INISFAIL 
 
 A LYRICAL CHRONICLE OF IRELAND 
 
 THE IRISH SISTERS 
 
 EARLY POEM^S^EDITATiyE OR DEVOTIONAL 
 
 POEMS FOR THE IVlbsT PART CONNECTED WITH THE 
 
 GREAT IRIShS^MINE, 18461849 
 
 mtBS^^MA 
 
 ST.yJ^TER'S cHAINS 
 
 BY 
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 
 
 NEW EDITION 
 
 Eontron 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1897 
 
LOAN STACK 
 
 jiw*;-'- 
 
 5 
 

 i^^7 
 
 INISPAIL. 
 
 FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1861, 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 (EDITION OF 1877.) 
 
 ' Inispail ' is an attempt to represent, as in a picture, 
 the most stormy, but the most poetic period of Irish 
 History. In simpler days than ours, when even rude 
 feelings were tender, and when thought had not 
 separated itself from action, poetry and history were 
 more akin than they have been in recent times. In 
 England and in Spain a series of ballads had early 
 grown up, out of which rose the later literature of 
 each country, ballads that recorded many a precious 
 passage of old times, and embodied the genius, as 
 well as the manners, of the past. Irish History no 
 longer stands thus related to letters. Nowhere in 
 Ireland can we move without being challenged by the 
 monuments of the past ; yet, for many of her sons, 
 and those who ought to be the best instructed, and 
 for the traveller from afar, there exists no Alfred, 
 and no Wallace. For the English-speaking part 
 of the population nearly the whole of the old 
 bardic literature has perished, and with it much of a 
 history admirable for the manner in which it exhibits 
 
 b 
 297 
 
XVlll PREFACE. 
 
 the finer, together with the more barbaric, traits of a 
 society the spiritual civilisation of which had been 
 early developed, and the civil early checked. Yet for 
 centuries the bards occupied a more important posi- 
 tion in Ireland than in any other part of the West : 
 their dignity was next to the regal ; their influence 
 over the people unbounded ; and they possessed all 
 the secular learning then in the land. The Gael 
 required that even the precepts of the law should be 
 delivered to him in verse, as well as that the lines of 
 the Princes and Chiefs should be thus traced. The 
 influence of the priest alone equalled that of the 
 bard, and between these two orders a rivalry often 
 existed. We have the testimony of Spenser as to the 
 merit and power of the latter as late as the sixteenth 
 century. He admired them and he feared them. The 
 love of the bard for his country was a lover's passion. 
 To him of course his Erin was in some degree an 
 Ideal Erin. He could see the crimes of individuals, 
 and denounce judgment on them; but beneath the 
 accidents of the hour he ever recognised in his Land 
 the child of a divine predilection. The closer the 
 hunters beset her, the more thickly the * winged 
 wounds' came about her, the more vehemently he hailed 
 her as one 'doomed to death, yet fated not to die.' 
 The name * Inisfail ' signified the * Isle of Destiny.' 
 
 In Ireland the alliance between poetry and love of 
 country was, perhaps, closer than elsewhere. For 
 ages her History was but a record of calamity ; and 
 to every generous nature his country becomes en- 
 deared by her sufferings. But even in earlier days 
 the bards must have found their best subjects for 
 song among the picturesque and romantic details of 
 Irish story. The antiquity to which it mounted 
 
PREFACE. XIX 
 
 excited imaginative sympathies : the dimness with 
 which large tracts of it were invested gave a more 
 striking prominence to what remained of it those 
 great, half-isolated Records which loomed through 
 the mist like mountain behind mountain retiring 
 into more and more remote distance. Some reference 
 to those records, wild as the wildest ' Irish airs,' may 
 perhaps render more easily intelligible an enterprise 
 of verse which many will deem rash, an attempt to 
 add a Gaelic note to that large concert of English 
 poetry enriched long since by strains indirectly 
 drawn from almost every age and land. 
 
 Long before those three golden centuries succeed- 
 ing her conversion to Christianity, Ireland possessed 
 culture, laws, and a time-honoured monarchy. It 
 was in part for this reason that she at once became 
 the great missionary land of the North, while 
 foreigners flocked in crowds to her colleges. Her 
 Faith was a tree that rapidly ' covered the lands 
 with its branches,' because it had been planted ' by 
 the water side,' If Ireland had to * wait long for 
 her martyrs,' it was because the genius of her early 
 institutions was less opposed than that of other 
 Western Nations to Christianity. Most of Europe, 
 including Britain and Gaul, had received the Roman 
 civilisation. With Pagan Rome Ireland had had no 
 dealings, closely as she became linked with Christian 
 Rome. She was an Eastern nation in the West, and 
 a Southern in the North. Her civilisation was pa- 
 triarchal, not military, in essence ; its type was the 
 family, not the army ; it had more afiinity with the 
 Church, when the Church yet dwelt in tents, than 
 with the complex fabric of the State. It was a 
 civilisation of clans. The clan system would have 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 been fatal to a people whose vocation was to create a 
 great political dominion. To a country whose great- 
 ness was destined to be a missionary greatness it 
 proved an auxiliary, at once affording to her the type 
 of those spiritual clans, her convents, of which those 
 ruled by the great monastic family of St. Columba 
 proved the most potent, and also withdrawing her 
 from the larger worldly ambitions. Had the clan 
 system met with no external interference, civil society 
 might possibly in Ireland, as in India, have preserved 
 its original type substantially unchanged to modern 
 times, without decay, though also without progress. 
 But, on the other hand, the missionary progress of 
 Ireland in three centuries, exceeded that made by 
 half the countries of Europe in twice the time. Clan 
 fights were her sports ; but Eeligion was her Reality. 
 To it her genius was attracted. Another Eastern 
 characteristic, ' Fatalism,' has been attributed to the 
 Irish race. Her Fatalism meant simply a profound 
 sense of Religion. The intense Theism which has 
 ever belonged to the East survived in Ireland as an 
 instinct no less than as a Faith. The Irish have 
 commonly found it more easy to recognise the Divine 
 hand than secondary causes. They have regarded 
 Religion as the chief possession of man. Such 
 nations are ever attached to the Past. 
 
 That Past was indeed too great a thing to be 
 forgotten. Even in our own days, remote and prosaic, 
 by the banks of the Boyne, amid more troubled me- 
 morials, we stand and wonder at tumuli the winding 
 galleries of which are supposed to retain the ashes of 
 those kings of the Tuatha de Danann, who ruled in 
 Ireland before the Milesian race. In the isles of 
 Aran, in Kerry, and in Donegal, we still find the 
 
PREFACE. XXI 
 
 remains of cairn and cromlech and rath, of stone forts, 
 and of those singular houses called ' cloghauns ' with 
 their steep beehive roofs. The Royal Irish Academy- 
 shows us its silver shields, golden crowns, cups, 
 torques, spear-heads of bronze, &c. The illuminated 
 Missals and Breviaries of the Dublin University 
 prove to us that no sooner had the land become 
 Christian than it applied to sacred purposes the 
 skill it had long before possessed. Centuries earlier, 
 when the neighbouring countries were barbarous, its 
 Brehon Laws had constituted a complete code of 
 civil rule ; while many of its social usages, fosterage, 
 for instance, and the clan tenure of land, hereditary 
 offices, eric, &c., were as deeply rooted in the national 
 heart, as when, 1500 years later, arbitrary laws 
 endeavoured in vain to eradicate them. The long 
 list of 118 kings, previous to the time of St. Patrick, 
 astonishes us at first ; but, on examining the material 
 records still existing, we find abundant proofs of the 
 antiquity of Irish civilisation. The traces of the 
 husbandman's labour remain on the summit of hills 
 which have not been cultivated within the records of 
 tradition, and the implements with which he toiled 
 have been found in the depth of forest or bog. 
 
 If the ancient memorials of Ireland are interesting 
 to us, much more so must they have proved to the 
 Irish of an earlier day. A green and woody knoll 
 beside Lough Derg is all that for us remains of Kin- 
 cora, the Palace of the Munster Kings, and home of 
 Brian the Great. But to a Gael in the fifteenth 
 century its ruins must have spoken a language as 
 intelligible as that in which old castles battered by 
 Mountjoy address us. To the Irishman, prince or 
 peasant, Nial of the Nine Hostages was as familiar 
 
XXll PREFACE. 
 
 a name as Bruce was to the Scottish. Bard and 
 chronicler told how, before St. Patrick had sum- 
 moned King Laeghaire to believe, Nial had ruled 
 over all Ireland ; how he had been the ancestor of 
 the tribe of Hi-Nial, from which were descended the 
 Princes of Tirconnel and Tyrone, at whose name the 
 children of Norman nobles in the Pale, the four 
 counties round Dublin, trembled ; how he had sent 
 against Britain and Gaul those naval expeditions, 
 still for us recorded in Roman verse ; * how he had 
 leagued with his countrymen in Scotland, those 
 Scoti who with the Picts had again and again driven 
 back the Romans behind their further wall till they 
 left the land defenceless ; and how, at last, he had 
 fallen at sea, in the port of Boulogne, by the hand 
 of his rival, Eochy. From priest as well as bard he 
 would have heard of the Irish Numa, King Cormac ; 
 how he had succeeded to his father, a.d. 227 ; how 
 he had established three colleges, one for w^ar, one 
 for history, and one for jurisprudence ; how he had 
 reduced the old Brehon law into a code ; how he 
 had assembled at his palace of Tara his bards and 
 chroniclers, and commanded them to collect all the 
 ancient annals of Ireland into a series the ' Psalter 
 of Tara ' ; how he had himself written a book called 
 ' The Institutions of a Prince,' and stored in it the 
 civil wisdom of his time ; how, in obedience to law, he 
 had resigned his throne on becoming disfigured by a 
 wound ; and how it was piously believed that, before 
 his death, Christianity had reached him, and he had 
 become a Believer. 
 
 ' Totam cum Scotiis lernem 
 Movit, et infesto spumavit remige Tetliys.' 
 
 Claudian. 
 
PREFACE. XXm 
 
 Still more often would he have heard the tale of 
 King Cor mac's grandfather, Conn of the Hundred 
 Fights, who succeeded to the crown of all Ireland, 
 A.D. 123, and who was at last compelled to surrender 
 one half of it to Eoghan More (Eugene the Great), 
 King of Munster. He would have heard how the 
 latter, on the war breaking out again, had sought 
 and found allies in Spain, and with them had perished 
 in a night surprise ; how his rival. Conn of the 
 Hundred Fights, was slain, in the hundredth year of 
 his age, by a king of Ulster ; and how from a king 
 who united the blood of Conn and of Eugene were 
 descended the great houses of Munster, those of the 
 Dalcassian race, as the OBriens, who held sway in 
 Thomond or north Munster, and those of the Euge- 
 nian race, as the MacCarthys, who retained it for so 
 many centuries in Desmond or south Munster, and 
 were at last obliged to share it with the Norman 
 Geraldines. 
 
 But the records of which every song-loving Gael 
 heard went up to periods long before the Christian 
 Era. He heard how, at a time when the bards had 
 long enjoyed the dignities in Christian times be- 
 stowed on the clergy, a storm had arisen against this 
 song-church, accused of inordinate wealth and abused 
 power. He heard also how it had been saved by the 
 interposition of St. Columba, himself a Poet. He 
 heard how, earlier still, King Eochy had constituted 
 the five provincial kingdoms, as centuries previously 
 King Ugony More had divided Ireland into twenty- 
 five for the benefit of his twenty-five sons, compelling 
 his people to swear by the * sun and the moon, the 
 dew, and all elements visible and invisible,' that their 
 inheritance should not be taken from them for ever. 
 
XXIV PREFACE. 
 
 He heard how Emania, the palace of the Ulster 
 kings, had been built, before the time of XJgony, 
 B.C. 305, by Queen Macha, who had compelled rival 
 princes to toil at the foundations, and marked with 
 the point of her torque the spot where the work was 
 to begin. The annalist of Clonmacnoise told him 
 how for 850 years the Ked-branch Knights, the great 
 order of Pagan Chivalry, had gone in and come out 
 among its halls; how another .Queen, Maeve, or 
 Maude, who had herself built the Connaught Palace 
 of Cruachan, invaded Ulster at the head of her 
 army ; how her Gamanradians of lorras had fought 
 with the Red-branch Chivalry ; and how, centuries 
 later, the three Collas had burned to the ground that 
 Emania of which the only record remaining was then, 
 as it is now, a lonely rath near Armagh. The 
 chronicler would then have told him that the palace 
 of Tara had been built by King Ollamh Fodhla 
 centuries before even that of Emania had been heard 
 of ; that in it, reign after reign, was held the great 
 Triennial Assembly of chiefs, bards, and historians ; 
 that each warrior had taken the seat appointed for 
 him beneath his own banner, during deliberations 
 conducted with a solemnity half regal, half sacerdotal ; 
 that these assemblies continued to take place till 
 A.D. 554, and that it was deserted for ever in con- 
 sequence of a malison pronounced against it by St. 
 Rodanus of Lothra. Emania had enjoyed more years 
 of splendour than had elapsed between the first 
 Danish invasion and Queen Elizabeth's wars ; yet its 
 greatness was over before Ireland had confessed the 
 Christian Faith. Tara had lasted longer than the 
 whole period of Danish, Norman, and Saxon wars 
 united ; yet the weeds had begun to creep over its 
 
PREFACE. XXV 
 
 old rath as many centuries before Henry II. had 
 landed in Ireland as elapsed between his enterprise 
 and what in Ireland was called the ' Anglo-Dutch 
 invasion.' 
 
 Glancing thus with the bards from epoch to epoch, 
 we reach the latest of the remote ones, that of the 
 Milesian settlement. The most learned amongst 
 recent antiquarians assure us that a sceptical spirit 
 respecting that settlement is as unphilosophical as a 
 credulous spirit would have been deemed in the last 
 century. They affirm that the whole social system of 
 Ireland having been based upon genealogical claims, 
 her most important institutions were formed for the 
 purpose of recording facts and dates accurately ; and 
 they state that the early chronicles are remarkably 
 confirmed by Science as regards eclipses, astronomical 
 calculations, &c. It is certain that the Gael ever 
 looked upon this period as the authentic beginning 
 of Irish glories, however problematical her earlier 
 legends might be. Rejecting the claims to a greater 
 antiquity, Charles O'Connor, of Balenagar, assigns 
 to the establishment of the Milesian monarchy in 
 Ireland the date of 760 years before our Era, making 
 it thus nearly contemporaneous with the foundation 
 of Rome. A race called Gadelian, or Gaelic, and at 
 a later period called Scoti (as is supposed from their 
 claims to a Scythian descent), migrated to Ireland 
 from Spain under the leadership of the six sons of 
 Milesius, king of that country. Their names were 
 Heber, Heremon, Donn, Colpa, Ir, and Amergin. 
 The brothers founded that Gaelic monarchy which 
 had lasted for nearly 2000 years when the mighty 
 Norman race extended its conquests from England 
 to Ireland, a land the political and religious institu- 
 
XXVI PKEFACE. 
 
 tions of which had never wholly recovered the effects 
 of the Danish inroads. 
 
 It is with the Norman conquests in Ireland that 
 the present Poem commences. It is necessary to 
 make a few remarks respecting the chief character- 
 istics of Irish History from that period to the latter 
 part of the eighteenth century. 
 
 The six centuries of Irish History, illustrated by 
 ' Inisfail,' divide themselves into three portions. 
 The first endured for about 350 years. Its pre- 
 dominant characteristic was Outlawry. The Brehon 
 Law was set aside by the conquering race, and the 
 English Law was refused to the conquered, refused 
 by the settler more than by English kings. The 
 weak were the prey of the strong. Yet even in 
 those ages of wroug and rapine all was not suffering. 
 Flowers spring up by the torrent's bed ; and many a 
 gay song was sung beneath the invader's fortress. 
 Moreover, in the midst of the Norman settlements 
 the Gaelic chief held his own, and around him the 
 old clan life went on as before. Partly through 
 intermarriages, the Norman nobles, in the remoter 
 parts of Ireland, became Irish Chiefs, speaking the 
 national language, and adopting the national usages. 
 It is thus that Keating, writing his history amid the 
 storms of the seventeenth century, speaks of this 
 race : ' Notwithstanding what has been said of the 
 cruelties and sacrilegious acts of some of those 
 foreigners who came into Ireland, many of them were 
 men of virtue and strict piety, who promoted the 
 service of God and the cause of religion by erect- 
 ing churches and monasteries, and bestowing large 
 
PREFACE. XXVll 
 
 revenues upon them for their support; and God 
 rewarded their charity and acts of mercy with 
 particular marks of His favour, and not only blessed 
 them in their own persons, but in a noble and worthy 
 posterity.' Their gradual amalgamation with the 
 nation at large is a pledge that no estrangement of 
 race or class among Ireland's sons can be permanent. 
 
 The second period is characterised by the wars of 
 Religion. They completed the estrangement between 
 England and Ireland. They completed also the union 
 of the Gaelic and Norman races in Ireland. When 
 the last great act of the tragedy had come, at the 
 same side the ancient foes fought and fell. The 
 Cromwellian victories, and the confiscation of more 
 than half Ireland at that time, reduced with com- 
 paratively few exceptions the chiefs of both the old 
 races to that condition to which the Geraldines of 
 Desmond had previously been brought by the con- 
 fiscations of Elizabeth, and the Ulster princes by 
 those of James I. This period ends with the de- 
 thronement of James II., when the fall of the old 
 Monarchy consummated that of the old Nobility and 
 the old Faith. 
 
 The third period is that of Penal Laws, * silently 
 endured. A succession of wars, renewed during 
 centuries with recurrent passion, in defence of 
 ancient laws, national existence, and religious free- 
 dom, had remained barren of their intended result. 
 Foreign alliances, even during periods when England 
 was torn by dynastic and religious dissensions, had 
 always proved abortive. The struggle had but ren- 
 dered Ireland famous among the nations, and 
 scattered among them her warriors, as her mission- 
 aries had been scattered in old times. Wrong had 
 
XXVI 11 PREFACE. 
 
 run its complete circle. But the People endured. 
 The Faith for which it had suffered preserved it as 
 an integral People. The chains which had never been 
 broken fell off. A more glorious triumph than that 
 so often sought had been reserved for Ireland. It 
 was awarded, not to a fortunate moment, but to silent 
 years ; not to nobles, but to a people among whom, 
 however, many tempests had sown wide the seed of 
 nobility ; not to spasmodic action, but to inflexible 
 fortitude ; not to arms, but to Faith. When the cloud 
 had rolled by there emerged a People and a Religion. 
 
 Persons of the most different prepossessions have 
 arrived at practically the same estimate of Irish 
 History, and in it have thus found the moral of the 
 tale. 
 
 The Catholic sees in Ireland an image of the 
 Church herself for three early centuries the great 
 missionary of the Faith ; for three late ones its 
 martyr ; ever in tribulation, but never consumed ; 
 at one time exalted as a nation, at another deposed 
 from nationhood but to become more powerful as a 
 race, and effecting more in its captivities and dis- 
 persions than it could have done if oppression, and 
 the poverty bequeathed by oppression, had never 
 driven it to the margin of waters broader and more 
 lonely than those of Euphrates or Choaspes. To 
 one of a different creed a conclusion morally the 
 same is differently coloured. Justice, he says, ulti- 
 mately triumphs over wrong. Liberty cannot be 
 trampled down for ever. A Religion is a Cause : 
 and a Cause and a People in permanent union are 
 indomitable. The philosopher shapes the result 
 thus : The relation between the three periods of 
 Irish History is logical. The Outlawry of the first 
 
PREFACE. XXIX 
 
 period rendered it impossible that in the second a 
 new religion should be introduced into Ireland by 
 means of Law. Who were to bow before the new 
 laws at variance with the old traditions % Not 
 kernes, who had never had the benefit of law : not 
 Barons, whose only law had been their own will. 
 The struggle but identified for ever the National 
 sentiment with the Catholic sentiment. Equally 
 close appears to him the connection between the 
 second and the third period of Irish History. The 
 Penal Laws of the latter were blunted by the whole- 
 sale confiscations of the former. Misery became the 
 pledge for fidelity. To the Irish people, who had 
 already lost their lands, there remained nothing but 
 their Faith. During the long night of persecution 
 its truths shone out like stars, and wrote themselves 
 indelibly on the heart of the race. Its priests were 
 its only friends (a power greater than they sought 
 being thus, but at a later time, forced upon them) : 
 the next world was its nearest hope : and it was not 
 likely that either would be forsaken. In the end, 
 permanent instincts and principles triumphed over 
 temporary necessities. In the failure of persecuting 
 laws, and in the restoration of Ireland, one man sees 
 the victory of Faith, another that of Justice, and a 
 third that of Reason ; three powers that work, on 
 the long run, to the same result. 
 
 In these days few are so biassed by party or 
 sectarian bitterness as to grudge an epitaph to virtue 
 and calamity in times gone by. A timid caution may 
 shrink from Historical Studies (as if the most 
 interesting of studies could be suppressed), but 
 a manly prudence will enjoin them, provided that 
 they be conducted with justice. Ireland is bound 
 
XXX PREFACE. 
 
 to acknowledge that it was not England alone, or 
 Protestant countries alone, that persecuted. On the 
 long run Truth is a peacemaker. What is to be 
 feared from historical studies in connection with 
 Ireland 1 The spirit of vengeance 1 A man must be 
 half-witted to sigh for revenge when the offenders 
 have been for centuries dead. He must be an idiot 
 not to perceive that on the long run, whatever a just 
 cause may have gained for a time through the use of 
 unjust means, it has invariably lost ten times as 
 much through injustice. 
 
