shrine, and 
 the mighty magic of it calls him back to life, but with a savage soul, as his 
 kindred believe; for he deserts them for the natives, over whom he
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 rules many years, Inheriting and wearing the magic pearl. At last the 
 young men of the tribe begin to question his authority, and one of them, 
 with a spear-thrust, destroys the great pearl. Jacob Kibsen then seems 
 repossessed by a white man s soul, and returns to the spot long since 
 abandoned by his kindred, and finds it occupied by English settlers, whose 
 children s simple, childlike playmate he becomes, and remains till death. 
 The plot is good; and it is always managed with a sober simplicity, which 
 forms an excellent ground for some strong dramatic effects. The Austra 
 lian scenery and air and natural life are everywhere summoned round 
 the story without being forced upon the reader. Here, for instance, is 
 a picture at once vivid and intelligible, which is not always the case 
 with the vivid pictures of the word-painters. After the rains begin in that 
 southern climate, 
 
 " Earth throba and heaves 
 
 With pregnant prescience of life and leaves; 
 
 The shadows darken neath the tall trees screen. 
 
 While round their stems the rank and velvet green 
 
 Of undergrowth is deeper still ; and there, 
 
 Within the double shade and steaming air, 
 
 The scarlet palm has fixed its noxious root, 
 
 And hangs the. glorious poison of its fruit; 
 
 And there, mid shaded green and shaded light, 
 
 The steel-blue silent birds take rapid flight 
 
 From earth to tree and tree to earth ; and there 
 
 The crimson-plumaged parrot cleaves the air 
 
 Like flying fire, and huge brown owls awake 
 
 To watch, far down, the stealing carpet-snake, 
 
 Fresh-skinned and glowing in his changing dyes, 
 
 With evil wisdom in the cruel eyes 
 
 That glint like gems as o er his head flits by 
 
 The blue-black armor of the emperor-fly; 
 
 And all the humid earth displays its powers 
 
 Of prayer, with incense from the hearts of flowers 
 
 That load the air with beauty and with wine 
 
 Of mingled color. . - . 
 
 " And high p erhead Is color: round and round 
 The towering gums and tuads, closely wound 
 Like cables, creep the climbers to the sun, 
 And over all the reaching branches run 
 And hang, and still send shoots that climb and wind 
 Till every arm and spray and leaf is twined, 
 And miles of trees, like brethren joined in love, 
 Are drawn and laced; while round them and above, 
 When all is knit, the creeper rests for days 
 As gathering might, and then one blinding blaze 
 Of very glory sends, in wealth and strength, 
 Of scarlet flowers o er the forest s length! 
 
 " There are deep springs of familiar feeling (as the mother s grief for 
 the estrangement of her savage-hearted son) also touched in this poem, in 
 which there is due artistic sense and enjoyment of the weirdness of the
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 motive; and, in short, we could imagine ourselves recurring more than 
 once to the story, and liking it better and better. The Dog Guard is the 
 next best story in the book; a horrible fact, treated with tragic realism, 
 and skilfully kept from being merely horrible. . . . Some of the best 
 poems in the book are the preludes to the stories." 
 
 Boston Advertiser. 
 
 " The first, and in many respects the best poem in the book, is The King 
 of the Vasse, which is a story of the very earliest settlement of Australia 
 by Europeans, and before a convict settlement was established there. 
 There is to it far greater care and finish than to any of the other long 
 poems. In some parts it is weird and strange to a degree; in others it is 
 pathetic, everywhere it is simple, with a pleasant flow of rhythm, and 
 closely true to nature. It is followed by The Dog Guard, a poem which 
 leaves an impression on the mind like Coleridge s Ancient Mariner a sub 
 ject which, but for great skill in the treatment, would have been repulsive. 
 As it stands in the book it shows eminent descriptive power, and a certain 
 freedom and daring that lifts it far above the commonplace. Interspersed 
 among the longer poems are short verses, which must answer the same par- 
 pose in the book as the organist s interludes, helping out the value of tluit 
 which precedes, and that which follows. Some of these are more than 
 excellent. They stand out as a peculiar feature of the book, adding to its 
 completeness, as they will add to the poet s reputation. Preceding The 
 Dog Guard we have the following, which perhaps is as characteristic as 
 any of the preludes. It will be seen that the burden of this, as indeed of 
 the whole book, is Western Australia: 
 
 " Nation of Sun and Sin, 
 
 Thy flowers and crimes are red, 
 And thy heart is sore within 
 While the glory crowns thy head. 
 Land of the songless birds. 
 What was thine ancient crime, 
 Burning through lapse of time 
 Like a prophet s cursing words? 
 