 'Inisfail' may be regarded as a National Chronicle 
 cast in a poetic form. Its aim is to embody the 
 essence of a nation's history during a long period 
 of that History. Contemporary historic poems touch 
 us with a magical hand ; but they often pass by 
 the most important events, and linger beside the 
 most trivial. Looking back upon the past as from 
 a vantage-ground, its general proportions become 
 palpable : and the themes to which poetry then 
 attaches herself are either those critical junctures 
 upon which the fortunes of a nation turn, or such 
 accidents of a lighter sort as illustrate the character 
 of a race. A historic series of poems thus becomes 
 possible, the interest of which is continuous, and the 
 course of which reveals an increasing significance. 
 Such a series, however, as it constitutes a Whole, 
 must be read in its proper order if its meaning is to 
 be understood, and if the Unity of the poem is to be 
 felt. The character of Irish History rendered it 
 natural that its illustration should be chiefly lyrical. 
 In this respect I have imitated the example of 
 Ireland's ancient bards, with whom the Ode or the 
 Dirge was as common as the Ballad was with the 
 
PREFACE. XXXI 
 
 minstrels of other nations. Throughout, I have en- 
 deavoured to be true to the inner spirit of Irish 
 History, faithful to its meaning, and no less to its 
 changes. This accounts for the difference of treat- 
 ment and tone observable in the three Parts of the 
 poem, a difference which corresponds with the three 
 periods of the history recorded. In Part I. the tone 
 is chiefly legendary, and the treatment objective, be- 
 cause the period of Irish History illustrated in it is 
 that which bordered most nearly upon the legends of 
 Ireland's heroic yet half barbaric time. In Part II. 
 the tone becomes more dramatic, the tragic struggle 
 having reached its agony. In Part III. the more 
 impassioned part of the conflict being over, the tone 
 subsides into the elegiac until the end is approached, 
 and the morning perforce glimmers through the night. 
 Fidelity to Irish History rendered no less necessary 
 that recurrence to certain fundamental ideas which the 
 reader will observe, as the poem advances, in various 
 degrees of development such ideas as those of a 
 Providence punishing at once and exalting; the 
 penance of the Norman ; the penance of the Gael ; 
 the Apostolic mission of Ireland ; her undying hope ; 
 the fidelity of her sons in far lands, &c. I en- 
 deavoured to make the human prevail over the 
 merely political interest of the theme, and to 
 illustrate Ireland's Faith apart from polemics, and 
 exclusively as a Power of Consolation and Strength. 
 A national Chronicle in verse would, if faithful, be 
 an echo of that voice which comes from the heart of 
 a People, and is heard alike in festive hall and in the 
 village circle, in the church-porch, and on the battle- 
 field. That voice has many tones besides the sadder 
 and more solemn it records the brief pathetic joy 
 
XXXll PREFACE. 
 
 which vanishes like a flame, and the hope perennial 
 like a fountain. The main scope, however, of a 
 poem which illustrates the interior life of a Nation 
 the biography of a People must be spiritual. The 
 moral of a brief individual life is often hidden. 
 Nations are patriarchs ; and their lives last long 
 enough to vindicate the ways of God. 
 
 The chief aim of ' Inisfail ' was to indicate that sole 
 point of view from which Irish History possesses a 
 meaning. One great Yocation has been guaranteed 
 to Ireland by many great qualifications, and by many 
 great disqualifications. When Religion and Mis- 
 sionary Enterprise ruled the Irish Heart and Hand, 
 Ireland reached the chief greatness she has known 
 within historic times, and the only greatness which 
 has lasted. When the same Heart and Hand return 
 to the same task, Ireland will reap the full harvest of 
 her sorrowful Centuries. She will then also inherit 
 both a Greatness and a Happiness perhaps such as is 
 tendered to her alone among the Nations. 
 
 It has been said that Irish History abounds in 
 touching and dramatic details, but that it is essen- 
 tially fragmentary. Eeligion imparts completeness 
 to it. When Religion threw off the bonds of 
 centuries, a deliverance precious to all who- respect 
 freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, Irish 
 History entered on its consummation, and justice 
 won the most remarkable of her triumphs in modern 
 times. Had it been otherwise, Irish History would 
 have been no theme for song. Most unfit for poetry, 
 however pathetic it may be, is any subject the 
 substance of which is but violence and wrong, and 
 the resultant of which is despondency. Under the 
 tumults with which poetry deals there is ever an 
 
PREFACE. XXXUl 
 
 inner voice of peace. Memory mournful and faith- 
 ful has been called by Keble the great Inspirer of 
 Poetry. There is a Hope, the sister of devout 
 Memory, which is its inspirer no less. Such Hope 
 may stand on a tombstone; but her eyes are fixed 
 on heaven ; and if her Song begins in dirges it ends 
 in hymns. 
 
 A. DE V. 
 
INISFAIL 
 
 A LYRICAL CHRONICLE OF IRELAND 
 
 |tt %\xzt parts 
 
 A dirge devoutly breathed o'er sorrows past 
 Tells also of bright calms that shall succeed.' 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
1^0 the JH^morj) of 
 THE FAITHFUL AND THE TEUE; 
 
 OF THOSE AMONG THE SONS OF IRELAND 
 
 WHO, DURING THE AGES OF HER AFFLICTION, 
 
 SUSTAINED A JUST CAUSE 
 
 IN THE SPIRIT OF LOYALTY AND LIBERTY, 
 
 AND WHO SULLIED THAT CAUSE 
 BY NO CRIME. 
 
 V. 
 
PART I. 
 
 THE THREE WOES. 
 
 That Angel whose charge is Eire sang thus o'er the 
 dark isle winging : 
 By a virgin his song was heard at a tempest's 
 ruinous close : 
 * Three golden ages God gave while your tender corn- 
 blade was springing : 
 Faith's earliest harvest is reap'd. To-day God 
 sends you Three Woes. 
 
 ' For ages three, without Laws ye shall flee as beasts 
 in the forest : 
 For an age, and a half age, Faith shall bring not 
 peace but a sword : 
 Then Laws shall rend you like eagles, sharp-fang'd, 
 of your scourges the sorest : 
 When these Three Woes are past, look up, for your 
 Hope is restored. 
 
 'The times of your dole shall be twice the time of 
 your foregone glory : 
 But fourfold at last shall lie the grain on your 
 granary floor : ' 
 
THE WARNINGS. 
 
 The seas in vapour shall fleet, and in ashes the moun- 
 tains hoary : 
 Let God do that which He wills. Let His People 
 endure and adore ! 
 
 THE WARNINGS. 
 
 A.D. 1170. 
 
 In the heaven were Portents dire : 
 
 On the earth were sign and omen : 
 Bleeding stars and rain of fire 
 
 Dearth and plague foreran the foemen. 
 Causeless tremors on the crowd 
 Fell, and strong men wept aloud : 
 Ere the Northmen cross'd the seas 
 Said the bards, were signs like these. 
 
 Aodh saw at break of day 
 
 An oak with blood-beads on its lichen 
 All its branches rushed one way, 
 
 Like an army panic-stricken. 
 Aodh cried, ' I see a host 
 That flees as one that flies a ghost.' 
 Mad he died at noon : ere night 
 The Stranger's sails were up in sight. 
 
 III. 
 Time was given us to repent : 
 
 Prophets smote us, plain and city : 
 
A BARD SONG. 
 
 But we scorn'd each warning sent, 
 
 And outwrestled God's great pity. 
 'Twixt the blood-stained brother bands 
 Mitred Laurence raised his hands, 
 Eaised Saint Patrick's cross on high : 
 We despised him ; and we die. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 I. 
 
 Our Kings sat of old in Emania and Tara : 
 
 Those new kings whence come they 1 Their names 
 are unknown ! 
 Our Saints lie entomb' d in Ardmagh and Killdara ; 
 
 Their relics are healing ; their graves are grass- 
 grown. 
 Our princes of old, when their warfare was over, 
 
 As pilgrims forth wander'd ; as hermits found rest : 
 Shall the hand of the stranger their ashes uncover 
 
 In Benchor the holy, in Aran the blest '^ 
 
 II. 
 Not so,* by the race our Dalriada planted ! 
 In Alba were children ; we sent her a man. 
 
 * Innumerable authorities Irish, English, and Scotch 
 record tliat beginning of Scotch, as distinguished from Cale- 
 donian, history, the establishment of an Irish colony in Western 
 Scotland, at that time named Alba a colony from which that 
 noble country derived its later name, the chief part of its popu- 
 lation, and its Royal House, from which, through the Stuarts, 
 our present Sovereign is descended. This settlement is recorded 
 by the Venerable Bede. 
 
b THE DIRGE OF THE INVADERS. 
 
 Battles won in Argyle in Dunedin they chanted ; 
 King Kenneth completed what Fergus began. 
 Our name is her name : she is Alba no longer : 
 
 Her kings are our blood, and she crowns them at 
 Scone ; 
 Strong-hearted they are, and strong-handed, but 
 stronger 
 When throned on our Lia Fail, Destiny's stone. 
 
 THE DIRGE OF THE INVADERS; 
 
 OR, THE HOUSE NORMAN. 
 
 Among the churches sacked and burnt by Dermod and his 
 Norman allies, was that of the Monastery of Kells, to which 
 the headship of the great Order of St. Columba had been trans- 
 ferred several centuries previously, when lona was wasted by 
 the Danes. The monks are here supposed to have been inter- 
 rupted, while celebrating the obsequies of their slaughtered 
 brethren, by the return of the despoilers. 
 
 I. 
 
 The walls are black : but the floor is red ! 
 
 Blood ! there is blood on the convent floor ! 
 Woe to the mighty : that blood they shed : 
 
 Woe, woe, de Bohun ! Woe, woe, le Poer ! 
 Fitz- Walter, beware ! the years are strong : 
 De Burgh, de Burgh ! God rights the wrong. 
 Ye have murder' d priests : the hour draws nigh 
 When your sons unshriven, without priest, shall die. 
 
 II. 
 Toll for the Mighty Ones : brethren toll ! 
 They stand astonish'd ! what seek they here 1 
 
THE DIRGE OF THE INVADERS. 7 
 
 Through tower and through turret the winds on roll, 
 
 But the yellow lights shake not around the bier. 
 They are here unbidden ! stand back, ye proud ! 
 God shapes the empires as wind the cloud. 
 The offence must come : but the deed is sin : 
 Toll the death-bell : the death-psalms begin. 
 
 III. 
 
 The happy Dead with God find rest : 
 
 For them no funeral bell we toll. 
 Fitz-Hugh ! Death sits upon thy crest ! 
 
 De Clare ! Death sits upon thy soul ! 
 Toll, monks, the death-bell ; toll for them 
 Who masque under helmet and diadem : 
 Death's masque is Sin. The living are they 
 Who live with God in eternal day ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Fitz-Maurice is sentenced ! Sound, monks, his knell ! 
 
 As Roderick fell must de Courcy fall. 
 Toll for Fitz-Gerald the funeral bell : 
 
 The blood of O'Ruark is on Lacy's wall. 
 The lions are ye of the robber kind ! 
 But when ye lie old in your dens and blind 
 The wolves and the jackals on you shall prey. 
 From the same shore sent. Beware that day ! 
 
 V. 
 
 Toll for the Conquerors : theirs the doom ! 
 
 For the great House Norman : its bud is nipt ! 
 Ah, princely House, when your hour is come 
 
 Your dirge shall be sung not in church but crypt ! 
 
b PECCATUM PECCAVIT. 
 
 We mourn you in time. A baser scourge 
 Than yours that day will forbid the dirge ! 
 Two thousand years to the Gael God gave : 
 Four hundred shall open the Norman's grave ! 
 
 Thus with threne and with stern lament 
 
 For their brethren dead the old monks made moan 
 
 In the convent of Kells, the first day of Lent, 
 One thousand one hundred and seventy-one. 
 
 PECCATUM PECCAVIT. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 Where is thy brother ? Heremon, speak ! 
 
 Heber the son of Milesius, thy sire ? 
 The orphans' wail and the widow's shriek 
 
 For ever ring on the air of Eire ! 
 And whose, O whose was the sword, Heremon, 
 
 That smote Amergin, thy brother and bard % 
 The Fate of thy house or a mocking Demon 
 
 Upheaved thy hand o'er his forehead scarr'd ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Woe, woe to Eire ! That blood of brothers 
 Wells up from her bosom renewed each year ; 
 
 'Twas hers the shriek that desolate Mother's : 
 'Twas Eire that wept o'er that first red bier ! 
 
THE MALISON. 
 
 The priest has warn'd, and the bard lamented : 
 But warning and wailing her sons despised ; 
 
 The head was sage, and the heart half-sainted ; 
 But the sword-hand was evermore unbaptised 
 
 THE MALISON. 
 
 The Curse of that land which in ban and in blessing 
 Hath puissance through prayer and through 
 penance, alight 
 On the False One who whisper 'd, the Traitor's hand 
 pressing, 
 'I ride without guards in the morning good- 
 night ! ' 
 O beautiful serpent ! woman fiend-hearted ! 
 
 Wife false to O'Ruark ! f Queen base to thy trust ! 
 The glory of ages for ever departed 
 
 That hour from the isle of the saintly and just. 
 
 * Between the brothers who founded the great Milesian or 
 Gaelic dynasty in Ireland, about B.C. 760, there was strife, as 
 between the brothers who founded Kome nearly at the same 
 date. Herenion and Heber divided Ireland between them. A 
 dispute having arisen between them, a battle was fought at 
 Geashill, in the present King's County, in which Heber fell 
 by his brother's hand. This may be called Ireland's ' Original 
 Sin,' the typical foimt of many woes. In the second year of his 
 reign Heremon also slew his brother, Amergin, in battle. 
 
 + The story of the Irish Helen is well known. Dervorgil, 
 the wife of O'Ruark, Prince of Breffny, fled with Dermod Mac 
 Murrough, King' of Leinster. The latter, on his deposition, 
 went to England, where he contracted alliances with Henry II. 
 and Strongbow against Roderick O'Connor, the last Gaelic king 
 of all Ireland. Dervorgil ultimately found a refuge at Mellifont, 
 
10 
 
 THE MALISON. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Curse o that land on the princes disloyal, 
 
 Who welcomed the Invader, and knelt at his knee ! 
 False Dermod, false Donald the chieftains once 
 royal 
 Of the Deasies and Ossory, cursed let them be ! 
 Their name and their shame make eternal. Engrave 
 them 
 On the cliffs which the great billows buffet and 
 stain : 
 Like billows the nations, when tyrants enslave them, 
 Swell up in their vengeance not always in vain ! 
 
 III. 
 
 But praise in the churches and worship and honour 
 
 To him who, betray' d and deserted, fought on ! 
 All praise to King Roderick, the chief of Clan- 
 Connor, 
 The King of all Erin, and Cathall his son ! 
 May the million-voiced chant that in endless expan- 
 sion 
 Kolls onward through heaven his praises prolong ; 
 May the heaven of heavens this night be the mansion 
 Of the good king who died in the cloisters of 
 Cong ! 
 
 where she lived in penance and works of charity. Dermod 
 died at Ferns, under circumstances of strange horror. Ex- 
 hausted by domestic discords, as well as the calamities of his 
 country, Roderick retired to the monastery he had founded at 
 Cong. He died there at the age of eightj'-two, and was interred 
 at Clonmacnoise, the burial-place of the Irish kings. 
 
THE LEGENDS. 11 
 
 THE LEGENDS. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 I. 
 
 The woods rose slowly ; the clouds sail'd on ; 
 
 Man trod not yet the island wide : 
 A ship drew near from the rising sun ; 
 
 At the helm was the Scythian Parricide. 
 Battles were lost and battles were won ; 
 
 New lakes burst open ; old forests died : 
 For ages once more in the land was none : 
 
 God slew the race of the Parricide. 
 
 II. 
 There is nothing that lasts save the Pine and Bard : 
 
 I, Fintan the bard, was living then ! 
 Tall grows the Pine upon Slieve-Donard : 
 
 It dies : in the loud harp it lives again. 
 Give praise to the bard and a huge reward ! 
 
 Give praise to the bard that gives praise to men : 
 My curse upon Aodh, the priest of Skard, 
 
 Who jeers at the bard-songs of Ikerren ! 
 
 THE LEGENDS. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 I. 
 
 Dead is the Prince of the Silver Hand, 
 And dead Eochy the son of Ere ! 
 
 Ere lived Milesius they ruled the land 
 
 Thou hast ruled and lost in turn, O'Ruark ! 
 
12 THE FAITHFUL NORMAN. 
 
 Two thousand years have pass'd since then, 
 And clans and kingdoms in blind commotion 
 
 Have butted at heaven and sunk again 
 
 As great waves sink in the depths of ocean. 
 
 II. 
 
 Last King of the Gaels of Eire, be still ! 
 
 What God decrees must come to pass : 
 There is none that soundeth His way or will : 
 
 His hand is iron, and earth is glass. 
 Where built the Firbolgs shrieks the owl ; 
 
 The Tuatha bequeathed but the name of Eire : 
 Roderick, our last of kings, thy cowl 
 
 Outweighs the crown of thy kingly sire ! 
 
 THE FAITHFUL NORMAN. 
 
 Pkaise to the valiant and faithful foe ! 
 
 Give us noble foes, not the friend who lies ! 
 We dread the drugg'd cup, not the open blow ; 
 
 We dread the old hate in the new disguise. 
 To Ossory's Prince they had pledged their word : 
 
 He stood in their camp, and their pledge they 
 broke ; 
 Then Maurice the Norman upraised his sword ; 
 
 The Cross on its hilt he kiss'd, and spoke : 
 
 II. 
 
 ' So long as this sword or this arm hath might 
 I swear by the Cross which is lord of all, 
 
SONG. 13 
 
 By the faith and honour of noble and knight 
 
 Who touches yon Prince by this hand shall fall ! ' 
 
 So side by side through the throng they pass'd ; 
 And Eire gave praise to the just and true. 
 
 Brave foe ! the Past truth heals at last : 
 
 There is room in the great heart of Eire for you ! 
 
 SONG. 
 
 Willow-like maid with the long loose tresses, 
 With locks like Diarba's, and fairy foot, 
 
 That gatherest up from the streamlet its cresses, 
 Above that caroller bending mute, 
 
 Those tresses black in a fillet bind, 
 
 Or beware of Manannan the god of the wind ! 
 
 IL 
 
 No fear of the Stranger with feet like those ; 
 
 No fear of the robbers that couch in the glen 
 But the Wind-god blows on thy cheek a rose, 
 
 Then back returns to kiss it again. 
 Manannan, they say, is the God in air 
 So sang the Tuatha Bind close thy hair ! 
 
 III. 
 
 The red on her cheek was brightening still ; 
 
 A smile ran o'er it and made reply 
 As she cast from the darkling and sparkling rill 
 
 The flash of a darkling and sparkling eye ; 
 Then over her shoulder her long locks flung 
 And homeward tripp'd with a mirthful song. 
 
14 THE LEGENDS. 
 
 THE LEGENDS. 
 
 A BAKD SONG. 
 I. 
 
 They fought ere sunrise at Tor Conainn ; 
 
 All day they fought on the hoarse sea-shore ; 
 The sun dropp'd downward ; they fought amain ; 
 
 The tide rose upward ; they fought the more. 
 The sands were cover' d ; the sea grew red ; 
 
 The warriors fought in the reddening wave ; 
 That night the sea was the Sea-King's bed ; 
 
 The Land-King drifted by cliff and cave. 
 
 II. 
 
 Great was the rage in those ancient days 
 
 (We were pagans then) in the land of Eire ; 
 Like eagles men vanquish 'd the noontide blaze ; 
 
 Their bones were granite ; their nerves were wire. 
 We are hinds to-day ! The Nemedian kings 
 
 Like elk and bison of old stalk'd forth ; 
 Their name the ' Sea Kings ' for ever clings 
 
 To the ' Giant Stepping Stones' round the North. 
 
 THE BARD ETHELL. 
 
 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 
 I. 
 
 I AM Ethell, the son of Conn ; 
 
 Here I bide at the foot of the hill ; 
 I am clansman to Brian and servant to none ; 
 
 Whom I hated I hate : whom I loved love still. 
 
THE BARD ETHELL. 15 
 
 Blind am I. On milk I live, 
 
 And meat (God sends it) on each Saint's Day, 
 Though Donald Mac Art may he never thrive 
 
 Last Shrovetide drove half my kine away ! 
 
 II. 
 
 At the brown hill's base, by the pale blue lake, 
 
 I dwell, and see the things I saw ; 
 The heron flap heavily up from the brake, 
 
 The crow fly homeward with twig or straw, 
 The wild duck, a silver line in wake, 
 
 Cutting the calm mere to far Bunaw. 
 And the things that I heard though deaf I hear ; 
 From the tower in the island the feastf ul cheer ; 
 The horn from the wood ; the plunge of the stag. 
 With the loud hounds after him, down from the crag. 
 Sweet is the chase, but the battle is sweeter ; 
 More healthful, more joyous, for true men meeter ! 
 
 III. 
 
 My hand is weak ; it once was strong : 
 
 My heart burns still with its ancient fire : 
 If any man smites me he does me wrong. 
 
 For I was the Bard of Brian Mac Guire. 
 If any man slay me not unaware, 
 
 By no chance blow, nor in wine and revel, 
 I have stored beforehand a curse in my prayer 
 
 For his kith and kindred : his deed is evil. 
 
 IV. 
 
 There never was King, and there never will be, 
 
 In battle or banquet like Malachi ! 
 
 The Seers his reign had predicted long ; 
 
 He honour'd the Bards, and gave gold for song. 
 
16 THE BARD ETHELL. 
 
 If rebels arose he put out their eyes ; 
 
 If robbers plunder'd or burn'd the fanes 
 He hung them in chaplets, like rosaries, 
 
 That others, beholding, might take more pains : 
 There was none to women more reverent-minded, 
 
 For he held his mother, and Mary, dear ; 
 If any man wrong' d them that man he blinded 
 
 Or straight amerced him of hand or ear. 
 There was none who founded more convents none ; 
 
 In his palace the old and poor were fed ; 
 The orphan walked, and the widow's son. 
 
 Without groom or page to his throne or bed. 
 In council he mused, with great brows divine, 
 And eyes like the eyes of the musing kine, 
 Upholding a Sceptre o'er which, men said. 
 Seven Spirits of Wisdom like fire-tongues played. 
 He drain'd ten lakes and he built ten bridges ; 
 
 He bought a gold book for a thousand cows ; 
 He slew ten Princes who brake their pledges ; 
 
 With the bribed and the base he scorn'd to carouse. 
 He was sweet and awful ; through all his reign 
 God gave great harvests to vale and plain ; 
 From his nurse's milk he was kind and brave : 
 And when he went down to his well-wept grave 
 Through the triumph of penance his soul uprose 
 To God and the Saints. Not so his foes ! 
 
 The King that came after ! ah woe, woe, woe ! 
 He doubted his friend and he trusted his foe. 
 He bought and he sold : his kingdom old 
 
 He pledged and pawn'd to avenge a spite : 
 No Bard or prophet his birth foretold : 
 
 He was guarded and warded both day and night 
 
THE BARD ETHELL. 17 
 
 He counsell'd with fools and had boors at his feast ; 
 
 He was cruel to Christian and kind to beast : 
 
 Men smiled when they talk'd of him far o'er the 
 
 wave : 
 Paid were the mourners that wept at his grave ! 
 God plagued for his sake his people sore : 
 
 They sinn'd ; for the people should watch and pray 
 That their prayers, like angels at window and door, 
 
 May keep from the King the bad thought away ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 The sun has risen : on lip and brow 
 
 He greets me I feel it with golden wand. 
 Ah, bright-faced Noma ! I see thee now ; 
 
 Where first I saw thee I see thee stand ! 
 From the trellis the girl look'd down on me : 
 
 Her maidens stood near : it was late in spring : 
 The grey priests laugh'd as she cried in glee 
 
 ' Good Bard, a song in my honour sing ! ' 
 I sang her praise in a loud-voiced hymn 
 To God who had fashion'd her, face and limb, 
 For the praise of the clan and the land's behoof : 
 So she flung me a flower from the trellis roof. 
 Ere long I saw her the hill descending 
 
 O'er the lake the May morning rose moist and 
 slow : 
 She pray'd me (her smile with the sweet voice blend- 
 ing) 
 
 To teach her all that a woman should know. 
 Panting she stood : she was out of breath : 
 
 The wave of her little breast was shaking : 
 From eyes still childish and dark as death 
 
 Came womanhood's dawn through a dew-cloud 
 breaking. 
 
 V. c 
 
3 8 THE BAED ETHELL. 
 
 Norna was never long time the same : 
 
 By a spirit so strong was her slight form moulded 
 The curves swell'd out from the flower-like frame 
 
 In joy ; in grief to a bud she folded : 
 As she listened her eyes grew bright and large 
 Like springs rain-fed that dilate their marge. 
 
 VII. 
 
 So I taT:^ght her the hymn of Patrick the Apostle, 
 And the marvels of Bridget and Columkille : 
 
 Ere long she sang like the lark or the throstle, 
 
 Sang the deeds of the servants of God's high 
 Will : 
 
 I told her of Brendon who found afar 
 
 Another world 'neath the western star ; 
 
 Of our three great bishops in Lindisf arne isle ; 
 
 Of St. Fursey the wondrous. Fiacre without guile ; 
 
 Of Sedulius, hymn-maker when hymns were rare ; 
 
 Of Scotus the subtle who clove a hair 
 
 Into sixty parts, and had marge to spare. 
 
 To her brother I spake of Oisin and Fionn, 
 
 And they wept at the death of great Oisin's son.* 
 
 * The publications of the Ossianic Society have made us 
 familiar with Fionn Mac Cumhal (the Fingal of McPlierson), 
 chief of the far-famed Irish militia, instituted in the third 
 century to protect the kingdom from foreign invasion. Its 
 organisation rendered it an army of extraordinary efficiency ; 
 but, existing as a separate power, it became in time as for- 
 midable to the native sovereigns as to foreigners. The 
 terrible battle of Gavra was its ruin. In it Oscar, the son 
 of Oisin (or Ossian), and consequent!)'' the grandson of 
 Fionn, fell in single combat with the Irish king Carbry, and 
 nearly his whole army perished with him, a.d. 284. To this 
 day Fionn and Oisin are liousehold names in those parts of 
 Western Ireland in which the traditional Gaelic poetry is 
 recited. 
 
THE BAUD ETHELL. 19 
 
 I taught the heart of the boy to revel 
 
 In tales of old greatness that never tire, 
 And the virgin's, up-springing from earth's low level. 
 
 To wed with heaven like the altar fire. 
 I taught her all that a woman should know : 
 
 And that none might teach her worse lore I gave 
 her 
 A dagger keen, and I taught her the bl6w 
 
 That subdues the knave to discreet behaviour. 
 A sand-stone there on my knee she set, 
 And sharpen' d its point I can see her yet 
 I held back her hair and she sharpen'd the edge 
 While the wind piped low through the reeds and 
 sedge. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 She died in the convent on Ina's height : 
 
 I saw her the day that she took the veil : 
 As slender she stood as the Paschal light, 
 
 As tall and slender and bright and pale ! 
 I saw her ; and dropp'd as dead : bereaven 
 Is earth when her holy ones leave her for heaven : 
 Her brother fell in the fight at Beigh : 
 May they plead for me, both, on my dying day ! 
 
 IX. 
 
 All praise to the man who brought us the Faith ! 
 
 'Tis a staii* by day and our pillow in death ! 
 
 All praise, I say, to that blessed youth 
 
 Who heard in a dream from Tyrawley's strand 
 That wail, ' Put forth o'er the sea thy hand ; 
 
 In the dark we die : give us Hope and Truth ! ' 
 
 But Patrick built not on lorras' shore 
 
 That convent where now the Franciscans dwell : 
 
20 THE BARD ETHELL. 
 
 Columba was mighty in prayer and war ; 
 
 But the young monk preaches as loud as his bell 
 That love must rule all and all wrongs be forgiven, 
 Or else, he is sure, we shall reach not heaven ! 
 This doctrine I count right cruel and hard : 
 And when I am laid in the old churchyard 
 The habit of Francis I will not wear ; 
 Nor wear I his cord, or his cloth of hair 
 In secret. Men dwindle : till psalm and prayer 
 Had soften' d the land no Dane dwelt there ! 
 
 X. 
 
 I forgive old Cathbar who sank my boat : 
 
 Must I pardon Feargal who slew my son ; 
 Or the pirate, Strongbow, who burn'd Granote, 
 
 They tell me, and in it nine priests, a nun. 
 And worst Saint Finian's old crosier staff 1 
 At forgiveness like that I spit and laugh ! 
 My chief, in his wine-cups, forgave twelve men ; 
 And of these a dozen rebell'd again ! 
 There never was chief more brave than he ! 
 
 The night he was born Loch Gur up-burst : 
 He was bard-loving, gift-making, loud of glee, 
 
 The last to fly, to advance the first. 
 He was like the top spray upon Uladh's oak, 
 
 He was like the tap-root of Argial's pine : 
 He was secret and sudden : as lightning his stroke : 
 
 There was none that could fathom his hid design ! 
 He slept not : if any man scorn'd his alliance 
 He struck the first blow for a frank defiance 
 With that look in his face, half night half light, 
 Like the lake gust-blacken'd yet ridged with white ! 
 There were comely wonders before he died : 
 The eagle barked and the Banshee cried ; 
 
THE BARD ETHELL. 21 
 
 The witch-elm wept with a blighted bud : 
 
 The spray of the torrent was red with blood : 
 
 The chief, return'd from the mountain's bound, 
 
 For gat to question of Bran, his hound. 
 
 We knew he would die : three days were o'er ; 
 
 He died. We waked him for three days more. 
 
 One by one, upon brow and breast 
 
 The whole clan kiss'd him. In peace may he rest ! 
 
 XI. 
 
 I sang his dirge. I could sing that time 
 Four thousand staves of ancestral rhyme : 
 To-day I can scarcely sing the half : 
 Of old I was corn and now T am chaff ! 
 My song to-day is a breeze that shakes 
 
 Feebly the down on the cygnet's breast : 
 'Twas then a billow the beach that rakes. 
 
 Or a storm that buffets the mountain's crest. 
 Whatever I bit with a venomed song 
 
 Grew sick, were it beast, or tree, or man : 
 The wrong'd one sued me to right his wrong 
 
 With the flail of the Satire and fierce Ode's fan. 
 I sang to the chieftains : each stock T traced 
 Lest lines should grow tangled through fraud or 
 
 haste. 
 To princes I sang in a loftier tone. 
 Of Moran the Just who refused a throne ; 
 Of Moran whose torque would close, and choke 
 The wry -necked witness that falsely spoke. 
 I taught them how to win love and hate. 
 Not love from all ; and to shun debate. 
 To maids in the bower I sang of love : 
 And of war at the feastings in bawn or grove. 
 
22 THE BARD ETHELL. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Great is our Order ; but greater far 
 
 Were its pomp and power in tlie days of old, 
 When the five Chief Bards in peace or war 
 
 Had thirty bards each in his train enroll'd ; 
 When Ollave Fodhla in Tara's hall 
 
 Fed bards and kings : when the boy, king Nial, 
 Was train' d by Torna : when Britain and Gaul 
 
 Sent crowns of laurel to Dalian Forgial. 
 To-day we can launch the clans into fight : 
 
 That day we could freeze them in mid career ! 
 Whatever man knows was our realm by right : 
 
 The lore without music no Gael would hear. 
 Old Cormac, the brave blind king, was bard 
 Ere fame rose yet of O'Daly and Ward. 
 The son of Milesius was bard ' Go back, 
 
 My People,' he sang ; ' ye have done a wrong ! 
 Nine waves go back o'er the green sea track ; 
 
 Let your foes their castles and coasts make strong. 
 To the island ye came by stealth and at night : 
 She is ours if we win her in all men's sight !' 
 For that first song's sake let our bards hold fast 
 To Truth and Justice from first to last ! 
 'Tis over ! some think we err'd through pride, 
 Though Columba the vengeance turned aside. 
 Too strong we were not : too rich we were : 
 Give wealth to knaves : 'tis the true man's snare ! 
 
 XIII. 
 
 But now men lie : they are just no more : 
 
 They forsake the old ways : they quest for new : 
 
 They pry and they snuff after strange false lore 
 As dogs hunt vermin ! It never was true : 
 
THE BARD ETHELL. 23 
 
 I have scorn' d it for twenty years this babble 
 That eastward and southward a Saxon rabble 
 Have won great battles, and rule large lands, 
 And plight with daughters of ours their hands ! 
 We know the bold Norman o'erset their throne 
 Long since ! Our lands ! Let them guard their own ! 
 
 XIV. 
 
 How long He leaves me the great God here ! 
 
 Have I sinn'd some sin, or has God forgotten 1 
 This year I think is my hundredth year : 
 
 I am like a bad apple, unripe yet rotten ! 
 They shall lift me ere long, they shall lay me the 
 
 clan 
 By the strength of men on mount Cruachan ! 
 God has much to think of ! How much he hath seen 
 And how much is gone by that once hath been ! 
 On sandy hills where the rabbits burrow 
 
 Are Raths of Kings men name not now : 
 On mountain tops I have tracked the furrow 
 
 And found in forests the buried plough. 
 For one now living the strong land then 
 Gave kindly food and raiment to ten. 
 No doubt they wax'd proud and their God defied ; 
 
 So their harvest He blighted or burned their 
 hoard ; 
 
 Or He sent them plague, or He sent the sword : 
 Or He sent them lightning ; and so they died 
 Like Dathi, the king, on the dark Alp's side. 
 
 XV. 
 
 Ah me that man who is made of dust 
 
 Should have pride toward God ! 'Tis a demon's 
 spleen ! 
 
24 THE BARD ETHELL. 
 
 I have often fear'd lest God, the All-just, 
 
 Should bend from heaven and sweep earth clean, 
 Should sweep us all into corners and holes. 
 Like dust of the house-floor, both bodies and souls ! 
 I have often fear'd He would send some wind 
 In wrath ; and the nation wake up stone-blind. 
 In age or in youth we have all wrought ill : 
 I say not our great king Nial did well, 
 Although he was Lord of the Pledges Nine 
 
 When, beside subduing this land of Eire, 
 He raised in Armorica banner and sign. 
 
 And wasted the British coast with fire. 
 Perhaps in His mercy the Lord will s'ay, 
 ' These men ! God's help ! 'Twas a rough boy 
 
 play!' 
 He is certain that young Franciscan Priest 
 God sees great sin where men see least : 
 Yet this were to give unto God the eye 
 Unmeet the thought, of the humming fly ! 
 I trust there are small things He scorns to see 
 In the lowly who cry to Him piteously. 
 Our hope is Christ. I have wept full oft 
 
 He came not to Eire in Oi sin's time ; 
 Though love, and those new monks, would make 
 men soft 
 
 If they were not harden'd by war and rhyme. 
 I have done my part : my end draws nigh : 
 I shall leave old Eire with a smile and sigh : 
 She will miss not me as I miss'd my son : 
 Yet for her, and her praise, were my best deeds done. 
 Man's deeds ! man's deeds ! they are shades that fleet, 
 Or ripples like those that break at my feet. 
 The deeds of my chief and the deeds of my King 
 Grow hazy, far seen, like the hills in spring. 
 
THE BARD ETHELL. 25 
 
 Nothing is great save the death on the Cross ! 
 
 But Pilate and Herod I hate, and know 
 
 Had Fionn lived then he had laid them low 
 Though the world thereby had sustained great loss. 
 My blindness and deafness and aching back 
 With meekness I bear for that suffering's sake ; 
 And the Lent-fast for Mary's sake I love, 
 And the honour of Him, the Man above ! 
 My songs are all over now : so best ! 
 They are laid in the heavenly Singer's breast 
 Who never sings but a star is born : 
 May we hear His song in the endless morn ! 
 I give glory to God for our battles won 
 
 By wood or river, on bay or creek ; 
 For Noma who died ; for my father, Conn : 
 
 For feasts, and the chase on the mountains bleak : 
 I bewail my sins, both unknown and known, 
 
 And of those T have injured forgiveness seek. 
 The men that were wicked to me and mine ; 
 (Not quenching a wrong, nor in war nor wine) 
 I forgive and absolve them all, save three : 
 May Christ in His mercy be kind to me ! 
 
 KING MALACHL 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 'TwAS a holy time when the Kings, long foemen. 
 Fought, side by side, to uplift the serf ; 
 
 Never triumph'd in old time Greek or Roman 
 As Brian and Malachi at Clontarf. 
 
26 SAINT PATRICK AND THE KNIGHT. 
 
 There was peace in Eire for long years after 
 Canute in England reign'd and Sweyn ; 
 
 But Eire found rest, and the freeman's laughter 
 Rang out the knell of the vanquished Dane. 
 
 Praise to the King of eighty years 
 
 Who rode round the battle-field, cross in hand ! 
 But the blessing of Eire and grateful tears 
 
 To the King who fought under Brian's command ! 
 A crown in heaven for the King who brake, 
 
 To staunch old discords, his royal wand : 
 Who spurned his throne for his People's sake. 
 
 Who served a rival and saved the land ! 
 
 SAINT PATRICK AND THE KNIGHT 
 
 OB, THE INAUGURATION OF IRISH CHIVALRY. 
 
 ' Thou shalt not be a Priest,' he said ; 
 
 ^ Christ hath for thee a lowlier task : 
 Be thou His soldier ! Wear with dread 
 
 His Cross upon thy shield and casque ! 
 Put on God's armour, faithful knight ! 
 
 Mercy with justice, love with law ; 
 Nor e'er except for truth and right 
 
 This sword, cross-hilted, dare to draw.' 
 
 II. 
 
 He spake, and with his crosier pointed 
 Graved on the broad shield's brazen boss 
 
THE BALLAD OF THE BIER THAT CONQUERED. 27 
 
 (That hour baptised, confirmed, anointed 
 Stood Erin's chivahy) the Cross ; 
 
 And there was heard a whisper low 
 Saint Michael, was that whisper thine ? 
 
 ' Thou Sword, keep pure thy virgin vow. 
 And trenchant shalt thou be as mine.' 
 
 THE BALLAD OF THE BIEB THAT 
 CONQUEBED; 
 
 OR, o'dONNELL's ANSWER. 
 
 A.D. 1257. 
 
 Maurice Fitz Gerald, Lord Justice, marched to the north-west, 
 and a furious battle was fought between him and Godfrey 
 O'Donnell, Prince of Tirconncll, at Creaclran-Killa, north of 
 Sligo, A.D. 1257. The two leaders met in single combat, and 
 severely wounded each other. It was of the wound he then 
 received that O'Donnell died, after triumphantly defeating his 
 great rival in Ulster, O'Neill. The latter, hearing that 
 O'Donnell was dying, demanded hostages from the Kinel 
 Connell. The messengers who brought this insolent message 
 fled in terror the moment they had delivered it ; and the 
 answer to it was brought by O'Donnell on his bier. Maurice 
 Fitz Gerald finally retired to the Franciscan monastery which 
 he liad founded at Youghal, and died peacefully in the habit of 
 that Order. 
 
 Land which the Norman would make his own ! 
 
 (Thus sang the Bard 'mid a host o'erthrown. 
 
 While their white cheeks some on the clench'd hand 
 
 propp'd. 
 And from some the life-blood unheeded dropp'd) 
 There are men in thee that refuse to die. 
 Though they scorn to live, while a foe stands nigh ! 
 
28 THE BALLAD OF THE BIER THAT CONQUERED. 
 
 O'Donnell lay sick with a grievous wound : 
 The leech had left him ; the priest had come ; 
 
 The clan sat weeping upon the ground, 
 
 Their banners furl'd, and their minstrels dumb. 
 
 II. 
 
 Then spake O'Donnell, the King : ' Although 
 My hour draws nigh, and my dolours grow ; 
 And although my sins I have now confess'd, 
 And desire in the Land, my charge, to rest, 
 Yet leave this realm, nor will I nor can 
 While a stranger treads on her, child or man. 
 
 III. 
 I will languish no longer a sick King here : 
 My bed is grievous ; build up my Bier. 
 The white robe a King wears over me throw ; 
 Bear me forth to the field where he camps your 
 
 foe. 
 With the yellow torches and dirges low. 
 The heralds have brought his challenge and fled ; 
 The answer they bore not I bear instead : 
 My People shall fight, my pain in sight, 
 And I shall sleep well when their wrong stands 
 
 right.' 
 
 IV. 
 
 Then the clan rose up from the ground, and gave ear, 
 And they fell'd great oak-trees and built a Bier ; 
 Its plumes from the eagle's wings were shed. 
 And the wine-black samite above it spread 
 Inwov'n with sad emblems and texts divine, 
 And the braided bud of Tirconnell's pine. 
 
THE BALLAD OF THE BIEK THAT CONQUERED. 29 
 
 And all that is meet for the great and brave 
 When past are the measured years God gave, 
 And a voice cries ' Come ' from the waiting grave. 
 
 When the Bier was ready they laid him thereon ; 
 And the army forth bore him with wail and moan : 
 With wail by the sea-lakes and rock-abysses ; 
 With moan through the vapour-trail'd wildernesses ; 
 And men soie wounded themselves drew nigh 
 And said, ' We will go with our King and die ; ' 
 And women wept as the pomp pass'd by. 
 The yellow torches far off were seen ; 
 No war-note peal'd through the gorges green ; 
 But the black pines echo'd the mourners' keen. 
 
 VI. 
 
 What said the Invader, that pomp in sight 1 
 ' They sue for the pity they shall not win.' 
 But the sick King sat on the Bier upright, 
 And said, ' So well ! I shall sleep to-night : 
 Best here my couch, and my peace begin.' 
 
 VII. 
 
 Then the war-cry sounded ' Lamb-dearg Aboo ! ' 
 And the whole clan rushed to the battle plain : 
 They were thrice driven back, but they closed anew 
 That an end might come to their King's great 
 
 pain. 
 'Twas a nation, not army, that onward rush'd, 
 'Twas a nation's blood from their wounds that 
 
 gush'd : 
 Bare-bosom' d they fought, and with joy were slain ; 
 Till evening their blood fell fast like rain ; 
 
30 THE DIRGE OF ATHUNKEE. 
 
 But a shout swelVd up o'er the setting sun, 
 And O'Donnell died, for the field was won. 
 
 So they buried their King upon Aileach's shore ; 
 And in peace he slept ; O'Donnell More. 
 
 THE DIRGE OF AT HUN REE 
 
 A.D. 1316. 
 
 I. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 Erin's crown, it fell on thee ! 
 Ne'er till then in all its woe 
 Did her heart its hope forego. 
 Save a little child but one 
 The latest regal race is gone. 
 Roderick died again on thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 A hundred years and forty -three 
 Winter-wing'd and black as night , 
 O'er the land had track'd their flight : 
 In Clonmacnoise from earthy bed 
 Roderick raised once more his head : 
 Fedlim floodlike rushed to thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 
 The light that struggled sank on thee ! 
 
THE DIRGE OF ATHUNKEE. 31 
 
 Ne'er since Cathall the red-handed 
 Such a host till then was banded. 
 Long-haired Kerne and Galloglass 
 Met the Norman face to face ; 
 The saft'ron standard floated far 
 O'er the on-rolling wave of war ; 
 Bards the onset sang on thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 The poison tree took root in thee ! 
 What might naked breasts avail 
 'Gainst sharp spear and steel-ribbed mail ] 
 Of our Princes twenty-nine 
 Bulwarks fair of Connor's line, 
 Of our clansmen thousands ten 
 Slept on thy red ridges. Then 
 Then the night came down on thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 v. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 Strangely shone that moon on thee ! 
 Like the lamp of them that tread 
 Staggering o'er the heaps of dead, 
 Seeking that they fear to see. 
 that widows' wailing sore ! 
 On it rang to Oranmore ; 
 Died, they say, among the piles 
 That make holy Aran's isles ; 
 It was Erin wept on. thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
32 THE DIRGE OF ATHUNREE. 
 