 " Aloes and myrrh and tears 
 Mix in thy bitter wine: 
 Drink, while the cup is thine 
 Drink, for the draught is sign 
 Of thy reign in coming years. 
 
 " Mr. O Reilly has done his work faithfully and well ; he has given ua 
 in his book more than he promised us in the preface; and to-day, with his 
 first poetical venture before the public, he has added another to the lanreU 
 he has already won in other flelda."
 
 - OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 New York Tribune. 
 
 11 These songs are the most stirring tales of adventure imaginable, 
 chiefly placed in Western Australia, a penal colony, which has received 
 from the mother country only her shame and her crime. The book is the 
 very melodrama of poetry. . . . Mr. O Reilly is a man whose career has 
 been full of wild and varied adventure, aiid who has put these stirring 
 scenes all of which he saw, and part of which he was into verse as 
 spontaneous and unconventional as the life he describes. His rhymed 
 tales are as exciting aa ghost stories, and we have been reading them while 
 the early sullen November night closed in, with something the same feel 
 ing, the queer shiver of breathless expectation, with which we used to 
 listen to legends of ghosts and goblins by our grandmother s firelight. 
 Not that the supernatural figures too largely in these tales, the actors in 
 them are far more formidable than any disembodied spirits. . . . The King 
 of the Vasse is a wonderful story, in which a dead child is raised to life 
 by a pagan Incantation and the touch of a mystic pearl ou the face, 
 which will charm the lovers of the miraculous. The Amber Whale, 
 The Dog Guard, and Haunted by Tigers, are in the same vein with 
 The Monster Diamond. Thrilling tiles all of them. Chunder All s 
 Wife is a charming little Oriental love story; a Legend of the Blessed 
 Virgin is full of tenderness and grace, for Mr. O Reilly is both a Catholic 
 nd an Irishman; and I cannot close my extracts from his book more 
 fittingly than with hia heartfelt lines to his Native Land : 
 
 " It chanced to me upon a time to sail 
 
 Across the Southern Ocean to and fro ; 
 And, lauding at fair isle*, by stream and vale 
 
 Of sensuous blessing did we ofttimes go. 
 And months of dreamy joys, like joys in sleep, 
 
 Or like a clear, calm stream o er mossy stone, 
 Unnoted passed our hearts with voiceless sweep, 
 
 And left ua yearning still for lands unknown. 
 
 " And when we found one, for tis soon to find 
 
 In thousand-isled Cathay another isle, 
 For one short noon its treasures tilled the mind. 
 
 And then again we yearned, and ceased to smile. 
 And so it was, from isle to isle we passed, 
 
 Like wanton bees or boys on flowers or lips; 
 And when that all w:ia tasted, then at last 
 
 We thirsted still for draughts instead of sip*. 
 
 " I learned from this there is no Southern land 
 
 Can till with love the hearts of Northern men. 
 Sick minds need change; but, when in health they stwnd 
 Neth foreign skies their love flies home again.
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 And thus with me it was: the yearning turned 
 
 From laden airs of cinnamon away, 
 And stretched far westward, while the full heart burned 
 
 With love for Ireland, looking on Cathay ! 
 
 " My first dear love, all dearer for thy grief! 
 
 My land that has no peer in all the sea 
 For verdure, vale, or river, flower or leaf, 
 
 If first to no man else, thou rt first to me. 
 New loves may come with duties, but the first 
 
 Is deepest yet, the mother s breath and smiles : 
 Like that kind face and breast where I waa nursed 
 
 Is my poor land, the Niobe of isles." " 
 
 Mr. R. H. Stoddard, in Scribner s Monthly. 
 
 " The King of the Vasse, the opening poem in Mr. O Reilly s volume, 
 Is a remarkable one; and if the legend be the creation of Mr. O Reilly, it 
 places him high among the few really imaginative poets. . . . This, in brief, 
 is the outline of the King of the Vasse. In it we could point out many 
 faulty lines. William Morris could have spun off the verse more fluently, 
 and Longfellow could have imparted to it his usual grace. Still, we are 
 glad that it is not from them, but from Mr. O Reilly, that we receive 
 it. The story is simply and strongly told, and is imaginative and 
 pathetic. It is certainly the most poetic poem in the volume, though by 
 no means the most striking one. The Amber Whale is more character 
 istic of Mr. O Reilly s genius, as The Dog Guard and The Dukite 
 Snake are more characteristic of the region in which he is most at home. 
 .... He is as good a balladist as Walter Thorubury, who is the 
 only other living poet who could have written The Old Dragoon * 
 Story. " 
 
 Boston Gazette. 
 