 VT. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 The sword of Erin brake on thee ! 
 Thrice a hundred wounded men, 
 Slowly nursed in wood or glen, 
 When the tidings came of thee 
 Rushed in madness to the sea ; 
 Hurled their swords into the waves, 
 , Having died in ocean caves : 
 Would that they had died on thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 The heart of Erin burst on thee ! 
 Since that hour some unseen hand 
 On her forehead stamps the brand : 
 Her children ate that hour the fruit 
 That slays manhood at the root ; 
 Our warriors are not what they were ; 
 Our maids no more are blithe and fair ; 
 Truth and Honour died with thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 Never harvest wave o'er thee ! 
 Never sweetly-breathing kine 
 Pant o'er golden meads of thine ! 
 Barren be thou as the tomb ; 
 May the night-bird haunt thy gloom 
 And the wailer from the sea, 
 Athunree ! 
 
THE DIRGE OF EDWARD BRUCE. 33 
 
 IX. 
 
 Athunree ! Athunree ! 
 All my heart is sore for thee ; 
 It was Erin died on thee, 
 Athunree ! 
 
 THE DIRGE OF EDWARD BRUCE. 
 
 A.D. 1318. 
 
 I. 
 
 He is dead, dead, dead ! 
 
 The man to Erin dear ! 
 The King who gave our Isle a head 
 
 His kingdom is his bier. 
 He rode into our war ; 
 
 And we crown'd him chief and prince 
 For his race to Alba's shore 
 
 Sailed from Erin, ages since. 
 Woe, woe, woe ! 
 
 Edward Bruce is cold to-day ; 
 He that slew him lies as low, 
 
 Sword to sword and clay to clay. 
 
 II. 
 
 King Robert came too late ! 
 
 Long, long may Erin mourn ! 
 Famine's rage and dreadful Fate 
 
 Forbade her Bannockburn ! 
 As the galley touch'd the strand 
 
 Came the messenger of woe ; 
 
 V. D 
 
34 THE TRUE KING. 
 
 The King put back the herald's hand : 
 ' Peace,' he said, ' thy tale I know ! 
 
 His face was in the cloud ; 
 
 And his wraith was on the surge.' 
 
 Maids of Alba, weave his shroud ! 
 Maids of Erin, sing his dirge ! 
 
 THE TBUE KING. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 A.D. 1399. 
 
 I. 
 
 He came in the night on a false pretence ; 
 
 As a friend he came ; as a lord remains : 
 His coming we noted not ; when, or whence ; 
 
 We slept : we woke in chains. 
 Ere a year they had chased us to dens and caves ; 
 
 Our streets and our churches lay drown'd in blood 
 The race that had sold us their sons as slaves 
 
 In our Land as conquerors stood ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Who were they, those princes that gave away 
 
 What was theirs to keep, not theirs to give ? 
 A king holds sway for a passing day ; 
 
 The kingdoms for ever live ! 
 The Tanist succeeds when the King is dust : 
 
 The King rules all ; yet the King hath nought : 
 They were traitors not Kings who sold their trust ; 
 
 They were traitors not Kings who bought ! 
 
THE BALLAD OF QUEEN MARGARET's FEASTING. 35 
 IIL 
 
 Brave Art Mac Murrough ! Arise, 'tis morn ! 
 
 For a true King the nation waited long, 
 He is strong as the horn of the unicorn. 
 
 This true King who rights our wrong ! 
 He rules in the fight by an inward right ; 
 
 From the heart of the nation her king is grown ; 
 He rules by right ; he is might of her might ; 
 
 Her flesh, and bone of her bone ! 
 
 THE BALLAD OF QUEEN MARGARETS 
 FEASTING. 
 
 A.D. 1451. 
 
 The Irish chronicler thus concludes: 'God's blessing, the 
 blessing of all the Saints, and of every one, blessing from 
 Jerusalem to Inis Glaaire, be on her going to heaven ; and 
 blessed be he who will reade and heare this for blessing her 
 Soul; and cursed be that sore in her breast that killed 
 Margaret.' 
 
 Fair she stood God's queenly creature ! 
 
 Wondrous joy was in her face ; 
 Of her ladies none in stature 
 
 Like to her, and none in grace. 
 On the church -roof stood they round her, 
 
 Cloth of gold was her attire ; 
 They in jewelFd circle wound her ; 
 
 Beside her Ely's King, her sire. 
 
 II. 
 
 Far and near the green fields glitter'd 
 Like to flowery meads in Spring, 
 
36 THE BALLAD OF QUEEN MARGARET's FEASTING. 
 
 Gay with companies loose-scatter'd 
 
 Ranged each in seemly ring 
 Under banners red or yellow : 
 
 There all day the feast they kept 
 From chill dawn and noontide mellow 
 
 Till the hill-shades eastward crept. 
 
 III. 
 
 On a white steed at the gateway 
 
 Margaret's husband, Calwagh, sate : 
 Guest on guest, approaching, straightway 
 
 Welcomed he with love and state. 
 Each pass'd on with largess laden : 
 
 Chosen gifts of thought and work, 
 Now the red cloak of the maiden. 
 
 Now the minstrel's golden torque. 
 
 IV. 
 
 On the wind the tapestries shifted ; 
 
 From the blue hills rang the horn ; 
 Slowly toward the sunset drifted 
 
 Choral song and shout breeze-borne. 
 Like a sea the crowds unresting 
 
 Murmur' d round the grey church-tower ; 
 Many a prayer amid the feasting. 
 
 For Margaret's mother rose that hour ! 
 
 V. 
 
 On the church-roof kerne and noble 
 At her bright face look'd, half -dazed ; 
 
 Nought was hers of shame or trouble ; 
 On the crowds far off she gazed : 
 
 Once, on heaven her dark eyes bending, 
 Her hands in prayer she flung apart : 
 
THE WEDDING OF THE CLANS. 37 
 
 Unconsciously her arms extending 
 She bless'd her People in her heart. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Thus a Gaelic queen and nation 
 
 At Imayn till set of sun 
 Kept with feast the Annunciation, 
 
 Fourteen hundred fifty-one. 
 Time it was of solace tender ; 
 
 ^Twas a brave time, strong yet fair ! 
 Blessing, ye Angels, send her 
 
 From Salem's towers and Inisglaaire ! 
 
 THE WEDDING OF THE CLANS. 
 A girl's babble. 
 
 I GO to knit two clans together ; 
 
 Our clan and this clan unseen of yore : 
 Our clan fears nought ! but I go, O whither % 
 
 This day I go from my Mother's door. 
 
 Thou redbreast sing'st the old song over 
 
 Though many a time thou hast sung it before ; 
 
 They never sent thee to some strange new lover : 
 I sing a new song by my Mother's door. 
 
 I stepp'd from my little room down by the ladder. 
 The ladder that never so shook before ; 
 
 I was sad last night : to-day I am sadder 
 Because I go from my Mother's door. 
 
 The last snow melts upon bush and bramble ; 
 The gold bars shine on the forest's floor ; 
 
38 THE WEDDING OF THE CLANS. 
 
 Shake not, thou leaf ! it is I must tremble 
 Because I go from my Mother's door. 
 
 From a Spanish sailor a dagger I bought me ; 
 
 I trail'd a rose-tree our grey bawn o'er ; 
 The creed and my letters our old bard taught me ; 
 
 My days were sweet by my Mother's door. 
 
 My little white goat that with raised feet huggest 
 The oak stock, thy horns in the ivies frore, 
 
 Could I wrestle like thee how the wreaths thou 
 tuggest ! 
 I never would move from my Mother's door. 
 
 weep no longer, my nurse and Mother ! 
 
 My foster-sister, weep not so sore ! 
 You cannot come with me, Ir, my brother; 
 
 Alone I go from my Mother's door. 
 
 Farewell, my wolf-hound, that slew Mac Owing 
 As he caught me and far through the thickets 
 bore : 
 
 My heifer. Alb, in the green vale lowing. 
 My cygnet's nest upon Lorna's shore ! 
 
 He has killed ten chiefs, this chief that plights me ; 
 
 His hand is like that of the giant Balor : 
 But I fear his kiss ; and his beard affrights me. 
 
 And the great stone dragon above his door. 
 
 Had I daughters nine with me they should tarry ; 
 
 They should sing old songs ; they should dance at 
 my door ; 
 They should grind at the quern ; no need to marry ! 
 
 O when will this marriage-day be o'er ? 
 
THE IRISH NORMAN. 39 
 
 THE IRISH NORMAN; 
 
 OR, ' LAMENT FOR THE BARON OF LOUGHMOE.' ^ 
 I. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 
 Not the corded brethren hooded 
 
 With the earth-hued cloak and cowl : 
 
 'Mid the black church mourner-crowded 
 While the night winds round it howl 
 Let them, in the chancel kneeling. 
 Lift the hymns to God appealing : 
 Let them scare the Powers of Evil, 
 Striking dumb the accusing devil : 
 Let them angel-fence the Soul 
 That flies forward to its goal : 
 Prayer can quicken : fire can purge : 
 Yet they shall not sing his dirge ! 
 
 II. 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 Not the ceremonial weepers 
 
 Blackening o'er the place of tombs : 
 Though their cry might wake the sleepers 
 In the dark that wait their dooms ; 
 Though their dreadful ululation 
 Sounds the death-note of a nation ; 
 Though the far-oli* listeners shiver 
 Wave-tossed seamen, weary reapers 
 Shiver like to funeral plumes. 
 While the long wail like a river 
 Rolls beyond the horizon's verge ; 
 Yet they shall not sing his dirge ! 
 
 * The name of an Irish air. 
 
40 THE IRISH NORMAN. 
 
 III. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 Not the minstrels of his presence, 
 
 Harpers of his halls and towers : 
 Let them, 'mid the bowery pleasance, 
 Sing that flower among the flowers, 
 
 Female beauty : swift its race is 
 
 As the smiles on infant faces ! 
 
 O, ye conquering years and hours ! 
 
 Children that together played 
 
 Love and wed, and then are laid 
 
 Grey-haired beneath the yew-tree bowers, 
 
 Passing gleams in glooms that merge ; 
 
 Yet they shall not sing his dirge ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 Sing it castles that he wasted 
 Like those old oaks thunder-blasted, 
 Wasted with the sword or fire ! 
 Sternness God with sweetness mateth ; 
 Next to him that well createth 
 Is the just and brave Destroyer ! 
 The man that sinned, the same must fall. 
 Though Peter by him stood and Paul ! 
 They his clansmen, they his gleemen. 
 They that wear the garb of freemen 
 Wore the sackcloth, wore the serge : 
 Let them sing the Baron's dirge. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 Whoso fain would sing it faileth. 
 
THE IRISH NORMAN. 41 
 
 Triumph so o'er grief prevaileth ! 
 Double-fountain ed was his blood, 
 A Gaelic spring, a Norman flood ! 
 To his bosom truth he folded 
 
 With a youthful lover's zeal : 
 God's great Justice seemed he, moulded 
 
 In a statued shape of steel ! 
 Men were liars ; kerne and noble ; 
 He consumed them like to stubble ! 
 The orphan's shield, the traitor's scourge 
 Sing, fierce winds, the Baron's dirge ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 O thou dread Almighty Will ! 
 Man exulteth ; woman plaineth ; 
 But the Will Supreme ordaineth, 
 And the years its fate fulfil. 
 All our reason is unreason ; 
 
 All our glory ends in woe : 
 Thou didst raise him for a season, 
 Thou once more hast laid him low ! 
 But his strong life sought Thee ever ; 
 Sought Thee like a mountain river 
 Lost at last in the sea surge 
 No ! we will not sing his dirge ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Who shall sing the Baron's dirge 1 
 
 'Twas no time of sobs or sighing : 
 
 Grave, yet glad, he lay a dying. 
 Heralds through the vales were sent 
 
 Bidding all men pray for grace 
 
42 THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY. 
 
 That he rightly might repent 
 Sins of his and all his race : 
 Well he worked : three days his spirit 
 Throve in prayer and waxed in merit. 
 The blessed lights aloft were raised : 
 On the Cross his dim eyes gazed 
 To the last breath's ebb and gurge 
 No ! for him we chant no dirge ! 
 
 THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY, 
 
 The Statute of Kilkenny, passed a.d, 1362, is thus described 
 by an English historian, Mr. Plowden : * It was enacted that 
 intermarriages with the natives, or any connection with them as 
 fosterers, or in the way of gossiprcd, should be punished as high 
 treason ; that the use of their name, language, apparel, or cus- 
 toms should be punished with the forfeiture of lands and tene- 
 ments ; that to submit to be governed by the Brehon Laws was 
 treason ; that the English should not make war upon the natives 
 without the permission and authority of Government ; that the 
 English should not permit the Irish to graze upon their lands ; 
 that they should not admit them to any benefice or religious 
 privilege, or even entertain their bards.' 
 
 Of old ye warr'd on men : to-day 
 
 On women and on babes ye war ; 
 The noble's child his head must lay 
 
 Beneath the peasant's roof no more ! ' 
 
 I saw in sleep the infant's hand 
 His foster-brother's fiercely grasp ; 
 
 His warm arm, lithe as willow wand, 
 Twines me each day with closer clasp ! 
 
 O infant smiler ! grief -beguiler ! 
 
 Between the oppressoir and the oppress'd 
 O soft, unconscious reconciler, 
 
 Smile on ! through thee the Land is bless'd. 
 
THE STATUTE OE KILKENNY. 43 
 
 Through thee the puissant love the poor ; 
 
 His conqueror's hope the vanquished shares : 
 For thy sake by a lowly door 
 
 The clan made vassal stops and stares. 
 
 Our vales are healthy. On thy cheek 
 There dawns each day a livelier red : 
 
 Smile on ! Before another week 
 
 Thy feet our earthen floor will tread ! 
 
 Thy foster-brothers twain for thee 
 
 Would face the wolves on snowy fell : 
 
 Smile on ! the * Irish Enemy ' 
 
 Will fence their Norman nursling well. 
 
 The nursling as the child is dear ; 
 
 Thy Mother loves not like thy nurse ! 
 That babbling Mandate steps not near 
 
 Thy cot but o'er her bleeding corse ! 
 
 THE DAYS OF OUTLAWRY. 
 
 A CRY comes up from wood and wold, 
 
 A wail from fen and marish, 
 * Grant us our Laws, and take our gold ; 
 
 Like beasts dog-chased we perish.' 
 The hunters of their kind reply, 
 
 ' Our sports we scorn to barter ; 
 We rule ! the Irish Enemy 
 
 Partakes not England's charter.' 
 
44 THE DAYS OF OUTLAWRY. 
 
 II. 
 
 A cry comes up for ever new 
 A wail of hopeless anguish, 
 
 * Your Laws, your Laws ! our Laws ye slew ; 
 
 In living death we languish.' 
 
 * Not so ! We keep our hunting-ground ; 
 
 We chase the flying quarry. 
 Hark, hark, that sound ! the horn and hound ! 
 Away ! we may not tarry ! ' 
 
 III. 
 
 Sad isle, thy laws are Norman lords * 
 
 That, dower'd by Henry's bounty. 
 On cities sup 'mid famish'd hordes. 
 
 And dine on half a county ! 
 A laughing giant. Outlawry, 
 
 Strides drunk o'er hill and heather ; 
 Justice to him is as a fly 
 
 'Twixt mail'd hands clash'd together. 
 
 IV. 
 
 O memory, memory, leave the graves 
 
 Knee-deep in grass and darnel ! 
 Wash from a kingdom, winds and waves, 
 
 The odour of the charnel ! 
 Be dumb, red graves in valleys deep, 
 
 Black towers on plains blood-sloken : 
 Dark fields, your thrilling secrets keep, 
 
 Nor speak till God hath spoken ! 
 
 '"" In the reign of Edward I. those Irish who lay contiguous to 
 the county lands, finding themselves in a position of utter out- 
 lawry, the ancient Brehon Law of Ireland not being recognised 
 by England, and English law not being extended to them, 
 applied to the king for the protection of the latter. The inci- 
 
THE THREE CHOIRS. 45 
 
 THE THREE CHOIRS; 
 
 OR, THE CONSECRATION OF ST. PATRICK. 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 While holy hands on Patrick laid 
 
 The great Priest consecrated, 
 Three mystic choirs so sang the bards 
 
 Their anthems matched and mated ; 
 
 The first, that Roman choir which chants 
 
 O'er tombs of Paul and Peter ; 
 The next a Seraph band, with note 
 
 By distance rendered sweeter. 
 
 The third rang out from Fochlut's wood 
 
 Where once their ululation 
 Lost Erin's babes to Patrick raised 
 
 * Redeem a wildered nation ! ' 
 
 Ring out once more, from Erin's shore ! 
 
 From Rome, from Heaven, for ever 
 Roll on thou triple Psalm, that God 
 
 May answer and deliver ! 
 
 dent is thus narrated by Plowden in his ' History of Ireland' : 
 * They consequently offered, through Ufford, the chief governor, 
 8,000 marks to the king, provided he would grant the free 
 enjoyment of the laws of England to the whole body of Irish 
 natives indiscriminately.' Edward was disposed to accept the 
 offer, but in the words of Plowden : ' These politic and bene- 
 volent intentions of Edward were thwarted by his servants, who, 
 to forward their own rapacious views of extortion and oppression, 
 prevented a convention of the king's barons and other subjects 
 in Ireland. . . The cry of oppression was not silenced ; the 
 application of the Irish was renewed, and the king repeatedly 
 solicited to accept them as free and faithful subjects.' 
 
46 THE BALLAD OF TURGESIUS THE DANE. 
 
 THE BALLAD OF TURGE8IUB THE DANE; 
 
 OR, THE GIRL DELIVERER. 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 The people sat amid the dust and wept : 
 
 ' In darker days than these God burst the chain,' 
 
 Thus sang the harper as the chords he swept, 
 *Hear of the Girl Deliverer and the Dane.' 
 
 PART I. 
 
 Twin ivy wreaths her forehead wound, 
 
 A green wreath and a yellow : 
 Her hair a gleaming dusk in ground 
 
 With ends of sunshine mellow. 
 
 Fair rose her head the tall neck o'er ; 
 
 That neck in snows was bedded : 
 Some crown, they swore, unseen she bore 
 
 That queenly head it steadied. 
 
 Her sable vest in front was laced 
 
 With laces red as coral ; 
 Her golden zone in gems was traced 
 
 With leafy type and moral. 
 
 As treading hearts her small feet went 
 
 In love-suspended fleetness : 
 And hearts thus trodden forth had sent 
 
 An organ-sob of sweetness. 
 
 Upon the dais when she stept 
 
 Meath's peopled hall rang loudly ; 
 
 Their hundred harps the minstrels swept : 
 Her sire looked round him proudly. 
 
THE BALLAD OF TURGESIUS THE DANE. 47 
 
 The Dane beside him, darkening, sate, 
 
 At once his guest and victor ; 
 Green Erin's scourge the true King's fate 
 
 The sceptred serf's protector. 
 
 * Sir King ! our worship grows but small ! 
 
 Here Gaels alone find honour : 
 A white girl cannot cross your hall 
 But all men gaze upon her ! 
 
 ' My speech is short : yon stands my fort ! 
 
 Ere three nights thither send her 
 With twenty maidens of her court, 
 
 Your fairest, to attend her.' 
 
 PART II. 
 
 The Dane strides o'er his stony floor 
 
 A strong, fierce man, yet hoary : 
 The low sun fires the purple moor 
 
 With mingled gloom and glory. 
 
 The tyrant stops ; he stares thereon : 
 
 Sun-touched, his armour flashes : 
 His rough grey hair a glow hath won 
 
 Like embers seen through ashes. 
 
 His mail'd hand grasps his tangled beard : 
 
 He laughs that red sun watching. 
 Till the roofs laugh back like a forest weird 
 
 The laughter of Wood-gods catching. 
 
 * My Sea-Kings ! mark yon furnace-sheen ! 
 
 The Fire-god is not thrifty ! 
 No flame like that these eyes have seen 
 For winters five-and-fifty. 
 
48 THE BALLAD OF TURGESIUS THE DANE. 
 
 ' My sire lay dead : the ship sailed North, 
 The pyre and the corse on bearing : 
 
 Six miles it sailed ; the flames sprang forth 
 Like sea-vext Hecla glaring ! 
 
 * We'll pledge him to-night in the blood-red wine : 
 'Tis wrought, the task he set me ! 
 
 From coast to coast this Isle is mine : 
 Not soon will her sons forget me ! 
 
 ' I have burned their shrines and their cities 
 sacked ; 
 
 Their Fair Ones our castles cumber ; 
 We were shamed to-night if the bevy lacked 
 
 The fairest from their number. 
 
 ' Young wives for us all ; too many by half ! 
 
 Strange mates the hind with the dragon 
 He laughed as when the reveller's laugh 
 
 Rings back from the half-drained flagon. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 The girl hath prayed at her Mother's grave, 
 And kissed that grave, and risen : 
 
 She hath swathed a knife in a silken glaive : 
 She is calm, but her great eyes glisten. 
 
 Between silk vest and spotless breast 
 
 A dagger she hath hidden ; 
 With lips compressed gone forth, a guest 
 
 XJnhonoured not unbidden. 
 
 Through moonshine wan on moves she, on : 
 
 But who are those, the others ? 
 They are garbed like maids, but maids are none 
 
 They are lovers of maids, and brothers. 
 
THE BALLAD OP TURGESIUS THE DANE. 49 
 
 The gates lie wide : they enter in : 
 
 Loud roars the riot and wassail : 
 They hear at times 'mid the conquerors' din 
 
 The harp of the Gaelic vassal. 
 
 The Dane has laid on her head his hand, 
 
 The love in his eye is cruel : 
 Out leap the swords of that well-masked band : 
 
 Two nations have met in duel ! 
 
 'Twas God their sentence on high that wrote ! 
 
 'Tis a righteous doom that slaughter ! 
 His Sea-Kings lie drowned in the castle moat, 
 
 And the Tyrant in Annin water. 
 
 From mountain to mountain the tidings flashed : 
 
 It pealed from turret to turret : 
 Like a sunlit storm o'er the plains it dashed : 
 
 It hung o'er the vales like a spirit. 
 
 'Twas a maiden's honour that crowned the right : 
 'Twas a vestal claim, scarce noted 
 
 By the power which trampled it out of sight, 
 That rose on the wrong, and smote it ! 
 
 The harper ceased : aloud the young men cried, 
 ' That maid is Erin ! Live, O maid, for ever ! ' 
 
 ' Not Erin but her Faith,' the old priests replied : 
 ' Her Faith that only shall the Land deliver ! ' 
 
50 EPILOGUE. 
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
 At my casement I sat by night, while the wind 
 remote in dark valleys 
 Voluminous gather'd and grew, and waxing swell'd 
 to a gale : 
 Now mourning like seas heart-grieved, now sobbing 
 in petulant sallies : 
 Far off, 'twas a People's moan ; hard by, but a 
 widow's wail. 
 
 To God there is fragment none : nothing single ', no 
 isolation : 
 The ages to Him are one : round Him the Woe, 
 and the Wrong 
 Roll like a spiritual star, and the cry of the desolate 
 Nation : 
 The Souls that are under the Altar respond in 
 music ' How long ? ' 
 
 By the casement I sat alone till sign after sign had 
 descended : 
 The Hyads rejoin'd their sea, and the Pleiads by 
 fate were down borne : 
 And then with that distant dirge a tenderer anthem 
 was blended, 
 And, glad to behold her young, the bird gave 
 thanks to the morn. 
 
INISFAIL 
 
 A LYRICAL CHRONICLE OF IRELAND. 
 THE TRAGEDY. 
 
 PART II. 
 The Wars of Religion. 
 
PART II. 
 
 'CAN THESE BONES LIVE?' 
 
 A VOICE from the midnoon call'd, 'Arise, be alone, 
 and remove thee ; 
 Descend into valleys of bale, and look on the visions 
 of night ; 
 From the stranger flee, and be strange to the men 
 and the women that love thee 
 That thy wine may be tears, and that ashes may 
 mix with the meats of delight. 
 
 To few is the Vision shown, and to none for his weal 
 or from merit : 
 As lepers they live who see it ; as those that men 
 pity or hate : 
 And to few is the Voice reveal'd ; yet to them who 
 hear and can bear it 
 Though bitterness cometh at first, yet sweetness 
 Cometh more late.' 
 
 Then in vision I saw a Corse death-cold ; but the 
 Angels had draped it 
 In light ; and that light divine round the unseal' d 
 death-cave was strewn ; 
 
54 PLORANS PLORAVIT. 
 
 And an anthem rush'd o'er the worlds ; but the 
 
 tongue that moulded and shaped it 
 Was a great storm through ruins borne ; and the 
 
 lips that spake it were stone. 
 
 PLOBANS PLORAVIT. 
 
 A.D. 1583. 
 
 She sits alone on the cold grave-stone 
 And only the dead are nigh her ; 
 
 In the tongue of the Gael she makes her wail 
 The night wind rushes by her. 
 
 ' Few, O few are the leal and true, 
 
 And fewer shall be, and fewer ; 
 The land is a corse ; no life, no force : 
 
 wind with sere leaves strew her ! 
 
 ' Men ask what scope is left for hope 
 To one who has known her story : 
 
 I trust her dead ! Their graves are red ; 
 But their Souls are with God in glory.' 
 
 BOISIN BUBH;* 
 
 OR, THE BLEEDING HEART. 
 
 O WHO art thou with that queenly brow 
 And uncrown'd head % 
 
 * Roisin Dubh signifies the 'Black little Rose.' It is well 
 known to the Irish reader through the poem written in Queen 
 Elizabeth's reign by the Bard of Red Hugh, Prince of Tirconnel. 
 
ROISIN DUBH. 55 
 
 And why is the vest that binds thy breast, 
 
 O'er the heart, blood-red 1 
 Like a rose-bud in June was that spot at noon, 
 
 A rose-bud weak ; 
 But it deepens and grows like a July rose : 
 
 Death-pale thy cheek ! 
 
 II. 
 
 ' The babes I fed at my foot lay dead ; 
 
 I saw them die : 
 In Ramah a blast went wailing past ; 
 
 It was E-achel's cry. 
 But I stand sublime on the shores of Time 
 
 And I pour mine ode 
 As Miriam sang to the cymbals' clang 
 
 On the wind to God. 
 
 III. 
 
 sweet, men say, is the song by day. 
 
 And the feast by night ; 
 But on poisons I thrive, and in death survive 
 
 Through ghostly might.' 
 
 TffU DIRGE OF DESMOND. 
 
 Bush, dark Dirge, o'er hills of Erin ! Woe for Des- 
 mond's name and race ! 
 
 Loving Conqueror whom the Conquered caught so 
 soon to her embrace : 
 
 There's a veil on Erin's forehead : cold at last is 
 Desmond's hand : 
 
 Halls that roofed her outlawed Prelates blacken like 
 a blackening brand. 
 
56 THE DIRGE OF DESMOND. 
 
 Strongbow's sons forsook their Strong One, served 
 
 so long with loving awe ; 
 Koche the Norman, Norman Barry, and the Baron 
 
 of Lixnaw : 
 Gaelic lords that once were Princes holp not 
 
 Thomond or Clancar : 
 Ormond, ill-crowned Tudor's kinsman, ranged her 
 
 hosts, and led her war. 
 
 One by one his brothers perished : Fate down dragged 
 
 them to their grave : 
 Smerwick's cliffs beheld his Spaniards wrestling 
 
 with the yeasty wave. 
 Slain the herds, and burned the harvests, vale and 
 
 plain with corpses strown, 
 'Mid the waste they spread their feast ; within the 
 
 charnel reigned alone. 
 
 In the death-hunt she was nigh him ; she that 
 
 scorned to leave his side : 
 By her Lord she stood and spake not, neck-deep in 
 
 the freezing tide : 
 Bound them waved the osiers; o'er them drooped 
 
 the willows, rank on rank : 
 Troopers spurred ; and bayed the bloodhounds, up 
 
 and down the bleeding bank. 
 
 From the East sea to the West sea rings the death- 
 keen long and sore : 
 
 Erin's Curse be his that led them to the hovel, burst 
 the door ! 
 
 O'er the embers dead an old man silent bent with 
 head to knee : 
 
 Slowly rose he : backward fell they : ' Seek ye 
 Desmond ? I am he.' 
 
WAR-SONG OF MAC CARTHY. 57 
 
 London Bridge ! thy central archway props that grey 
 head year by year : 
 
 But to God that head is holy ; and to Erin it is 
 dear : 
 
 When that bridge is dust, that river in the last fire- 
 judgment dried, 
 
 The man shall live who fought for God ; the man 
 who for his country died. 
 
 wAE-sojsra of mag caethy. 
 
 Two lives of an eagle, the old song saith. 
 
 Make the life of a black yew-tree ; 
 For two lives of a yew-tree the furrow's path 
 
 Endures on the grassy lea : 
 Two furrows shall last till the time is past 
 
 God willeth the world to be j 
 For a furrow's time has Mac Carthy stood fast 
 
 Mac Carthy in Carbery. 
 
 II. 
 
 Up with the banner whose green shall live 
 
 While lives the green on the oak ! 
 And down with the axes that grind and rive 
 
 Keen-edged as the thunder-stroke ! 
 And on with the battle-cry known of old 
 
 And the clan-rush like wind and wave ; 
 On, on ! the Invader is bought and sold ; 
 
 His own hand hath dug his grave ! 
 
58 FLORENCE MAC CARTHY's FAREWELL TO HIS LOVE. 
 
 FLORENCE MAG CARTHTS FAREWELL 
 TO HIS ENGLISH LOVE, 
 
 England's fair child, Evangeline ! 
 In that far-distant land of mine 
 
 There stands a Yew-tree among tombs ! 
 For ages there that tree hath stood, 
 A black pall dash'd with drops of blood ; 
 
 O'er all my world it breathes its glooms. 
 
 II. 
 
 Evangeline ! Evangeline ! 
 Because my Yew-tree is not thine, 
 
 Because thy Gods on mine wage war, 
 Farewell ! Back fall the gates of brass ; 
 The exile to his own must pass : 
 
 I seek the land of tombs once more. 
 
 TO THE SAME. 
 
 We seem to tread the self-same street, 
 To pace the self -same courts or grass ; 
 
 Parting, our hands appear to meet : 
 O vanitatum vanitas ! 
 
 Distant as earth from heaven or hell 
 From thee the things to me most dear : 
 
 Ghost-throng'd Cocytus and thy will 
 Between us rush, . We might be near. 
 
THE DIRGE OF KILDARE. 59 
 
 Thy world is fair : my thoughts refuse 
 To dance its dance or drink its wine ; 
 
 Nor canst thou hear the reeds and yews 
 That sigh to me from lands not thine. 
 
 THE DIRaE OF KILDARE. 
 
 A.D. 1595. 
 
 The North wind clanged on the sharp hill-side : 
 The mountain muttered : the cloud replied ; 
 * There is one rides up through thy woods, Tyrone ! 
 That shall ride on a bier of the pine branch down.' 
 
 The flood roars over Danara's bed : 
 
 'Twas green at morning : to-night 'tis red : 
 
 What whispers the raven to oak and cave 1 
 
 ' Make ready the bier and make ready the grave.' 
 
 Kildare, Kildare ! Thou hast left the bound 
 Of hawk and heron, of hart and hound ; 
 With the hunters art come to the Lion's lair : 
 He is mighty of limb and old. Beware ! 
 
 Beware, for on thee that eye is set 
 Which glared upon Norreys at Clontibret : 
 And that hand is lifted, from horse to heath 
 Which hurled the giant they mourn in Meath ! 
 
 Kildare, Kildare ! There are twain this hour 
 
 With brows turned north from Maynooth's grey 
 
 tower : 
 The Mother sees nought : the bride shall see 
 The Herald and Death-flag far off not thee. 
 
60 WAR-SONG OF TIRCONNELL's BARD. 
 
 WAR-SONG OF TIECONNELVB BARD AT 
 THE BATTLE OF BLAGKWATER. 
 
 August 14, a.d, 1598. 
 
 At this battle the Irish of Ulster were commanded by 
 ' Red Hugh ' O'Neill, Prince of Tyrone, and by Hugh O'Don- 
 nell (called also * Red Hugh '), Prince of Tirconnell. Queen 
 Elizabeth's army was led by Marshal Bagnal, who fell in the 
 rout with 2,500 of his force. Twelve thousand gold pieces, 
 thirty-four standards, and all the artillery of the vanquished 
 army were taken. 
 
 Glory to God, and to the Powers that fight 
 
 For Freedom and the Kight ! 
 We have them then, the Invaders ! There they stand 
 
 At last on Oriel's land ! 
 And there the far-famed Marshal holds command, 
 
 Bagnal, their bravest, at his right 
 
 That recreant, neither chief nor knight, 
 
 ' The Queen's O'Reilly,' he that sold 
 
 His country, clan, and church for gold. 
 They have pass'd the gorge stream-cloven. 
 
 And the mountain's purple bound ; 
 Now the toils are round them woven, 
 
 Now the nets are spread around ! 
 Give them time : their steeds are blown ; 
 
 Let them stand and round them stare. 
 
 Breathing blasts of Irish air : 
 Our eagles know their own ! 
 
 Twin Stars ! Twin regents of our righteous war ! 
 This day remember whose, and who ye are 
 
WAK-SONG OF TIRCONNELL's BARD. 61 
 
 Thou that o'er green Tir-o wen's Tribes hast sway ! 
 Thou whom Tirconnell's vales obey ! 
 
 The line of Nial, the line of Conn 
 
 So oft at strife, to-day are one ! 
 
 To Erin both are dear ; to me 
 
 Dearest he is, and needs must be 
 
 My Prince, my chief, my child, on whom 
 
 So early fell the dungeon's doom. 
 
 O'Donnell ! hear this day thy Bard ! 
 
 By those young feet so maim'd and scarr'd. 
 
 Bit by the winter's fangs when lost 
 
 Thou wandered'st on through snows and frost, 
 Kemember thou those years in chains thou worest, 
 
 Snatch'd in false peace from unsuspecting halls, 
 And that one thought, of all thy pangs the sorest. 
 
 Thy subjects groan'd the upstart Stranger's thralls ! 
 That thought on waft thee through the fight : 
 On, on, for Erin's right ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Seest thou yon stream whose tawny waters glide 
 Through weeds and yellow marsh lingeringly and 
 slowly 1 
 Blest is that spot and holy ! 
 There, ages past, Saint Bercan stood and cried, 
 ' This spot shall quell one day the Invaders' pride ! ' 
 He saw in mystic trance 
 
 The blood-stain flush yon rill : 
 On, hosts of God, advance ; 
 
 Your country's fates fulfil ! 
 Be Truth this day your might ! 
 Truth lords it in the fight ! 
 
62 WAR-SONG OF TIRCONNELl's BARD 
 
 IV. 
 
 O'Neill ! That day be with thee now 
 When, throned on Ulster's regal seat of stone, 
 
 Thou sat'st and thou alone ; 
 While flocked from far the Tribes, and to thy hand 
 
 Was given the snow-white wand, 
 Erin's authentic sceptre of command ! 
 Kingless a People stood around thee ! Thou 
 Didst dash the alien bauble from thy brow, 
 
 And for a coronet laid down 
 That People's love became once more their Mon- 
 arch's crown ! 
 True King alone is he 
 In whom made one his People share the throne : 
 Fair from the soil he rises like a tree : 
 
 Rock-like the Tyrant presses on it, prone ! 
 Strike for that People's cause ! 
 For Gaelic rights ; for Brehon laws : 
 The sage traditions of civility ; 
 Pure hearths, and Faith set free ! 
 
 V. 
 
 Hark ! the thunder of their meeting ! 
 Hand meets hand, and rough the greeting ! 
 Hark ! the crash of shield and brand ; 
 They mix, they mingle, band with band. 
 Like two horn-commingling stags 
 Wrestling on the mountain crags, 
 Intertwisted, intertangled, 
 Mangled forehead meeting mangled ! 
 Lo ! the wavering darkness through 
 I see the banner of Red Hugh ; 
 
WAE-SONG OF TIRCONNELL's BAED. 63 
 
 Close beside is thine, O'Neill ! 
 
 Now they stoop and now they reel, 
 
 Rise once more and onward sail. 
 
 Like two falcons on one gale ! 
 
 ye clansmen past me rushing, 
 
 Like mountain torrents seaward gushing, 
 
 Tell the chiefs that from this height 
 
 Their chief of Bards beholds the fight j 
 
 That on theirs he pours his spirit ; 
 
 Marks their deeds and chants their merit ; 
 
 While the Priesthood evermore. 
 
 Like him that ruled God's host of yore. 
 
 With arms outstretch' d that God implore ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 Mightiest of the line of Conn, 
 On to victory ! On, on, on ! 
 It is Erin that in thee 
 Lives and works right wondrously ! 
 Eva from the heavenly bourne 
 Upon thee her eyes doth turn, 
 She whose marriage couch was spread 
 'Twixt the dying and the dead ! 
 Parcell'd kingdoms one by one 
 For a prey to traitors thrown ; 
 Pledges forfeit, broken vows, 
 Koofless fane and blazing house ; 
 All the dreadful deeds of old 
 Rise resurgent from the mould, 
 For their judgment peal is toll'd ! 
 All our Future takes her stand 
 Hawk-like on thy lifted hand. 
 States that live not, vigil keeping 
 In the limbo of long weeping ; 
 
64 WAR-SONG OF TIKCONNELL S BARD. 
 
 Palace-courts and minster-towers 
 That shall make this isle of ours 
 Fairer than the star of morn, 
 Wait thy mandate to be born ! 
 Chief elect 'mid desolation 
 Wield thou well the inspiration 
 Thou drawest from a new-born nation ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Sleep no longer Bards that hold 
 
 Ranged beneath me harps of gold ! 
 
 Smite them with a heavier hand 
 
 Than vengeance lays on axe or brand ! 
 
 Pour upon the blast a song 
 
 Linking litanies of wrong, 
 
 Till, like poison-dews, the strain 
 
 Eat into the Invader's brain. 
 
 On the retributive harp 
 
 Catch that death-shriek shrill and sharp. 
 
 Hers, though choked in blood, whose lord 
 
 Perish'd, Essex, at thy board ! 
 
 Peerless chieftain ! peerless wife ! 
 
 From his throat, and hers, the knife 
 
 Drain' d the mingled tide of life ! 
 
 Sing the base assassin's steel 
 
 By Sussex hired to slay O'Neill ! 
 
 Sing, fierce Bards, the plains sword-wasted. 
 
 Sing the cornfields burnt and blasted. 
 
 That when raged the war no longer 
 
 Kernes dog-chased might pine with hunger ! 
 
 Pour around their ears the groans 
 
 Of half -human skeletons 
 
 From wet cave or forest-cover 
 
WAR-SONG OF TIRCONNELl's BARD. 65 
 
 Foodless deserts peering over, 
 
 Or upon the roadside lying 
 
 Infant dead and mother dying, 
 
 On their mouth the grassy stain 
 
 Of the wild weed gnaw'd in vain ; 
 
 Look upon them hoary Head 
 
 Of the last of Desmonds dead ; 
 
 Head that evermore dost frown 
 
 From the Bridge of London down ! 
 
 She that slew him from her barge 
 
 Makes that Head this hour the targe 
 
 Of her insults cold and keen, 
 
 England's Caliph, not her Queen ! 
 
 Portent terrible and dire 
 
 Whom thy country and thy sire 
 
 Branded with a bastard's name, 
 
 Thy birth was but thy lightest shame ! 
 
 To honour recreant and thine oath ; 
 
 Trampling that Faith whose borrow'd garb 
 First gave thee sceptre, crown, and orb, 
 
 Thy flatterers scorn, thy lovers loathe 
 
 That idol with the blood-stained feet 
 
 Ill-throned on murder'd Mary's seat ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Glory be to Him Alone who holds the nations in His 
 
 hand ! 
 The plain lies bare ; the smoke drifts by ; they fly 
 
 the invaders band o'er band ! 
 Sing, ye priests, your deep Te Deums ; bards, make 
 
 answer loud and long 
 In your rapture flinging heavenward censers of 
 
 triumphant song. 
 
 V. F 
 
66 WAR-SONG OF TIRCONNELL's BARD. 
 
 Isle for centuries blind in bondage lift once more 
 
 thine ancient boast, 
 From the cliffs of Inishowen southward on to 
 
 Carbery's coast ! 
 We have seen the Eight made perfect, seen the Hand 
 
 that rules the spheres 
 Glance like lightning through the clouds, and back- 
 ward roll the wrongful years. 
 Glory fadeth, but this triumph is no fleeting barren 
 
 glory ; 
 Rays of healing it shall scatter on the eyes that read 
 
 our story : 
 Upon nations bound and torpid as they waken it shall 
 
 shine 
 As on Peter in his chains the Angel shone with light 
 
 divine. 
 From the unheeding, from the unholy it may hide, 
 
 like Truth, its ray ; 
 But when Truth and Justice conquer on their crowns 
 
 its beam shall play : 
 O'er the ken of troubled despots it shall trail a meteor's 
 
 glare ; 
 For the blameless it shall glitter as the star of 
 
 morning fair : 
 Whensoever Erin triumphs then its dawn it shall 
 
 renew ; 
 Then O'Neill shall be remember'd, and Tirconnell's 
 
 chief, Eed Hugh ! 
 
 THE TRUE VICTORY. 
 
 A WARRIOR by his stone-dead lord 
 Fast bleeding sat, and heard on high 
 
THE SUGANE EARL. 67 
 
 Three Angels making of a sword, 
 
 Who sang right merrily : 
 * We shape the sword of conquering days : 
 
 What jewels shall that sword emboss 1 
 Not deeds, but sufferings ; shame, not praise. 
 
 The victories of the Cross.' 
 
 THE SUGANE EABL. 
 
 A.D. 1601. 
 I. 
 
 'TwAS the White Knight that sold him his flesh 
 and his blood ! 
 A Fitz-Gerald betray' d the Fitz-Gerald : 
 Death-pale the false friend in the 'mid forest stood ; 
 
 Close by stood the conqueror's herald ! 
 At the cave- mouth he lean'd on his sword, pale and 
 dumb. 
 But the eye that was on him o'erbore him : 
 ' Come forth,' cried the White Knight ; one 
 answer 'd, ' I come ! ' 
 And the Chief of his House stood before him ! 
 
 II. 
 ' Cut him down,' said the Outlaw with cold smile and 
 stern, 
 
 ' 'Twas a bold stake ; but Satan hath won it ! ' 
 In the days of thy father. Earl Desmond, no kerne 
 
 Had heard that command, and not done it I 
 The name of the White Knight shall cease, and his race ! 
 
 His castle down fall, roof and rafter ! 
 This day is a day of rebuke ; but the base 
 
 Shall meet what he merits hereafter ! 
 
68 ormond's lament. 
 
 OEMONB'S LAMENT ; 
 
 OR, THE FOE TURNED FRIEND. 
 
 There clung a mist about mine eye, 
 
 Or else round him a mist there clung : 
 From war to war the years went by, 
 
 And still that cloud between us hung ; 
 That, that he was I saw him not, 
 
 Old friend, old comrade, fellow-man : 
 I saw but that which chance had wrought ; 
 
 A rival house, a hostile clan. 
 
 II. 
 