 " This is a volume of admirable poetry. The more ambitions poems in 
 the book are in narrative form, and are terse and spirited in style, and full 
 of dramatic power and effect. Mr. O Reilly is both picturesque and epi 
 grammatic, and writes with a manly straightforwardness that is very 
 attractive. ... Of the sickly sentimentality that forms the groundwork 
 if so much of our modern poetry, not a trace is to be found in this book. 
 
 <ie tone throughout is healthy, earnest, and pure. There is also an inde 
 pendence and originality of thought and treatment that are very striking, 
 and which prove not the least attractive features of the book. Some of 
 the stories are conceived with unusual power, and are developed with 
 scarcely less effect and skill."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 Boston Times. 
 
 " Some reminiscences of his romantic life, the poet haa WOTCD into the 
 verses that nil this volume. Very griiu reminiscences they are, of criuie 
 and death and horrors dire; but they represent faithfully, we have no 
 doubt, the society, or rather savagery, of those far and fearsome lauds. 
 Most of the poems are stories, sombre in substance, but told with a vehe 
 ment vigor that is singularly harmonious with their themes. The opening 
 poem, The King of the Vasse, preserves a strange and pathetic legend, 
 which the poet has wrought into a powerful, but most painful story. His 
 imagination revels in pictures of weird desolation and the repulsive and 
 appalling prodigies of annual und vegetable life in the tropic world; and 
 the effect of these presented in quick succession, and varied only by 
 episodes of human sin or suffering, is positively depressing. Such passage* 
 as this abound in the poem: 
 
 " In that strange country s heart, whence comes the breath 
 Of hot disease and pestilential dcatu, 
 Lie leagues of wooded swamp, that from the hills 
 Seem stretching meadows; but the flood that tills 
 These valley basins has the hue of iuk 
 And dismal doorways open on the brink, 
 Beneath the gnarled arms of trees that grow 
 All leafless to the top, from roots below 
 The Lethe flood; and he who enters there 
 Beneath this screen sees rising, ghastly bare, 
 Like mammoth bones within a charuel dark, 
 The white and ragged stems of paper-bark, 
 That drip down moisture with a ceaseless drip, 
 With lines that run like cordage of a ship; 
 For myriad creepers struggle to the light, 
 And twine and meet o erhead in murderous fight 
 For life and sunshine. . . . 
 
 " Between the water and the matted screen, 
 The bald-head vultures, two and two, are seen 
 In dismal grandeur, with revolting face 
 Of foul grotesque, like spirits of the place; 
 And now and then a spear-shaped wave goes by, 
 Its apex glittering with an evil eye 
 That sets above its enemy and prey 
 As from the wave in treacherous, slimy way 
 The black snake winds, aud strikes the bestial bird, 
 Whose shriek-like wailing on the hills is heard. 
 
 "The Dog Guard is a tale of horrors. The Amber Whale and 
 1 Haunted by Tigers are founded on whaling incidents, and the latter, 
 especially, is eloquent with the woe of tragedy. There are a few poems in 
 the volume written in a lighter mood. Uncle Xed s Tale is a very 
 spirited tale of battle. The Fishermen of Wexford ia one of the best 
 pieces in the collection almost severe in its simple realism, bat tenderly
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 pathetic. We ive rarely seen a first volume of poems so rich in promise 
 as is this. It is singularly free from the faults of most early poems, and 
 exhibits a maturity of thought and a sober strength of style that would do 
 credit to any of our older poets." 
 
 Boston Commercial Bulletin. 
 
 " His descriptive powers are remarkably strong and vivid, and his imag 
 ination powerful and vigorous. Yet it is evident from a glance at the 
 minor poems of Golu, and my Mother s Memory," that the author has 
 au imagination that will not desert him on brighter and more graceful 
 flights of fancy. Altogether the volume is one of much more than ordi 
 nary originality and excellence." 
 
 Worcester Palladium. 
 
 " He shows originality and good descriptive power, and he treats his 
 subjects con amore. . . . The author had the very best reason in the world 
 for writing this collection, and a second volume will be awaited with rea 
 son; for strong points are displayed, and a person who writes because hi* 
 heart wills it, sooner or later wins the heart of the public." 
 
 Bangor Whig. 
 
 " There is no one of the poems the book contains that has not running 
 through it a sort of realism that at once takes possession of the reader s 
 mind, and he looks upon it, as it were, as an actual event." 
 
 Mr. Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr) in The Catholic Review. 
 
 "Judged in all the phases of his talent presented by this book, Mr. 
 O Reilly ia unquestionably a mail of true poetic verve and temperament, 
 with too much reverence for the noble gift of song to sophisticate it with 
 mawkish affectations or conceited verbal ingenuities. No obscure line 
 patches his page; no fantastic mannerism accentuates his style; no pretend- 
 edly metaphysical abstraction egotizes what he thinks worthy of gift to 
 mankind." 
 