 In vain one Race, one Faith were ours : 
 
 A common Land, a common Foe : 
 Yainly we chased through Lorha's bowers, 
 
 In boyhood paired, the flying roe : 
 Sea-caves of Irr ! in vain by you 
 
 Our horses stemmed the heaving floods 
 While freshening gales of morning blew 
 
 The sunrise o'er the mountain woods ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Ah spells of Fate ! Ah "Wrath and Wrong ! 
 
 Ah Friend that once my dearest wert ! 
 Where lay thine image hid so long 
 
 But in the centre of my heart 1 
 Thou fell'st ! a flash from out the past 
 
 One moment showed thee as of yore : 
 
ormond's lament. 69 
 
 Death followed fast a midnight blast ; 
 And that fair crest was seen no more. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Ah, great right hand, so brave yet kind ! 
 
 Ah, sovereign eyes ! ah, lordly mirth ! 
 Thy realm to-day like me sits blind : 
 
 And endless winter chills thy hearth. 
 This day I see thee in thy spring. 
 
 Though seventy winters make me grey : 
 This night my bards thy praise shall sing : 
 
 This night for thee my priests shall pray.* 
 
 * In Ireland there were occasions when the chief who had pur- 
 sued an ancient enemy to the death became his sincerest mourner. 
 A chronicler of the seventeenth century affirms that an in- 
 stance of such a change was found in the Earl of Ormond of 
 Elizabeth's time, called ' Black Thomas. ' ' Now, good reader, 
 let there be a truce to words, and listen to the whistling of the 
 lash. . . . . There was then in Ireland Thomas Butler, Earl 
 of Ormond, who changed his religion in the court of Elizabeth. 
 Brooding over the scandal he had given by his apostacy, he re- 
 solved to be reconciled to the Church in his last days. He 
 therefore made his peace with God, edified all by his piety, and 
 soon after, losing the ineffable blessing of sight, was gathered 
 to his fathers. Now, ere he died, he was heard to lament two 
 actions of his life first, that he had ever renounced that holy 
 religion in his youth which in his old age he was not able to 
 succour ; and, secondly, that he had taken up arms against the 
 Geraldines of Desmond, who were ever the strenuous champions 
 of the Faith, and the bulwarks of their country's liberty. Oh, 
 good God ! why did Ormond conspire to ruin them ? ' 
 
 ('The Rise, Increase, and Exit of the Family of the Geral- 
 dines, Earls of Desmond, and Palatines of Kerry.' Written in 
 Latin by Brother Dominicus de Rosario O'Daly, in the seven- 
 teenth century, and translated by the Rev. C. P. Meahan.) 
 
70 THE PHANTOM FUNERAL. 
 
 THE PHANTOM FUNERAL; 
 
 OR, THE DIRGE OF THE LAST DESMOND. 
 A.D. 1601. 
 
 James Fitz-Garret, son of the * Great Earl of Desmond, ' had 
 been sent to England when a child as a hostage, and was for 
 seventeen years kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in 
 the Queen's religion. James Fitz-Thomas, the ' Sugane Earl,' 
 having meantime assumed the title and prerogatives of Earl of 
 Desmond, the Queen sent her captive to Ireland, attended by 
 persons devoted, to her, and provided with a coiulitional patent 
 for his restoration. When he reached Kilraallock, on his way 
 to Kerry, wheat and salt were there showered on him by the 
 people, in testimony of loyalty. The next day was Sunday. 
 "When the young Earl left his house, it was with difficulty that 
 a guard, of English soldiers could keep a path open for him. 
 From street and window and housetop every voice urged him to 
 fidelity to his ancestral faith. The youth, who did not even 
 understand the language in which he was adjured, having 
 reached a spot where two roads separated, took that one which 
 led to * the Queen's church,' as it was called ; and with loud 
 cries his clan rushed forth from Kilmallock, and abandoned his 
 standard for ever. Shortly afterwards he returned to England, 
 where he fell sick ; and in a few months the news of his death 
 reached his ancient palatinate of Kerry. See the Pacata 
 Hibcrnia. 
 
 THE WAIL OF THE WOMEN OF DESMOND. 
 
 Strew the bed and strew the bier, 
 
 (Who rests upon it was never man) 
 With all that a little child holds dear, 
 
 With violets blue and violets wan. 
 
 Strew the bed and strew the bier 
 
 With the berries that redden thy shores, Corann : 
 Lay not upon it helmet or spear : 
 
 He knew them never. He ne'er was man. 
 
 Far off he sleeps ; yet we mourn him here ; 
 Their tale is falsehood ! he ne'er was man ! 
 
THE PHANTOM FUNERAL. 71 
 
 'Tis a phantom funeral ! Strew the bier 
 
 With white lilies brushed by the floating swan. 
 
 They lie who say that the false Queen caught him 
 A. child asleep on the mountains wide ; 
 
 A captive reared him ; a strange faith taught him ; 
 'Twas for no strange faith that his father died ! 
 
 They lie who say that the child return'd 
 A man unmanned to his towers of pride ; 
 
 That his people with curses the false Earl spurn' d 
 Woe, woe, Kilmallock ! they lie, and lied ! 
 
 The Clan was wroth at an ill report, 
 
 But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears : 
 
 The child that was motherless play'd. 'Twas sport ! 
 A child must sport in his childish years ! 
 
 XJlulah ! Ululah ! Low, sing low ! 
 
 The women of Desmond loved well that child ! 
 Our lamb was lost in the winter snow : 
 
 Long years we sought him in wood and wild. 
 
 How many a babe of Fitz -Gerald's blood 
 In hut was foster'd though born in hall ! 
 
 The whole stock burgeon'd the fair new bud, 
 The old land welcomed them, each and all ! 
 
 Glynn weeps to-day by the Shannon's tide, 
 And Shanid and she that frowns o'er Deal ; 
 
 There is woe by the Laune and the Carra's side, 
 And where the Knight dwells by the woody Feale. 
 
 In Dingle and Beara they chant his dirge ; 
 
 Far off he faded our child sing low ! 
 We have made him a bed by the ocean's surge ; 
 
 We have made him a bier on the mountain's brow. 
 
72 THE MARCH TO KINSALE. 
 
 The Clan was bereft ! the old walls they left ; 
 
 With cries they rushed to the mountains drear ! 
 But now great sorrow their heart hath cleft ; 
 
 See ! one by one they are drawing near ! 
 
 Ululah ! XJlulah ! Low, sing low ! 
 
 The flakes fall fast on the little bier : 
 The yew-branch and eagle-plume over them throw ! 
 
 The last of the Desmond Chiefs lies here. 
 
 THE MARCH TO KINSALE. 
 
 December, a.d. 1601. 
 
 I. 
 O'er many a river bridged with ice 
 
 Through many a vale with snow-drifts dumb 
 Past quaking fen and precipice 
 
 The Princes of the North are come ! 
 Lo, these are they that, year by year, 
 
 Koll'd back the tide of England's war ; 
 Rejoice, Kinsale ! thy help is near ! 
 That wondrous winter march is o'er. 
 
 And thus they sang, ' To-morrow morn ' 
 
 Our eyes shall rest upon the foe : 
 Pass on, swift night, in silence borne, 
 And blow, thou breeze of sunrise, blow ! 
 
 11. 
 
 Blithe as a boy on march'd the host 
 
 With droning pipe and clear- voiced harp ; 
 
 At last above that southern coast 
 
 Bang out their war-steed's whinny sharp : 
 
THE MARCH TO KINSALE. 73 
 
 And up the sea-salt slopes they wound, 
 And airs once more of ocean quaff 'd ; 
 Those frosty woods, the blue wave's bound. 
 
 As though May touched them waved and laugh' d. 
 And thus they sang, ' To-morrow morn 
 
 Our eyes shall rest upon our foe : 
 Pass on, swift night, in silence borne. 
 
 And blow, thou breeze of sunrise, blow ! ' 
 
 III. 
 Beside their watchfires couch'd all night 
 
 Some slept, some danced, at cards some play'd, 
 While, chanting on a central height 
 
 Of moonlit crag, the priesthood pray'd : 
 And some to sweetheart, some to wife 
 
 Sent message kind ; while others told 
 Triumphant tales of recent fight. 
 Or legends of their sires of old. 
 
 And thus they sang, * To-morrow morn 
 
 Our eyes at last shall see the foe : 
 Roll on, swift night, in silence borne. 
 
 And blow, thou breeze of sunrise, blow ! ' 
 
 KINSALE. 
 
 January 3, a.d. 1602. 
 
 What man can stand amid a place of tombs 
 Nor yearn to that poor vanquished dust beneath ? 
 Above a Nation's grave no violet blooms ; 
 A vanquished Nation lies in endless death. 
 
74 
 
 KINSALE. 
 
 ' Tis past : the dark is dense with ghost and vision ! 
 
 All lost ! the air is throng' d with moan and wail : 
 But one day more and hope had been fruition : 
 
 Athunree, thy fate overhung Kinsale ! * 
 
 What name is that which lays on every head 
 A hand like fire, striking the strong locks grey ? 
 
 What name is named not save with shame and dread ? 
 Once let us breathe it, then no more for aye ! 
 
 Kinsale ! accursed be he, the first who bragg'd 
 ' A city stands where roam'd but late the flock ; ' 
 
 Accursed the day when, from the mountain dragg'd, 
 Thy corner-stone forsook the mother-rock ! 
 
 * The inexplicable disaster at Kinsale, when, after their 
 marvellous winter march, the two great Northern chiefs of 
 Tirconnell and Tyrone had succeeded in relieving their 
 Spanish allies there, was one of those events upon which 
 the history of a nation turns. We know little more than 
 that it was a night-attack, the secret of which had been 
 divulged by a deserter. O'Donnell took shipping for 
 Spain, where he died before the promised aid was furnished, 
 in the twenty-ninth year of his age, September 10, 1602. 
 King Philip caused him to be buried in the Cathedral of 
 Valladolid, and raised there a monument in ' his honour. 
 O'Neill fought his way back to Ulster. Lord Mountjoy had 
 repeatedly wasted ,'the ' country, so that a terrible famine 
 reigned. Every day O'Neill was more strictly hemmed in ; 
 while his allies deserted him and his retainers ^tere starved. 
 "When the news arrived of the death of Red Hugh O'Donnell 
 all hope was over. He agi'eed to the terms proposed to him 
 by Mountjoy, surrendering his claims as a native prince, 
 and engaging to resume his title as Earl of Tyrone. Several 
 days previously the Queen had died ; but Mountjoy had 
 concealed this event. A few days later the ships of O'Neill's 
 Spanish allies arrived. He sent them back. 
 
ROISIN DUBH. 75 
 
 BOISIN DUBH. 
 
 DIRGE. 
 I. 
 
 I AM black but fair, and the robe I wear 
 
 Is dark as death ; 
 My cheek is pale, and I bind my veil 
 
 With a cypress wreath. 
 Where the nightshades flower I build the bower 
 
 Of my secret rest : 
 O kind is sleep to the eyes that weep 
 
 And the bleeding breast. 
 
 II. 
 
 My palace floor I tread no more ; 
 
 No throne is mine ; 
 No sceptre I hold, nor drink from gold 
 
 Of victory's wine ', 
 Yet I rule a Queen in the worlds unseen 
 
 By Sassanach eye ; 
 A realm I have in the hearts of the brave 
 
 And an empery. 
 
 TO NUALA IN ROME. 
 
 Nuala was the sister of Eed Hugh, and of Roderick 
 O'Donnell. The latter died an exile in Rome, a.d, 1608. 
 Nuala left her husband, on his proving a traitor to his 
 country, and clave to her brother. It was on iinding her 
 weeping at that brother's grave in S. Pietro Montorio, that 
 O'Donnell's bard addressed to her the tragic ode well known 
 through Clarence Mangan's translation : ' Woman of the 
 Piercing Wail ! ' 
 
76 TO NUALA IN ROME. 
 
 Thy shining eyes are vague with tears 
 Though seldom and unseen they flow ; 
 
 The playmate of thy childish years 
 My friend at last lies low. 
 
 If I, thus late, thy love might win 
 
 Withheld for his sake, brief the gain ; 
 
 I live in battle's ceaseless din : 
 Thou pinest in silent pain. 
 
 Nuala ! exile, and the bread 
 
 By strangers doled thy cheek make pale ; 
 On blue Lough Eirne that cheek was red, 
 
 In western Ruaidh's gale ! 
 
 The high-neck'd stag looks down no more 
 From sunset cliffs upon thy path 
 
 In Doire. Not now thou tread' st the shore 
 By Aileach's royal Rath. 
 
 No more thou hear'st the sea-wind sing 
 O'er cairns where Ulster monarchs sleep ; 
 
 The linnets of the Latian spring 
 They only make thee weep. 
 
 To thee no joy from domes enskied, 
 
 Or ruins of Imperial Rome ; 
 Thou look'st beyond them, hungry -eyed, 
 
 T'ward thy far Irish home. 
 
 On green Tirconnell, now a waste. 
 The sighs of outcasts feed thine own ; 
 
 Nuala ! soon my clarion's blast 
 Shall drown that mingled moan. 
 
 In Spain they call us King and Prince, 
 And plight alliance, and betray ; 
 
THE ARRAIGNMENT. 77 
 
 In Kome, through clouds of frankincense 
 Slow dawns our better day. 
 
 To King or Kaiser, Prince or Pope 
 
 I sue not, nor to magic spell ; 
 Nuala ! on this sword my Hope 
 
 Stands like a God. Farewell ! 
 
 THE ARRAIGNMENT; 
 
 OR, FIRST AND LAST. 
 
 Thus sang thy missioned Bard, O'Neill, 
 At James's Court a threatening guest. 
 
 When Ulster died. Round ranks of steel 
 Ran the sharp whisper ill suppressed. 
 
 Ho ! space for Judgment ! squire and groom ! 
 
 Ho ! place for Judgment^ and a bier ! 
 We bear a dead man to his tomb : 
 
 We ask for Judgment, not a tear. 
 
 Back, beaming eyes, and cloth of gold, 
 
 Back, plumes, and stars, and herald's gear, 
 
 Injustice crowned, and falsehood stoled ! 
 There lies a lordlier pageant here ! 
 
 Draw near. Sir King, and lay thy hand 
 
 Upon this dead man's breast ! Draw near ! 
 
 The accusing blood, at God's command. 
 
 Wells forth ! The count is summed. Give ear ! 
 
78 THE ARRAIGNMENT. 
 
 Who, partner with a knave abhorred,"^ 
 Farmed as his own that Traitor's feud 1 
 
 Vicarious fought 1 By others' sword 
 Mangled a kingdom unsubdued 1 
 
 Who reigned in great Religion's name, 
 Liegeman and Creedsman of the Pope 1 
 
 Who vindicates his cleric claim 
 
 By schism and rapine, axe and rope 1 
 
 Who reads by light of blazing roofs 
 His gospel new to Prince and Kerne 1 
 
 Who tramples under horses' hoofs 
 A race expatriate, slow to learn 1 
 
 From holy Ulster, last discrowned 
 
 'Twas falsehood did the work, not war 
 
 Who drives her sons by scourge and hound 
 To famished Connacht's utmost shore ? 
 
 Beware false splendours brave to-day ! 
 
 Unkingly King, and recreant peers ! 
 Ye hold your prey ; but not for aye : 
 
 The hour is yours : but ours the years ! 
 
 * Dermod, King of Leinster, a.d. 1170. 
 
THE SUPPRESSION OP THE FAITH IN ULSTER. 79 
 
 THE SUPPRESSION OF THE FAITH IN 
 ULSTER. 
 
 A BARDIC ODE. 
 
 A.D. 1623. 
 
 Throughout Ulster, and in most parts of Ireland, it had 
 been found impossible to carry the Penal Laws against 
 the Catholic faith fully into effect until the reign of 
 James I. The accession of that prince was hailed as the 
 beginning of an era of liberty and peace. James had ever 
 boasted himself a descendant of the ancient Milesian princes, 
 had had frequent dealings with the Irish chiefs in their 
 wars against Elizabeth, and was believed by them to be, at 
 least in heart, devoted to the religion of his Mother. In 
 the earlier part of his reign, though he refused to grant a 
 legal toleration, he engaged that the Penal Laws should not 
 be executed. In the year 1605 a proclamation was issued, 
 commanding all Catholic priests to quit Ireland under the 
 penalty of death. Next came the compulsory flight of 
 Tirconnell and Tyrone, the Plantation of Ulster, and 
 the swamping of the Irish Parliament by the creation of 
 fictitious boroughs. In 1622 Archbishop Ussher preached 
 before the new l3eputy. Lord Faulkland, his celebrated sermon 
 on the text, 'He beareth not the sword in vain.' The next 
 year a new proclamation was published, commanding the 
 departure of all the Catholic clergy, regular and secular, within 
 forty days. 
 
 I. 
 
 Now we know that they are dead ! 
 They, the Chiefs that kept from seaith 
 The northern land the sentenced Faith 
 Now we know that they are dead ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Wrong, with Kapine in her leash, 
 Walk'd her ancient rounds afresh ! 
 Law late come with leaden mace 
 Smites Keligion in the face ; 
 But the spoiler first had place ! 
 
80 THE SUPPRESSION OF THE FAITH IN ULSTER. 
 
 III. 
 
 Axes and hammers, hot work and hard ! 
 
 From niche and from turret the Saints they cast ; 
 The church stands naked as the churchyard ; 
 
 The craftsman-army toils fiercely and fast : 
 They pluck from the altars the precious stones 
 
 As vultures pluck at a dead man's eyes ; 
 Like wolves down-dragging the flesh from the bones 
 
 They strip the gold from the canopies. 
 They rifle the tombs ; they melt the bells : 
 The foundry furnace bubbles and swells I 
 Spoiler, for once thou hast err'd ; what ho ! 
 Thou hast loos'd this shaft from an ill-strung bow ! 
 In that Faith thou wouldst strangle, thy Mother died ! 
 Who slew her 1 The Usurper our chiefs defied ! 
 Thy heart was with Rome in the days of old ; 
 Thy counsel was ours ; thy counsel and gold ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 A ban went forth from the regal chambers, 
 
 From the Prince that courted us once with lies. 
 
 From the secular synods where he who clambers, 
 Not he that walks upright, receives the prize : 
 
 ' Go back to thy Judah, sad Prophet, go ; 
 
 There wail thy wrong, and denounce thy woe ; 
 
 But no longer in Bethel thy prophecy sing, 
 
 'Tis the chapel and court of Samaria's King ! ' 
 
 Let England renounce her church at will. 
 
 The children of Erin are faithful still. 
 
 For a thousand years has that church been theirs : 
 
 They are God's, not Caesar's, the Creeds and Prayers ! 
 
THE SUPPRESSION OF THE FAITH IN ULSTER. 81 
 V. 
 
 Thou that are haughty and full of bread, 
 The crown falls soon from the unwise head ! 
 Who rear strange altars shall find anon 
 The lion thereby and sea-sand thereon ! 
 In the deserts of penance they peak and pine 
 Till fulfilled are the days of the wrath divine. 
 Thy covenant make with the cave and the brier 
 For shelter by day and by night for fire ; 
 When the bolt is launch' d at the craggy crest, 
 And the cedars flame round the eagle's nest ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 A voice from the ocean waves, 
 
 And a voice from the forest glooms, 
 And a voice from old temples and kingly graves, 
 
 And a voice from the Catacombs ! 
 It cries, the king that warreth 
 
 On religion and freedom entwined in one 
 Down drags in his blindness the fane, nor spareth 
 
 The noble's hall, nor the throne ! 
 I saw in my visions the walls give way 
 
 Of the mystic Babylon ; 
 I saw the gold Idol whose feet are clay 
 
 On his forehead lying prone ; 
 I saw a sea-eagle defaced with gore 
 
 Flag wearily over the main ; 
 But her nest on the cliii* she reached no more 
 
 For the shaft was in her brain. 
 As when some strong man a stone uplifteth 
 
 And flingeth into floods far down, 
 So God, when the balance of Justice shifteth, 
 
 Down dasheth the despot's crown, 
 
 V. G 
 
82 THE SUPPRESSION OF THE FAITH IN ULSTER. 
 
 Down dasheth the realm that abused its trust, 
 And the nation that knew not pity, 
 
 And maketh the image of Power unjust 
 To vanish from out the city ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Wait, my country, and be wise ; 
 Thou art gall'd in head and breast, 
 Rest thou needest, sleep and rest ; 
 Rest and sleep, and thou shalt rise 
 And tread down thine enemies. 
 That which God ordains is best ; 
 That which God permits is good. 
 Though by man least understood. 
 Now His sword He gives to those 
 Who have wisdom won from woes ; 
 In them fighting ends the strife : 
 At other times the impious priest 
 Slipping on his victim's blood 
 Falls in death on his own knife ! 
 God is hard to 'scape ! His ire ! 
 Strikes the son if not the sire ! * 
 In a time, to God not long. 
 Thou shalt reckon with this wrong ! 
 
 * King James I.'s 'Plantation of Ulster' was the loss of 
 Ireland to his son, and again to his grandson, and conseq^uently 
 the permanent loss to him and his of England. 
 
KING Charles's 'graces.' 83 
 
 KING CHARLES'S 'GBAGES: 
 
 A.D. 1626. 
 
 I. 
 
 Thus babble the strong ones, ' The chain is slacken' d ! 
 
 Ye can turn half round on your side to sleep ! 
 With the thunder-cloud still your isle is blacken'd ; 
 
 But it hurls no bolt upon tower or steep. 
 Ye are slaves in name : old laws proscribe you ; 
 
 But the King is kindly, the Queen is fair ; 
 They are knaves or fools who would goad or bribe 
 you 
 
 A legal freedom to claim ! Beware ! ' 
 
 II. 
 
 We answer thus : our country's honour 
 
 To us is dear as our country's life ! 
 That stigma the foul law casts upon her 
 
 Is the brand on the fame of a blameless wife ! 
 Once more we answer : from honour never 
 
 Can safety long time be found apart : 
 The bondsman that vows not his bond to sever, 
 
 Is a slave by right and a slave in heart ! 
 