 Utica Ilerald. 
 
 " In the leading poem of Mr. O Reilly s collection, entitled The King of 
 the Vasse, there are novelties of scene and legend which alone claim the 
 attention. . . . The poem is in many respects a wonderful one, and contains 
 many subtleties of thought and expression, which it is impossible to 
 reproduce in scanty extract."
 
 IO OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 Literary World, Boston. 
 
 ..." Mr. O Reilly unquestionably possesses poetical talent of a high and 
 rare order. He excels iu dramatic narrative, to which his natural intensity 
 of feeling lends a peculiar force. His verse is sometimes careless, and 
 often lacks finish; but writers are few, nowadays, who have a better capi 
 tal in heart or hand for successful poetical work than that which is 
 evidenced in this volume." 
 
 New York Independent. 
 
 " The first and longest poem in this book, The King of the Vasse," 
 Introduces us into a new country, and proves that the author s dreary 
 Australian experiences were a gain to literature. . . . The Dog Guard 
 and The Amber Whale are even better, the first being an addition of 
 real value to our literature. Throughout the lesser poems which composo 
 the remainder of the volume, there is such an evenness of excellence as 
 to give good proof that the author need not confine himself to narrative 
 poetry in order to claim an honorable place in our literature." 
 
 Chicago Times. 
 
 " This book is a striking Instance that you find poetry nowhere unless 
 you bring some with you. The thousands of despairing wretches who 
 have toiled in the chain-gangs aa Mr. O Reilly did, saw no poems in the 
 eoil which seemed to give them back the impress only of the British 
 arrow cut on the sole of their convict shoes. But the radiant imagination 
 and tender heart of the patriot felon found poetry oa every side of him, 
 and in his hands the driest stick becomes an Aaron s rod, and buds 
 and blossoms. The most delightful portion of the book is its Australian 
 legends. These reveal extraordinary dramatic power, and their rhythmi 
 cal construction is perfect. Unique and incomparable, they will keep a per 
 manent place in literature, and the romance of their origin and authorship 
 will scarcely add anything to their beauty and completeness as poems. . . . 
 Modern poets put a great deal of water in their ink, says Goethe. 
 O Reilly s ink contains just water enough to keep the fluid from becoming 
 thick. It flows like a limpid stream, flecked with clouds and sunlight, and 
 here and there tossing with so much force into fissures of Australian rocka 
 as to send up glittering, snowy showers of spray. O Reilly is undoubtedly 
 destined to reach a high place as an English poet. He is now a very 
 young man." 
 
 Christian Era. 
 
 "As a poet, his writings have called forth admiration, and as an editor, 
 he is worthy of great praise."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. II 
 
 .Mr. E. P. IVTiipple, in the Boston Globe. 
 
 " The Boston editors can boast of having a poet in their ranks, and they 
 should naturally cherish him. . . . More than half his volume is devoted 
 to what he saw, felt, collected, and imagined during a forced sojourn in 
 Australia. The remaining portion consists of occasional poems, very 
 tender, fanciful, earnest, individual, and manly, claiming nothing which 
 they do not win by their own inherent force, grace, melody, and sweet 
 reasonableness, or it may be at times their passionate unreasonableness. 
 Nobody can read the volume without being drawn to its author. He is so 
 thoroughly honest and sincere that he insists that his imaginations are but 
 memories." 
 
 New York Evening Mail. 
 
 " Most of the songs are stories of the bush or of the sea, and, strangely, the 
 subjects are almost without exception, illustrations of the awful surety of 
 the punishment that lays in wait for the sin of him whom men harm not 
 the key of Coleridge s Ancient Mariner. It is almost the old Greek 
 Fate that stalks through these tales of outlawry and wrong, and if they be 
 indeed the legends of a convict land, they are themselves a strange showing 
 of how crime haunts and hunts the soul. . . . Mr. O Reilly has the natural 
 gift of telling a story capitally, and all these tales in verse are interesting 
 as well as powerful. He has other qualifications also as a poet; his Aus 
 tralian landscapes are drawn with fine artistic skill, and testify to their 
 own truth, and about some of his pictures their is a weirduess that touches 
 on the supernatural." 
 
 Boston Post. 
 
 " Of the author s genius in poetry the public are so well aware, through 
 his fugitive pieces, that no commendation is necessary. His style is vigor 
 ous and manly, and combines a delicacy of sentiment with clearness of 
 thought and vivacity of imagery. Most of these poems have a peculiar 
 interest, from the fact that they are of a narrative form, relics of an un 
 known sphere, of the writer s personal experience and adventure in 
 Australia. They are uneven in merit, but by far the greater number have 
 already taken a permanent place among the living poems of the day." 
 
 Daribury News. 
 
 " His poems, aside from their intrinsic merit and romantic interest, are 
 worth close study, as examples of the effects produced upon the mind of a 
 prisoner by the wild luxuriance and fantastic forms which nature assume* 
 in Australia."
 
 12 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 New York Tablet. 
 
 "The Amber Whale, Dog Guard, and Monster Diamond, ar 
 among the best known of his longer poems, and they have already taken 
 their place amongst the best narrative poems of the age. . . . We hail 
 with very great pleasure this first collection of Mr. O Reilly s poems, 
 which we hope will meet with the kindly welcome it deserves from all 
 lovers of ballad poetry." 
 
 Cincinnati Times. 
 
 "Amid the frantic strivings of modern poets to obtain a reputation for 
 originality by wild mouthings, odd, strange, and revolting conceits, by soar 
 ing toward the empyriau, ami diving into the infinite, by a false mysticism 
 and luxuriance of verbiage, covering a poverty of ideas, it is refreshing to 
 find one poet who is content to be original within the domain of common 
 sense; who courts the muses, not with the freedom of a literary libertine, 
 but modestly, yet with true poetic ardor. ... In view of all this we take 
 it as a most encouraging thing that such a book of poetry as Songs from the 
 Southern Seas is published, and still more encouraging its evident ap 
 proval by critics aud acceptableness to the public. In some of the poems, 
 notably in The King of the Vasse, there are traces of the induence of 
 Wm. Morris, and Mr. O Reilly could not be influenced from a sweeter, 
 purer source; in narrative passages there is evidence of a study of Scott, 
 and the poet could not study in this department a better model; in the 
 war lyrics there is an evident following of the style of Macaulay, and a 
 ginger of more stirring battle-songs never lived; but throughout the book 
 there is hardly a trace of Swinburne or the Swinburnian school. The 
 poems are strong, earnest, and the offspring of genuine emution. . . . Mr. 
 O Reilly s war lyrics, under the title of Uncle Ned s Tales," are the most 
 spirited that have been produced for a long time. They have all the ring 
 and fire of Macaulay; they stir one s blood like the neigh of a war-horse or 
 the blast of a bugle." 
 
 Hartford Post. 
 
 " Some of the short poems are full of thoughtful earnestness and the 
 true poet s yearning tenderness, while seldom have more stirring lines 
 told tales of war than tliose of Uncle Ned s Stories." " 
 
 San Francisco Monitor. 
 
 " The volume now before us contains The King of the Vasse, The 
 Dog Guard, The Amber Whale, aud a number of minor pieces, all of 
 which are marked by much dramatic power and beauty of imagery, show 
 ing him to bo a poet iu the truest sense of the word."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 13 
 
 Irish American. 
 
 " Originality, whether of ideas, construction, or of subject?, Is the prin- 
 elpal something invariable sought for, and but seldom found, in the gen 
 eration of poets with which this era of ours is BO lavishly supplied. In 
 the volume before us, however, this essential poetic quality is so strikingly 
 manifest, that, in recognition of it, we must assign Mr. O Reilly a vory 
 high place among the few who, in our day, write readable and meritorious 
 verse. But this ia not the only feature in Mr. O Reilly s muse worthy of 
 remark; the vigor of his lines, the aptness of his similes, the effectiveness 
 of bis climaxes, all testify to the existence in the author of that true 
 poetic disposition, which is ever inborn, and never acquired. To those 
 who may be sceptical of our judgment, we say, read the Songs from 
 the Southern Seas, and realize the pleasure they are calculated to afford 
 even the most critical." 
 
 Detroit Post. 
 
 "They are evidently not fictions, but faithful transcripts of his own 
 feelings; the imagery is not stolen or borrowed, but original." 
 
 Ilartford Courant. 
 
 " The volume not only contains a great deal of vigorous and interesting 
 poetry, but it gives excellent promise for the future." 
 
 Albany Journal. 
 
 " For wild adventure and thrilling experience they will compare with the 
 most weird and exciting legends." 
 
 l>uhlin Nation. 
 
 "The narratives themselves ,-ire interesting; they have usually a tragic 
 turn, and are worked out with no small degree of skill. . . . Some of the 
 word-pictures of Australian scenery are exceedingly realistic and vivid. 
 . . . Some of the minor poems in this book afford much better indications 
 of the poetic capacities of the author; and the effect of the entire volume 
 is to lead us to lielievo that ho has within him powers which will enable 
 him to rise far above the mark to which he has here attained." 
 
 Lawrence American. 
 