 SIBYLLA lEBNENSIS. 
 
 I. 
 
 I dream'd. Great bells around me peal'd j 
 The world in that sad chime was drown'd ; 
 
 Sharp cries as from a battle-field 
 
 Were strangled in that wondrous sound : 
 
84 SIBYLLA lERNENSIS. 
 
 Had all the Kings of earth lain dead, 
 Had nations borne them lapp'd in lead 
 To torch-lit vaults with plume and pall, 
 Such bells had served for funeral. 
 
 II. 
 
 'Twas work of phantasy ! I slept 
 
 Where black Baltard o'erlooks the deep ; 
 
 Plunging all night the billows kept 
 Their ghostly vigil round my sleep. 
 
 But I had fed on tragic lore 
 
 That day your annals, ' Masters Four ! ' 
 
 And every moan of wind and sea 
 
 Was as a funeral chime to me. 
 
 IIL 
 
 I woke. In vain the skylark sang 
 Above the breezy cliff ; in vain 
 The golden iris flashed and swang 
 
 In hollows of the sea-pink plain. 
 As ocean shakes no longer near 
 The listening heart, and haunts the ear. 
 The Sibyl and that volume's spells 
 Pursued me with those funeral bells ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Irish Sibyl whispers slow 
 To one who pass'd her tardy Lent 
 
 In purple and fine linen, * Lo ! 
 
 Thou would'st amend but not repent 
 
 Beware ! Long prospers fearless crime ; 
 
 Half courses bring the perilous time ! 
 
 His way who changes, not his will. 
 
 Is strong no more, but guilty still.' 
 
THE BALLAD OF ' BONNY PORTMORE.' 85 
 
 THE BALLAD OF 'BONNY PORTMOBE' ;'^ 
 
 OR, THE WICKED REVENGE. 
 
 A.D. 1641. 
 
 I. 
 
 Shall I breathe it ? Hush ! 'twas dark : 
 Silence ! few could understand : 
 Needful deeds are done not told. 
 In your ear a whisper ! Hark ! 
 'Twas a sworn, unwavering band 
 
 Marching through the midnight cold ; 
 Rang the frost plain, stiff and stark : 
 By us, blind, the river rolled. 
 
 II. 
 
 Silence ! we were silent then : 
 Shall we boast and brag to-day 1 
 
 Just deeds, blabbed, have found their price ! 
 Snow made dumb the trusty glen ; 
 Now and then a starry ray 
 
 Showed the floating rafts of ice : 
 Worked our oath in heart and brain : 
 Twice we halted : only twice. 
 
 III. 
 When we reached the city wall 
 On their posts the warders slept : 
 By the moat the rushes plained : 
 Hush ! I tell you part, not all ! 
 Through the water-weeds we crept ; 
 Soon the sleepers' tower was gained. 
 My sister's son a tear let fall 
 
 Righteous deeds by tears are stained. 
 ^ The name of an old Irish air. 
 
86 THE BALLAD OF 'BONNY PORTMORE.' 
 
 IV. 
 
 Kound us lay a sleeping city : 
 Had they wakened we had died : 
 Innocence sleeps well, they say. 
 Pirates, traitors, base banditti, 
 Blood upon their hands undried, 
 'Mid their spoils asleep they lay ! 
 Murderers ! Justice murders pity ! 
 
 Night had brought their Judgment Day ! 
 
 V. 
 
 In the castle, here and there, 
 'Twixt us and the dawning East 
 Flashed a light, or sank by fits : 
 ' Patience, brothers ! sin it were 
 Lords to startle at their feast. 
 Sin to scare the dancers' wits ! ' 
 Patient long in forest lair 
 
 The listening, fire-eyed tiger sits ! 
 
 vi. 
 
 O the loud flames upward springing ! 
 that first fierce yell within, 
 
 And, without, that stormy laughter ! 
 Like rooks across a sunset winging 
 
 Dark they dashed through glare and din 
 Under rain of beam and rafter ! 
 O that death-shriek heavenward ringing ; 
 O that wondrous silence after ! 
 
 The fire-glare showed, 'mid glaze and blister, 
 A boy's cheek wet with tears. 'Twas base ! 
 
 That boy was firstborn of my sister ; 
 Yet I smote him on the face ! 
 
THE INTERCESSION. 87 
 
 Ah ! but when the poplars quiver 
 
 In the hot noon, cold o'erhead, 
 Sometimes with a spasm I shiver ; 
 
 Sometimes round me gaze with dread. 
 Ah ! and when the silver willow 
 
 Whitens in the moonlight gale, 
 From my hectic, grassy pillow 
 
 I hear, sometimes, that infant's wail ! 
 
 THE INTERCESSIONS 
 
 ULSTER. 
 A.D. 1641. 
 
 * Dr. Leland and other historians relate that the Catholic 
 clergy frequently interfered for the protection of the victims of 
 that massacre, which took place at an early period of the Ulster 
 rising of 1641. They hid them beneath their altars. From 
 the landing of Owen Roe O'Neill all such crimes ceased. They 
 disgraced a just cause, and, doubtless, drew down a Divine 
 punishment. A lamentable list of the massacres committed 
 in the same year, at the other side massacres less generally 
 known will be found in Cardinal Moran's 'Persecutions 
 suffered by the Catholics under Cromwell and the Puritans,' 
 p. 168. It is compiled from a contemporary record. 
 
 It was intended that Inisfail should represent in the main 
 the songs of the old Irish Bards (if only they could have been 
 preserved), as the best exponent of the Emotions and Imagina- 
 tion of the Race during the centuries of her affliction, but 
 there must have been also many Priests, like Iriel, who were 
 exponents not less true of the Conscience of that Race. To 
 such may be attributed the counsels urged upon them in many 
 parts of Inisfail, and especially towards its close, respecting the 
 forgiveness of injuries, obedience to the Divine Will, Peni- 
 tence, especially from p. 125 to p. 129 a Hope that nothing 
 could subdue, and those trials connected with the day of 
 Prosperity which are more dangerous than any which Adversity 
 knows. 
 
88 THE INTEKCESSION. 
 
 Iriel the Priest arose and said : 
 
 ' The just cause never shall prosper by wrong ! 
 The ill cause battens on blood ill shed ; 
 
 'Tis Virtue only makes Justice strong. 
 
 ' I have hidden the Sassanach's wife and child 
 Beneath the altar ; behind the porch ; 
 
 O'er- them that believe not these hands have piled 
 The copes and the vestments of Holy Church ! 
 
 ' I have hid three men in a hollow oak ; 
 
 I have hid three maids in an ocean cave : ' 
 As though he were lord of the thunder-stroke 
 
 The old Priest lifted his hand to save. 
 
 But the people loved not the words he spake ; 
 
 And their face was changed for their heart was 
 sore : 
 They spake no word ; but their brows grew black 
 
 And the hoarse halls roar'd like a torrent's roar. 
 
 ' Has the Stranger robb'd you of house and land 1 
 In battle meet him and smite him down ! 
 
 Has he sharpen'd the dagger 1 Lift ye the brand ! 
 Has he bound your Princes 1 Set free the clown ! 
 
 ' Has the Stranger his country and knighthood 
 shamed ? 
 Though he 'scape God's vengeance so shall not ye ! 
 His own God chastens ! Be never named 
 
 With the Mullaghmast slaughter ! Be just and 
 free ! ' 
 
 But the people received not the words he spake, 
 For the wrong on their heart had made it sore ; 
 
THE SILK OP THE KINE. 89 
 
 And their brows grew black like the stormy rack 
 And the hoarse halls roar'd like the wave-wash'd 
 shore. 
 
 Then Iriel the Priest put forth a curse ! 
 
 And horror crept o'er them from vein to vein ; 
 A curse upon man and a curse upon horse, 
 
 As forth they rode to the battle-plain. 
 
 And there never came to them luck or grace 
 
 No Saint in the battle-field help'd them more 
 Till O'Neill who hated the warfare base 
 . Had landed at Doe on Tirconnell's shore. 
 
 THE SILK OF THE KINE.^ 
 
 DIRGE OF RORY o'mORE. 
 
 A.D. 1642. 
 
 Up the sea-sadden'd valley at evening's decline 
 A heifer walks lowing ; ' the Silk of the Kine ; ' 
 From the deep to the mountain she roams, and again 
 From the mountain's green urn to the purple-rimm'd 
 main. 
 
 Whom seek'st thou, sad Mother ? Thine own is not 
 
 thine ! 
 He dropp'd from the headland; he sank in the brine. 
 'Twas a dream ! but in dream at thy foot did he 
 
 follow 
 Through the meadow-sweet on by the marish and 
 
 mallow ! 
 
 * One of the mystical names for Ireland used by the Bards. 
 
90 THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 
 
 Was he thine? Have they slain him'? Thou seek'st 
 
 him, not knowing 
 Thyself too art theirs, thy sweet breath and sad 
 
 lowing ! 
 Thy gold horn is theirs ; thy dark eye, and thy silk ! 
 And that which torments thee, thy milk, is their milk ! 
 
 'Twas no dream, Mother Land ! 'Twas no dream, 
 
 Inisfail ! 
 Hope dreams, but grief drfeams not the grief of the 
 
 Gael! 
 From Leix and Ikerren to Donegal's shore 
 Rolls the dirge of thy last and thy bravest O'More ! 
 
 THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 
 
 A BARDIC ODE. 
 
 This battle was won by Owen Roe O'Neill over the Parlia- 
 mentarian forces, A.D. 1646. The rebels left 3,423 of their 
 dead on the field. 
 
 I. 
 
 At even I mused on the wrong of the Gael ; 
 
 A storm rushed beside me with war-blast not wail, 
 
 And the leaves of the forest plague-spotted and dead 
 
 Like a multitude broken before it fled ; 
 
 Then I saw in my visions a host back driven 
 
 Ye clansmen be true, by a Chief from heaven ! 
 
 II. 
 At midnight I gazed on the moonless skies ; 
 There glisten'd, supreme of star-blazonries, 
 A Sword all stars ; then heaven, I knew, 
 Hath holy work for a sword to do : 
 Be true, ye clansmen of Nial ! Be true ! 
 
THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 91 
 
 III. 
 
 At morning I look'd as the sun uprose 
 On hills of Antrim late white with snows ; 
 Was it morning only that dyed them red 1 
 Martyr'd hosts, methought, had bled 
 On their sanguine ridges for years not few ! 
 Ye clansmen of Conn, this day be true ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 There is felt once more on the earth 
 
 The step of a kingly man : 
 Like a dead man hidden he lay from his birth, 
 
 Exiled from his country and clan : 
 This day his standard he flingeth forth ; 
 
 He tramples the bond and ban : 
 Let them look in his face that usurp'd his hearth ! 
 Let them vanquish him, they who can ! 
 Owen Roe, our own O'Neill ! 
 
 He treads once more our land ! 
 The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel, 
 But the hand is an Irish hand ! 
 % 
 
 V. 
 
 I saw in old time with these eyes that fail "^ 
 
 The ship drop down Lough Swilly ; 
 Lessening 'mid billows the snowy sail 
 
 Bent down like a storm-rock'd lily ! 
 
 * In 1607 a conspiracy, never proved, and probably never 
 undertaken, was suddenly charged against Tyrone and Tircon- 
 nell. To avoid arrest the two earls, whose enforced submission 
 had rendered them helpless, embarked on board a ship that 
 chanced to have anchored in Lough Swilly. They found refuge 
 in Rome, where their tombs are shown to the traveller in the 
 church of San Pietro^ on the Janiculan Hill. 
 
 The Four Masters thus record the tragedy : * They embarked 
 
92 THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 
 
 Far, far it bore them, those Sceptres old 
 
 That ruled o'er Ulster for ages untold, 
 
 The sceptre of Nial and the sceptre of Conn, 
 
 Thy Princes, Tirconnell and green Tyrone ! 
 
 No freight like that since the mountain-pine 
 
 Left first the hills for the salt sea-brine ! 
 
 Down sank on the ocean a blood-red sun 
 
 As westward they drifted, when hope was none, 
 
 With their priests and their children o'er ocean' f 
 
 foam 
 And every archive of house and home : 
 Amid the sea-surges their bards sang dirges : 
 God rest their bones in their graves at Rome ! 
 
 Owen Eoe, our own O'Neill ! 
 He treads once more our land ! 
 
 The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel, 
 But the hand is an Irish hand ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 I saw in old time through the drifts of the snow 
 
 A shepherdless People dash'd to and fro. 
 
 With hands toss'd up in^the wintry air, 
 
 With the laughter of madness or shriek of despair. 
 
 Dispersed is the flock when the shepherd lies low : 
 
 The sword was of parchment : a lie was the blow : 
 
 on the festival of Holy Cross, in autumn. This was a princely 
 company : and it is certain that the sea has not borne and the 
 wind has not wafted in modern times a number of persons in 
 one ship more eminent, illustrious, or noble in race, heroic 
 deeds, valour, feats of arms, and brave achievements than 
 they. Would that God had but permitted them to remain 
 in their patrimonial inheritance until the children had arrived 
 at the age of manhood ! Woe to the heart that meditated, 
 woe to the counsel that recommended the project of this 
 expedition ! ' 
 
THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 93 
 
 What is Time 1 I can see the rain beat the white 
 
 hair, 
 And the sleet that defaces the face that was fair, 
 As onward they stagger o'er mountain and moor 
 From the Ardes and Rathlin to Corrib's bleak shore : 
 I can hear the babe weep in the pause of the wind 
 * To Connaught ! ' The bloodhounds are baying be- 
 hind ! 
 Owen Roe, our own O'Neill ! 
 
 He treads once more our land ! 
 The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel, 
 But the hand is an Irish hand ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 Visions no more of the dreadful past ! 
 
 The things that I long'd for are mine at last ! 
 
 I see them and hold them with heart and eyes ; 
 
 On Irish ground, under Irish skies, 
 
 An Irish army, clan by clan, 
 
 The standard of Ulster on leading the van ! 
 
 Each chief with his clansmen, tried men like steel ; 
 
 Unvanquish'd Maolmora, Cormac the leal ! 
 
 And the host that meets them right well I know, 
 
 The psalm-singing boors of that Scot, Munro ! 
 
 We hated you, Barons of the Pale ! 
 
 But now sworn friends are Norman and Gael ; 
 
 For both the old foes are of lineage old. 
 
 And both the old Faith and old manners hold. 
 
 Montgomery, Conway ! base-born crew ! 
 
 This day ye shall learn an old lesson anew ! 
 
 Thou art red with sunset this hour, Blackwater 
 
 But twice ere now thou wert red with slaughter ! 
 
 Another O'Neill by the ford they met ; 
 
 And ' the bloody loaming ' men name it yet ! 
 
94 THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 
 
 Owen E-oe, our own O'Neill ! 
 
 He treads once more our land ! 
 The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel ! 
 
 But the hand is an Irish hand ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The storm of the battle rings out ! On ! on ! 
 Shine well in their faces, thou setting sun ! 
 The smoke grows crimson : from left to right 
 Swift flashes the spleenful and racing light : 
 The horses stretch forward with belly to ground : 
 On ! on ! like a lake which has burst its bound ! 
 Through the clangour of brands rolls the laughter of 
 
 cannon : 
 Wind-borne it shall reach thine old walls, Dun- 
 
 gannon ! 
 Armagh's grey Minster shall chant again 
 To-morrow at vespers an ancient strain ! 
 On, on ! This night on thy banks. Loch Neagh 
 Men borne in bondage shall couch them free ! 
 On, warriors launch' d by a warrior's hand ! 
 Four years ye were leash'd in a brazen band ; 
 He counted your bones, and he meted your might, 
 This hour he dashes you into the fight ! 
 Strong sun of the battle, great Chief whose eye 
 Wherever it gazes makes victory. 
 This hour thou shalt see them do or die ! 
 They form : there stand they one moment, still ! 
 
 Now, now, they charge under banner and sign : 
 They breast unbroken the slope of the hill, 
 
 It breaks before them, the Invaders' line ! 
 Their horse and their foot are crush'd together 
 Like harbour-locked ships in the winter weather, 
 Each dash'd upon each, the churn'd wave strewing 
 
THE BATTLE OF BENBURB. 95 
 
 With wreck upon wreck, and ruin on ruin. 
 The spine of their battle gives way with a yell : 
 Down drop their standards : that cry was their knell ! 
 Some on the bank and some in the river 
 Struggling they lie that shall rally never. 
 'Twas God fought for us ! with hands of might 
 From on high He kneaded and shaped the fight ! 
 To Him be the praise ! What He wills must be : 
 With Him is the future : for blind are we ! 
 Let Ormond at will make terms or refuse them ! 
 Let Charles the Confederates win or lose them ; 
 Unbind the old Faith and annul the old strife, 
 Or cheat us, and forfeit his kingdom and life ! 
 Come hereafter what must or may 
 Ulster, thy cause is avenged to-day : 
 What fraud took from us and force, the sword 
 That strikes in daylight makes ours, restored ! 
 Owen E.oe, our own O'Neill ! 
 
 He treads once more our land ! 
 The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel, 
 
 But the hand is an Irish hand ! 
 
 TRADITOR ISTE. 
 
 A WAIL. 
 I. 
 
 Can it be, can it be? Can our Great One be 
 Traitor % 
 Can the child of her greatest be faithless to Eire 1 
 
96 TRADITOR ISTE. 
 
 The clown and the stranger have wronged let them 
 hate her ! 
 Old Thomond well knows them ; they hate her 
 for hire ! 
 Can a brave man be leagued with the rebels and 
 ranters 
 'Gainst his faith, and his country, his king, and 
 his race, 
 Can he bear the low meanings, the curses, the 
 banters 1 
 There's a scourge worse than these the applause 
 of the base ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Was the hand that set fire to the Churches de- 
 scended 
 From his hand who upreared them the strong 
 hand, the true 1 
 When the blood of the People and Priesthood ran 
 blended 
 Who was it looked on, and cried, * Spare them 
 not ' 1 Who 1 
 Some Fury o'erruled thee ! Some root thou hadst 
 eaten ! 
 'Twas a Demon that stalked in thy shape. 'Twas 
 not thou ! 
 Not tears of the Angels that blood-stain can 
 sweeten ; 
 That Cain-mark not death can erase from thy 
 brow ! 
 
DIRGE OF OWEN ROE o'nEILL. 97 
 
 DinaE OF OWEN BOE O'NEILL. 
 
 A.D. 1649. 
 
 SOj 'tis over ! Lift the dead ! 
 
 Bear him to his place of rest, 
 Broken heart, and blighted head : 
 
 Lay the Cross upon his breast. 
 
 There be many die too late ; 
 
 Here is one that died too soon : * 
 'Twas not Fortune it was Fate 
 
 After him that cast her shoon. 
 
 Toll the church bells slowly : toll ! 
 
 God this day is wroth with Eire : 
 Seal the book, and fold the scroll ; 
 
 Crush the harp, and burst the wire. 
 
 Lords and priests, ye talked and talked 
 
 In Kilkenny's Council Hall ; 
 But this man whose game ye baulked 
 
 Was the one man 'mong you all ! 
 
 'Twas not in the field he fell ! 
 
 Sing his requiem, dark-stoled choir ! 
 Let a nation sound his knell : 
 
 God this day is wroth with Eire ! 
 
 * The conqueror of Benburb died (by poison as was believed 
 at the time) just after he and Ormond had concluded terms for 
 joint action against Cromwell, Had he not been summoned to 
 Kilkenny when on the point of following up the victory of 
 Benburb, the Puritan army must, within a few days, have been 
 driven out of Ulster, 
 
 V. 
 
98 THE BISHOP OF ROSS. 
 
 THE BISHOP OF ROSS. 
 
 A.D. 1650. 
 
 They led him to the peopled wall : 
 
 * Thy sons ! ' they said, ' are those within ! 
 
 If at thy word their standards fall, 
 Thy life and freedom thou shalt win ! ' 
 
 Then spake that warrior Bishop old, 
 ' Eemove these chains that I may bear 
 
 My crosier staff and cope of gold : 
 My judgment then will I declare.' 
 
 They robed him in his robes of state : 
 They set his mitre on his head : 
 
 On tower and gate was silence great : 
 
 The hearts that loved him froze with dread. 
 
 He spake : 'Right holy is your strife ! 
 
 Fight for your Country, King, and Faith. 
 I taught you to be true in life : 
 
 I teach you to be true in death. 
 
 * A priest apart by God is set 
 
 To offer prayer and sacrifice : 
 And he is sacrificial yet 
 
 The pontiff for his flock who dies.' 
 
 Ere yet he fell, his hand on high 
 He raised, and benediction gave ; 
 
 Then sank in death, content to die : 
 Thy great heart, Erin, was his grave. 
 
DIRGE. 99 
 
 DIRGE. 
 
 A.D. 1652. 
 
 I. 
 
 Whose were they those voices 1 What footsteps 
 came near me 1 
 Can the dead to the living draw nigh and be 
 heard ? 
 I wept in my sleep ; but ere morning to cheer me 
 Came a breeze from the woodland, a song from the 
 bird. 
 O sons of my heart ! the long-hair' d, the strong- 
 handed ! 
 Your phantoms rush by me with war-cry and 
 wail : 
 Ye too for your Faith and your Country late banded 
 My sons by adoption, mail'd knights of the Pale ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Is there sorrow, O ye that pass by, like my sorrow ? 
 Of the Kings I brought forth there remaineth not 
 one ! 
 Each day is dishonour' d ; disastrous each morrow : 
 
 In the yew-wood I couch till the daylight is done. 
 At midnight I lean from the cliff o'er the waters. 
 
 And hear, as the thunder comes up from the sea 
 Your meanings, my sons, and your wailings, my 
 daughters : 
 With the sea-dirge they mix not : they clamour to 
 me ! 
 