 " There ia a vein of fire and earnestness, a glow of enthusiasm, thut can 
 not but attract to the writer, and win no slight admiration for his geniua; 
 and his countrymen will especially be pleased with the graceful volume."
 
 14 OPINIONS CF THE PRESS. 
 
 Catholic Record of Philadelphia. 
 
 " It has seldom been our good fortune to discover a volume of verses in 
 which the realistic and poetic elements were so powerfully and ably com 
 bined. Mr. O Reilly selects his themes from among scenes and characters 
 which would naturally be supposed to be the least congenial to the muse 
 of song, for Erato is not usually considered at home among Kantucket tars 
 on New Bedford whaling-ships, in Australian penal colonies, or the after- 
 dark pranks of shameless youngsters. The luxurious arcades and flower 
 ing groves of the tropics may, indeed, be for a time her abode, and she 
 may not disdain to occasionally bathe in the sparkling waters of sunny 
 Southern seas, but we will stake our character for penetration on the as 
 sertion that Mr. O Reilly is a handsome Irishman from the vicinity of Blar 
 ney Castle, for he has so completely fascinated her that she follows him 
 with her most favoring smiles wherever or whenever he bids her presence. 
 She is beside him in the murderer s secluded shelter ; she rides with him on the 
 storm-winds that whistle around the Horn; she sits beside him in the agoniz 
 ing cruise when the wounded amber whale drags his boat through the mighty 
 Southern spray; she perches on an oil barrel on New Bedford s wharves, 
 or peeps with him through the windows of a New-England meeting-hnj?e. 
 Wherever he lists, she lets him sing, sing the tenderest of songs, w ... < 
 manliest of tones."
 
 MOONDYNE: 
 
 IFIROIM: THE TJ 1ST ID E E,-"W O E, L2D. 
 
 BY JOHN BOYLE O REILLY. 
 Pilot Publishing Co., Boston. Post-free for 81.5O. 
 
 OPINION S OF THE PKESS. 
 
 From the New York Sun. 
 
 Regarded merely with a view to its artistic merits, this is a narrative 
 which no lover of nove s should neglect to read. \Vhetlier we look to the 
 strange and impressive nature of the scenery portrayed, and the abnormal 
 conditions of life studied to the novelty of incident and the skilful con- 
 struction of plot, or to the vigorous strokes by which the persons of the 
 tale are mnde to stand forth from the canvas we cannot fail to recognize 
 in this work a strong and captivating performance. . . . \Ve do not know 
 whether the author, as a matter of fact, has visited the penal colony in West 
 Australia, or has made a study of British prisons, but certainly his account 
 of convict life under these diverse conditions bears the marks of authen 
 ticity. What is more to our immediate purpose, his analysis of the princi 
 ples which lie at the roots of the systems of confinement and transportation, 
 is profound and fruitful, and his practical suggestions, enforced, as they are, 
 by the experience of penal settlements, where, after a ce:tain period of 
 probation, the outlaws and the victims of a highly-organized society are 
 suffered to begin life anew, deserve to be closely scanned and maturely 
 pondered. . . . Such are some of the problems forced upon the reader s 
 attention by this remarkable book, but which are rather hinted than ex 
 pounded not so much dissected by argument as commended to our sympa 
 thies by the poignant spectacle of suffering and the winning accent of 
 conviction. The author seldom overlooks the limitations of his artistic 
 purpose, and the thread of his story may be followed with eagerness by 
 those who would hear with indifference the teaching of the student and the 
 philanthrojiist."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the Chicago Times. 
 
 " Moondyne is remarkable in more respects than one. It lias plot enough 
 for nalf-a-dozen strong romances; it is written with ciispncss and sim 
 plicity, and in pure and nervous English ; its morality is orthodox ; its scene 
 and characters are who ly novel and unique, and the interest is keenly 
 even painfully sustained, . . . and no one can read Moondyne without 
 oving virtue more, pitying distress, abhorring injustice, and detesting vice. 
 It is one of the few American novels which, while intensely romantic, is 
 lolty in its aim, eloquent a"d noble in its argument, and hea thy and refining 
 in its effect. It is characterized throughout by the highest dramatic intuition, 
 and ought to find its way speedi y to the boards." 
 
 From the New Orleans Morning Star and Catholic Visitor. 
 
 "This fine novel is really a treat, refined in diction, liigh-toned in senti 
 ment, and instructive in details. There is no religious controversy in its 
 pages, no tedious theological arguments in the fabric of its story, but the 
 whole book affords its readers only pleasure and profit. The spirit which 
 animates the work is that of philanthropy, and the dedication, To all 
 who are in prison, for whatever cause, gives the clew to the object of the 
 writer. The characters are we 1 drawn, although we think the hero is over- 
 d/awn that is, he is too perfect but as a model to youth, the exi mp ar 
 must be, as far as possible, faultless. The interest of the story is splendidly 
 sustained, and the life of Moondync is thrilling, grand, and beautiful. The 
 lessons conveyed are very noble, and we think this expression in the mouth 
 of Mr. Wyville, under the attendant circumstances, is the one grand lesson 
 of the book, Authority must never forget humanity. We would like to 
 quote several passages from the book, which for strength and pathos 
 approach very near to the sublime but we can only name the many 
 striking points, and leave to the reader the pleasure of reading them in 
 full." 
 
 From the Boston Daily Advertiser. 
 
 "Mr. O Reilly has made a wonderful Ftory of tho convict-labor in Aus 
 tralia. The whole tale is on as magnificent a sca!e as Dumas Jlonte Cristo, 
 and more lofty in aim and sentiment. The vast natural wealth and bewil 
 dering beauty of the country, arc made the mere sotting for a group Of men, 
 who answer every demand of heroism, atid for two sweet women. The 
 v i ain is as bad as the heroes are good; through tho whole book the interest 
 never flags, the enthusiasm never cools, the intense dramatic and emotional
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 power never breaks. With the same glowing ardor the e oquent author 
 tells of superhuman courage, hair-breadth escapes, experiences in the bush, 
 and in the convict-gangs, discusses the penal code of Australia, the respon 
 sibility of England, the abstract principles of liberty and the rights of man, 
 the origin of crime and the deepest and most tender love of man and 
 woman. The rapid and high-wrought fiction of the story Is enhanced by 
 the rush and color of the style and the air of reality that is given to the 
 most romantic incidents and to the wildest horrors, ifoondyne, the title of 
 the book, means something more than manly or kingly, and although it is 
 applied especially to the chief god- ike hero, it belongs properly to the 
 whole group of men who are represented as lifting Australia from sin and 
 darkness into virtue and glory by the greatness of their own souls, the 
 strength of their own wills, and their own passion of unselfishness. And 
 all through this gorgeous fabric runs the thread of faith in man, faith in the 
 root of good to be found even in the worst of convicts, and in the Jaw of 
 kindness and encouragement, to replace in all penal co onies the law of 
 force. Mr. O Reilly dedicates his book to all who are in prison for what 
 ever cause. And prisoners never had a more gallant and chivalrous 
 champion." 
 
 From the Woman s Journal. 
 
 "This book is no ordinary romance. It is the work of a man of genius, 
 who writes a descriptive story, largely based upon his own observation and 
 experience, colored by his own feelings, and reflecting his own opinions, 
 aspirations, and prejudices. It could only have been written by John Boyle 
 O Reilly, a genuine poet and philanthropist, but also an American Catholic 
 Irishman, an escaped Australian convict, exiled by the British Government 
 for his participation in the Fenian insurrection. From such a man, with 
 Buch an experience, it would be unfair to expect an exact picture of English 
 or Australian life; but it is natural to expect a graphic transcript of an 
 exceptional experience, all the more valuable because exceptional, all the 
 more vivid because a record of scenes of which he has been an eye-witness. 
 Australian scenery is reproduced with a -Realth of word-painting which 
 few living writers could equal. The horrible life of a penal colony is por 
 trayed with admirable distinctness. The national and re igious feelings of 
 the writer are carefully kept in the background, and there is an evident 
 intention of fairness all through the book." 
 
 From tlie Boston Traveller. 
 
 " Mr. O Reilly has produced a strong and vigorous romance, in striking 
 contrast with the namby-pamby literature of late offered to the public as
 
 1 8 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 exemplars of the great American novel. The character of Moondyne 
 is among the noblest ever conceived by any novelist, and he who cannot 
 read this story -without attaining to a loftier inspiration toward a nobler life, 
 who cannot sympathize with the sorrows of the sinning and down-trodden, 
 who cannot lay it aside with a resolution to make his own life more useful 
 and better, such an one must be blind indeed. The author s style is not 
 among the least attractive features of the book. Strong, yet graceful, with 
 a certain verve which is delightfully invigorating, whether in giving those 
 inimitable character sketches which mark the volume in question, or in 
 depicting to the mind of the reader the wildness and beauty of Australian 
 scenery, Mr. O Reilly is equally at home. We trust that JToondyne will 
 not be the last novel from his pen." 
 
 From the London Bookseller. 
 
 " A powerful and fascinating tale, illustrating different systems of treat 
 ment adopted towards criminal convicts. The story belongs to the time 
 when Western Australia was a penal settlement, governed by laws of Dia- 
 conic severity. The regulations of our prisons at home were far from 
 satisfactory, as was proved by their frequent changes, none of which long 
 recommended themselves to practical men. Like Jean Valjean in Victor 
 Hugo s story, the hero of the tale under notice was a convict, who, by a 
 turn of the wheel, rose to a position of trust, and distinguished himself as a 
 philanthropist, and a reformer of the present system. No one who begins 
 the story will be able to stop till it is finished." 
 
 From the Worcester Spy. 
 
 " This is a novel of harrowing and exciting description, brilliantly written, 
 but almost too painful to allow enjoyment in the reading." 
 
 From the Boston Journal. 
 
 "There is power in the book, and pathos, and passion of a noble sort; 
 and there is an abundance of exciting incidents and some bits of stirring 
 and graphic description. The most jaded novel reader will find that there 
 is something more than commonly fresh and inspiring about the story. If 
 there are some faults of construction, and a little lack of symmetry, these 
 are more than atoned for by the virile strength and intensity which hold the 
 reader to the end."
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. It, 
 
 From the New York Graphic. 
 
 This brilliant and picturesque fiction obtained, ni it deserved, an imme 
 diate recognition of its power and originality, and added greatly to the 
 already enviable reputation of its versatile and gifted author. In the form 
 in which it now appears, with its large, clear type and its attractive pages, 
 it will increase its circle of readers, and consequently its popularity. The 
 book is one that amply rewards the reading, not only for the fire and vigor 
 of its style, but for the dramatic interest and the unconventionality of its 
 plot." 
 
 From the Boston Ilerald. 
 
 " As a novel, we cannot but regret that the ending is so tragic, but we do 
 not regard this volume as simply a novel. From beginning to end it is a 
 satire upon British institutions, and we have seen nothing to surpass it 
 since Bulwer s novel of Paul Clifford, where, under the guise of a love 
 story, the author demonstrated that the prison system of England was an 
 encouragement to crime, and that " the worst use you could put a man to 
 was to hang him." Mr. O Reilly s book has been favorably noticed in most 
 of the leading journals of the country, but the Catholic newspapers criticise 
 it very sharply, although they profess great respect for the author, and to 
 love him sincerely. Mr. O lteilly is not only a man of talent, but one of 
 real genius. He is in the prime of life, and is abundantly able to take care 
 of himself. He has written some of the best lyric poetry in the language, 
 and although his first novel is not faultless, he hns no occasion to be dis 
 turbed by any of the flies, gnats, or other dipterous insects which buzz about 
 him." 
 
 From the Boston Post. 
 
 "Its originality is a special charm. It is full of manliness and virile 
 power, and yet abounding in gentleness and pathos." 
 
 From the London Saturday Review. 
 " Jtfoondyne is a really clever and graphic story of Australian life." 
 
 From the Golden Rule. 
 
 " The story is powerfully written. There is little scenic description, but 
 Mr. O Reilly shows a keen analysis of motives and character, and there is 
 an imaginative glow and color suffused through the book which oniy tn
 
 2O OPINION? ^F THE PRESS. 
 
 poet could impart. The book is entirely without a harlequin. There ia !CIM 
 wit than the Amcricau reader might expect; but the interest of the story 
 never flags, and we feel that it was omitted, not because the writer could 
 not command it, but because he had a greater joy aud confidence in th 
 higher and more serious purposes of his book." 
 
 Frr>*i the Irish World. 
 
 "As an insight into the political and^iatural history of Australia alone, it 
 Is one of the most valuable books written for years past; there is so little 
 known of that strange land of ongless birds, scentless flowers, and fruit 
 less trees so wonderfully described in Mr. O Reilly s Australian poems. 
 Moondyne, the hero of the tale, reminds one of Victor Hugo s Jean Val- 
 jean. Body and soul ground to the dust in penal servitude for little or no 
 crime, his grand, rough nature comes out of it unscathed by its degrading 
 influences, and even elevated to more than human strength and beauty as he 
 ".ays aside all thoughts of his own welfare, and devotes himself to the 
 reform of the penal colony, and the amelioration of the awful slavery of 
 his fellow-men." 
 
 From the Cambridge Tribune. 
 
 41 "We think the book superior to Charles Reade s book with the same 
 object, that of calling attention to the wrongs inflicted upon convicts, and 
 as a work of fiction it impresses one more agreeably than that."
 
 A NEW ROMANCE. 
 
 A TALE OF TO-MORROW. 
 
 ROBERT GRANT, 
 
 JOHN BOYLE O REILLY, 
 J. S. OF DALE, AND 
 
 JOHN T. WHEELWRIGHT. 
 
 " All the king s horses and all the king s men 
 Couldn t put Humfty Dumpty up again." 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS. 
 1884.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REG AL LIBRARY AGILITY 
 
 A 000685014 3