100 THE WHEEL OF AFFLICTION. 
 
 THE WHEEL OF AFFLICTION. 
 
 Bright is the Dream-land of them that weep ; 
 
 Of the outcast head on the mountains bare : 
 Thy Saints, O Eire, I have seen in sleep ; 
 
 Thy Queens on the battle-plain, fierce yet fair. 
 
 Three times I dreamed on Tyrawley's shore : 
 
 Through ranks of the Vanished I paced a mile : 
 On the right stood Kings, and their crowns they 
 
 wore : 
 On the left stood Priests without gold or guile. 
 
 But the vision I saw when the deep I crossed, 
 When I crossed from lorras to Donegal 
 
 By night on the vigil of Pentecost 
 Was the saddest vision yet best of all. 
 
 From the sea to the sky a Wheel rolled round : 
 It breathed a blast on the steadfast stars ; 
 
 'Twas huge as that circle with marvels wound 
 The marvels that reign o'er the Calendars. 
 
 Then an Angel spake, ' That Wheel is Earth ; 
 
 It grinds the wheat of the Bread of God : ' 
 And the Angel of Eire, with an Angel's mirth, 
 
 'The mill-stream from Heaven is the Martyrs' 
 blood.' 
 
 EPILOaUE. 
 
 Like dew from above it fell, from beyond the limits 
 of ether ; 
 From above the courses of stars, and the thrones of 
 angelical choirs ; 
 
EPILOGUE. 101 
 
 *If God afflicts the Land, then God of a surety is 
 with her ; 
 Her heart-drops counts like beads, and walks with 
 her through the fires. 
 
 'Time, and a Time, and Times ! Earth's noblest 
 birth was her latest : 
 That latest birth was Man ; his flesh her Redeemer 
 wears : 
 Time, and a Time, and Times ! one day the least 
 shall be greatest : 
 In glory God reaps, but sows below in the valley 
 of tears.' 
 
 It was no Seraph's song nor the spheral chime of 
 creation. 
 That Voice ! To earth it stooped as a cloud to the 
 ocean flood : 
 It had ascended in sighs from the anguished heart of 
 a nation ; 
 The musical echo came back from the boundless 
 bosom of God. 
 
INISFAIL 
 
 A LYRICAL CHRONICLE OF IRELAND. 
 THE ELEGY. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 1. The Penal Laws. 
 
 2. The Victory of Endurance. 
 
PAET III. 
 
 PABVULI EJUS. 
 
 In the night, in the night, my Country, the stream 
 calls out from afar : 
 So swells thy voice through the ages, sonorous 
 and vast : 
 In the night, in the night, O my Country, clear flashes 
 the star : 
 So flashes on me thy face through the gloom of the 
 past. 
 
 I sleep not ; I watch : in blows the wind ice-wing'd, 
 and ice-finger' d : 
 My forehead it cools and slakes the fire in my 
 breast ; 
 Though it sighs o'er the plains where oft thine exiles 
 look'd back, and long linger'd, 
 And the graves where thy famish'd lie dumb and 
 thine outcasts find rest. 
 
 For up from those vales wherein thy brave and thy 
 beautiful moulder. 
 And on through the homsteads waste and the 
 temples defiled. 
 
106 IN RUIN RECONCILED. 
 
 A voice goes forth on that wind, as old as the Islands 
 and older, 
 ' God reigns : at His feet earth's Destiny sleeps 
 like a child.' 
 
 IN RUIN BEGONCILED. 
 
 A.D. 1660. 
 
 I HEARD a Woman's voice that wailed 
 Between the sandhills and the sea : 
 
 The famished sea-bird past me sailed 
 Into the dim infinity. 
 
 I saw on boundless rainy moors 
 Far off I saw a great Rock loom ; 
 
 The grey dawn smote its iron doors ; 
 And then I knew it for a Tomb. 
 
 Two queenly shapes before the grate 
 
 Watched, couchant on the barren ground ; 
 
 Two regal Shades in ruined state, 
 
 One Gael ; one Norman ; both discrowned. 
 
 THE CHANGED MUSIC. 
 
 The shock of meeting clans is o'er : 
 The knightly or the native shout 
 
 Pursues no more by field or shore 
 From rath to cairne, the ruined rout. 
 
THE MINSTREL OF THE LATER DAY. 107 
 
 O'er dusty stalls old banners trail 
 
 In mouldering fanes : while far beneath 
 
 At last the Norman and the Gael 
 Lie wedded in the caves of death. 
 
 No more the Bard-song ! dead the strains 
 
 That mixed defiance, grief, and laugh : 
 Old legends haunt no more the plains, 
 
 Half saintly and barbaric half. 
 Changed is the music. Sad and slow 
 
 Beyond the horizon's tearful verge 
 The elegiac wailings flow 
 
 The fragments of the broken dirge. 
 
 THE MINSTREL OF THE LATER DAY. 
 
 What art thou, O thou Loved and Lost 
 
 That, fading from me, leav'st me bare % 
 The last trump of a vanquished host 
 
 Far off expiring on the air 
 So cheats in death the listener's ear 
 
 As thou dost cheat this aching heart : 
 To me thy Past looked strangely near j 
 
 Distant and dim seems that thou art. 
 
 O Eire ! the things I loved in thee 
 
 Were dead long years ere I was born : 
 
108 THE ' CURSE OF CROMWELL.' 
 
 Yet still their shadows lived for me 
 An evening twilight like the morn ; 
 
 But daily now with vulgarer hand 
 
 The Present sweeps those phantoms by :- 
 
 Like annals of an alien land 
 
 Thy history's self appears to die. 
 
 ODE. 
 THE 'CURSE OF GBOMWELr ; 
 
 OR, THE DESOLATION OF THE WEST. 
 
 In trance I roamed that Land forlorn, 
 By battle first, then famine worn ; 
 
 I walked in gloom and dread : 
 The Land remained : the hills were there : 
 The vales : but few remained to share 
 
 That realm untenanted. 
 
 Far-circling wastes, far-bending skies ; 
 Clouds as at Nature's obsequies 
 
 Slow trailing scarf and pall : 
 In whistling winds on creaked the crane : 
 Grey lakes upstared from moor and plain 
 
 Like eyes on God that call. 
 
 Turn where I might, no blade of green 
 Diversified the tawny scene : 
 
 Bushless the waste, and bare : 
 A dusky red the hills as though 
 Some deluge ebbing years ago 
 
 Had left but seaweed there. 
 
THE 'CURSE OF CROMWELL.' 109 
 
 Dark red the vales : that single hue 
 O'er rotting swamps an aspect threw 
 
 Monotonous yet grand : 
 Long-feared for centuries in decay 
 Like a maimed lion there it lay, 
 
 What once had been a Land. 
 
 Yet, day by day, as dropt the sun 
 A furnace glare through vapours dun 
 
 Illumed each mountain's head : 
 Old tower and keep their crowns of flame 
 That hour assumed ; old years of shame 
 
 Like fiends exorcised, fled. 
 
 That hour, from sorrow's trance awaking, 
 My soul, like day from darkness breaking 
 
 With might prophetic fired 
 To those red hills and setting suns 
 Returned antiphonal response 
 
 As gleam by gleam expired. 
 
 And in my spirit grew and gathered 
 Knowledge that Ireland's worst was weathered 
 
 Her last dread penance paid ; 
 Conviction that for earthly scath 
 In world-wide victories of her Faith 
 
 Atonement should be made. 
 
 That hour as one who walks in vision 
 Of God's ' New Heavens ' I had fruition 
 
 And saw, and inly burned : 
 And I beheld the multitude 
 Of those whose robes were washed in blood 
 
 Saw chains to sceptres turned ! 
 
110 THE 'CURSE OF CROMWELL.' 
 
 And I saw Thrones, and Seers thereon 
 Judging, and Tribes like snow that shone 
 
 And diamond towers high-piled, 
 Towers of that City theirs at last 
 Through tribulations who have passed, 
 
 And theirs, the undefiled. 
 
 A Land became a Monument ! 
 
 Man works ; but God's concealed intent 
 
 Converts his worst to best : 
 The first of Altars was a Tomb 
 Ireland ! thy grave-stone shall become 
 
 God's Altar in the West ! 
 
 PEACE. 
 
 Seraph that from the blue abyss 
 
 O'erlook'st the storms round earth that roll 
 While we, by fragments wildered, miss 
 
 The dread perfection of the whole 
 Draw near at last ! A moment lean 
 
 Upon that earth's tumultuous breast 
 Thy hand heart-healing, and serene 
 
 And grant the anguished planet rest ! 
 
THE BALLAD OF THE LADY TURNED BEGGAR. Ill 
 
 THE BALLAD OF THE LADY TURNED 
 BEGGAR. 
 
 The Irish who fought for Charles I., and whose estates 
 were confiscated on that account, looked in vain, with a 
 few exceptions, for their restoration on the accession of 
 Charles II. The widow of one of these Royalists, Lord 
 Roche, in her old age used to be seen begging in the streets 
 of Cork. 
 
 * Drop an alms on shrunken fingers/ faintly with a 
 
 smile she said ; 
 But the smile was not of pleasure, and unroselike was 
 
 the red : 
 ' Fasts wear thin the pride fantastic ; one I left at 
 
 home lacks bread.' 
 
 II. 
 
 Lady ! hard is the beginning so they say of 
 
 shameless sinning : 
 Ah but, loss disguised in winning, easier grows it 
 
 day by day, 
 May thy shamefaced, sinless pleading to the unhearing 
 
 or the unheeding 
 Lacerate less an inly bleeding bosom ere those locks 
 
 grow grey ; 
 Locks whose midnight once was lighted with the 
 
 diamond's changeful ray ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Silks worn bare with work's abusing ; cheek made 
 
 wan with hailstorm's bruising ; 
 Eye its splendour slowly losing ; state less stately in 
 
 decay ; 
 
112 THE BALLAD OF THE LADY TURNED BEGGAR. 
 
 Chanting ballad or old ditty year by year she roam'd 
 
 the city : 
 Love at first is kin to pity ; pity to contempt, men 
 
 say; 
 Wonder lessen'd, reverence slackened, as the raven 
 
 locks grew grey. 
 
 IV. 
 
 What is that makes sadness sadder"? What is that 
 
 makes madness madder 1 
 Shame, a sharper-venomed adder, gnaws when looks 
 
 once kind betray ! 
 * She is poor : the poor are common ! 'Twas a 
 
 countess : 'tis a woman ; 
 Looks she has at times scarce human : England ! 
 
 there should be her stay : 
 'Twas for Charles the old lord battled Charles and 
 
 England so men say.' 
 
 V. 
 
 Charles ! Whitehall ! the wine, the revel ! ' No, she 
 sinks not to thai level ! 
 
 Mime or pander ; king or devil ; she will die on 
 Ireland's shore ! 
 
 Ne'er, till Portsmouth's brazen forehead grows with 
 virtuous blushes florid 
 
 Will she pass that gate abhorred, climb that stair- 
 case, tread that floor ; 
 
 Let that forehead wear the diamond which Lord 
 Roche's widow wore ! 
 
THE IRISH SLAVE IN BARBADOES. 113 
 
 VI. 
 
 Critic guest through Ireland wending, careless praise 
 
 with cavil blending, 
 Wonder not, in old man bending, or in beggar boys 
 
 at play. 
 Wonder not at aspect regal, princely front or eye of 
 
 eagle : 
 Common these where baying beagle, or the wire- 
 
 hair'd wolf-hound grey 
 Chased old nobles once through woodlands which the 
 
 ignoble made their prey. 
 Centuries three that sport renewed they thrice a 
 
 century so men say. 
 
 THE IRISH SLAVE IN BAEBADOES. 
 
 Beside our shieling spread an oak, 
 
 Close by, a beech, its brother : 
 Between them rose the pale blue smoke ; 
 
 They mingled each with other. 
 
 The gold mead stretched before our door 
 Beyond the church- tower taper ; 
 
 The river wound into the moor 
 In distance lost and vapour. 
 
 Amid green hazels, cradle-swung. 
 
 Our babe with rapture dancing, 
 Watched furry shapes the roots among. 
 
 With beaded eyes forth glancing. 
 
114 THE IKISH SLAVE IN BARBADOES. 
 
 Ah, years of blessing ! E-ich no more 
 Yet grateful and contented, 
 
 The lands that Stafford from us tore 
 No longer we lamented. 
 
 So fared it till that night of woe 
 When, from the mountains blaring, 
 
 The deep horns rang ' The foe, the foe ! ' 
 And fires were round us glaring. 
 
 He went : next day our hearth was cold, 
 Then came that week of slaughter : 
 
 I woke within the ship's black hold 
 And heard the rushing water. 
 
 Ah ! those that seemed our life can die 
 Yet we live on and wither ! 
 
 Fling out thy fires, thou Indian sky : 
 Toss all thy torches hither ! 
 
 Send, salt morass and swamps of cane 
 Send forth your ambushed fever ! 
 
 O death, unstrain at last my chain 
 And bid me rest for ever ! 
 
 ABC HBI SHOP PLUNKET. 
 
 (the last victim of THE * POPISH PLOT.') 
 
 July 11, a.d. 1681. 
 
 ' The Earl of Essex went to the king (Charles II.) to apply 
 for a pardon, and told his Majesty " the witnesses must needs 
 be perjured, as what they swore could not possibly be true." 
 But liis Majesty answered in a j)assion, " Why did you not 
 declare this, then, at the trial ? I dare pardon nobody 
 his blood be upon your head, and not mine ! " ' Haverty's 
 History of Ireland. See also Cardinal Moran's Life of Arch- 
 bishop Plimket. 
 
ARCHBISHOP PLUNKET. 115 
 
 Why crowd ye windows thus, and doors 1 
 
 Why climb ye tower and steeple 'i 
 What lures you forth, senators 1 
 
 What goads you here, O people ? 
 
 Here there is nothing worth your note 
 
 'Tis but an old man dying : 
 The noblest stag this season caught 
 
 And in the old nets lying ! 
 
 Sirs, there are marvels, but not here : 
 
 Here's but the threadbare fable 
 Whose sense nor sage discerns, nor seer ; * 
 
 Unwilling is unable ! 
 
 That prince who lurk'd in bush and brake 
 While bloodhounds bay'd behind him 
 
 Now, to his father's throne brought back. 
 In pleasure's mesh doth wind him. 
 
 The primate of that race, whose sword 
 
 Stream' d last to save that father. 
 To-day is reaping such reward 
 
 As Irish virtues gather. 
 
 His Faith King Charles partakes and hides ! 
 
 Ah, caitiif crowned, and craven ! 
 Not his to breast the rough sea tides ; 
 
 He rocks in peaceful haven. 
 
 Great heart ! Pray well in heaven this night 
 
 From dungeon loosed, and hovel, 
 For souls that blacken in God's light, 
 
 That know the Truth, yet grovel. 
 
116 A BALLAD OF SARSFIELD. 
 
 A BALLAD OF SABSFIELD ; 
 
 OR, THE BURSTING OF THE GUNS. 
 A.D. 1690. 
 
 Sarsfield rode out the Dutch to rout, 
 
 And to take and break their cannon ; 
 To mass went he at half -past three, 
 
 And at four he cross'd the Shannon. 
 
 Tirconnel slept. In dream his thoughts 
 
 Old fields of victory ran on ; 
 And the chieftains of Thomond in Limerick's towers 
 
 Slept well by the banks of Shannon. 
 
 He rode ten miles and he cross'd the ford. 
 And couch'd in the wood and waited ; 
 
 Till, left and right, on march'd in sight 
 That host which the true men hated. 
 
 * Charge ! ' Sarsfield cried ; and the green hill- side 
 
 As they charged replied in thunder ; 
 They rode o'er the plain and they rode o'er the slain, 
 
 And the rebel rout lay under ! 
 
 He burn'd the gear the knaves held dear, 
 
 For his King he fought, not plunder ; 
 With powder he cramm'd the guns, and ramm'd 
 
 Their mouths the red soil under. 
 
 The spark flash' d out like a nation's shout 
 
 The sound into heaven ascended ; 
 The hosts of the sky made to earth reply 
 
 And the thunders twain were blended ! 
 
A BALLAD OF ATHLONE. 117 
 
 Sarsfield rode out the Dutch to rout, 
 And to take and break their cannon 
 
 A century after, Sarsfield's laughter 
 Was echoed from Dungannon. 
 
 A BALLAD OF ATHLONE; 
 
 OR, HOW THEY BROKE DOWN THE BRIDGE. 
 
 Does any man dream that a Gael can fear ? 
 
 Of a thousand deeds let him learn but one ! 
 The Shannon swept onward, broad and clear 
 
 Between the leaguers and worn Athlone. 
 
 ' Break down the bridge ! ' Six warriors rushed 
 Through the storm of shot and the storm of shell 
 
 With late, but certain, victory flushed 
 The grim Dutch gunners eyed them well. 
 
 They wrenched at the planks 'mid a hail of fire : 
 They fell in death, their work half done : 
 
 The bridge stood fast ; and nigh and nigher 
 The foe swarmed darkly, densely on. 
 
 ' who for Erin will strike a stroke 1 
 
 Who hurl yon planks where the waters roar 1 ' 
 
 Six warriors forth from their comrades broke 
 And flung them upon that bridge once more. 
 
 Again at the rocking planks they dashed ; 
 
 And four dropped dead ; and two remained : 
 The huge beams groaned, and the arch down- 
 crashed ; 
 
 Two stalwart swimmers the margin gained. 
 
118 THE REQUITAL. 
 
 St. E-uth in his stirrups stood up and cried, 
 ^ I have seen no deed like that in France ! ' 
 
 With a toss of his head Sarsfield replied 
 
 ' They had luck, the dogs ! 'Twas a merry chance ! ' 
 
 many a year upon Shannon's side 
 
 They sang upon moor and they sang upon heath 
 Of the twain that breasted that raging tide, 
 
 And the ten that shook bloody hands with Death ! 
 
 THE REQUITAL. 
 
 We too had our day ; it was brief : it is ended 
 
 When a King dwelt among us; no strange King 
 but ours ! 
 When the shout of a People delivered ascended 
 
 And shook the broad banner that hung on his 
 towers. 
 We saw it like trees in a summer breeze shiver ; 
 
 We read the gold legend that blazoned it o'er : 
 ' To-day ; now or never ! To-day and for ever ! ' 
 
 O God, have we seen it to see it no more % 
 
 II. 
 
 How fared it that season, our lords and our masters, 
 In that spring of our freedom how fared it with 
 you 1 
 Did we trample your Faith? Did we mock your 
 disasters ? 
 We restored but his own to the leal and the true. 
 
THE LAST MAC CARTHYMORE. 119 
 
 Ye had fallen? 'Twas a season of tempest and 
 troubles : 
 But against you we drew not that knife ye had 
 drawn ; 
 In the war-field we met ; but your prelates and 
 nobles 
 Stood up 'mid the senate in ermine and lawn ! 
 
 THE LAST MAG CARTHYMORE. 
 
 On thy woody heaths, Muskerry Carbery, on thy 
 
 famish'd shore, 
 Hands hurl'd upwards, wordless wailings, clamour 
 
 for Mac Cart hy more ! 
 He is gone ; and never, never shall return to wild or 
 
 wood 
 Till the sun burns out in blackness and the moon 
 
 descends in blood. 
 
 He, of lineage older, nobler, at the latest Stuart's 
 
 side 
 Drew once more his father's sword for Charles in 
 
 blood of traitors dyed : 
 Once again the stranger fattens where Mac Carthys 
 
 ruled of old. 
 For a later Cromwell triumphs in the Dutchman's 
 
 muddier mould. 
 
 Broken boat and barge around him, sea-gulls piping 
 
 loud and shrill. 
 Sits the chief where bursts the breaker, and laments 
 
 the sea-wind chill 
 
120 THE LAST MAC CARTHYMORE. 
 
 In a barren northern island dinn'd by ocean's endless 
 
 roar 
 Where the Elbe with all his waters streams between 
 
 the willows hoar. 
 
 Earth is wide in hill and valley; palace courts and 
 convent piles 
 
 Centuries since received thine outcasts, Ireland, oft 
 with tears and smiles : 
 
 Wherefore builds this grey-hair 'd Exile on a rock- 
 isle's weedy neck ? 
 
 Ocean unto ocean calleth; inly yearneth wreck to 
 wreck ! 
 
 He and his, his Church and Country, King and kins- 
 men, house and home, 
 
 Wrecks they are like broken galleys strangled by the 
 yeasty foam : 
 
 Nations past and nations present are or shall be soon 
 as these 
 
 Words of peace to him come only from the breast of 
 raging seas. 
 
 Clouds and sea-birds inland drifting o'er the sea-bar 
 and sand-plain ; 
 
 Belts of mists for weeks unshifting; plunge of de- 
 vastating rain ; 
 
 Icebergs as they pass uplifting aguish gleams 
 through vapours f rore. 
 
 These, long years, were thy companions, thou last 
 Mac Carthymore ! 
 
 When a rising tide at midnight rush'd against the 
 
 downward stream 
 Rush'd not then the clans embattled meeting in the 
 
 Chieftain's dream ? 
 
A HUNDRED YEARS. 121 
 
 When once more that tide exhausted died in mur- 
 murs towards the main 
 
 Died not then once more his slogan, ebbing far o'er 
 hosts of slain ? 
 
 Pious river ! let us rather hope the low monotonies 
 
 Of thy broad stream seaward toiling and the willow- 
 bending breeze 
 
 Charm' d at times a midday slumber, tranquillised 
 tempestuous breath, 
 
 Music last when harp was broken, requiem sad and 
 sole in death. 
 
 A HUNDRED YJEABS ; 
 
 OR, RELIGIO NOVISSIMA. 
 
 There is an Order by a northern sea. 
 
 Far in the West, of rule and life more strict 
 
 Than that which Basil reared in Galilee, 
 In Egypt Paul, in Umbria Benedict. 
 
 Discalced it walks ; a stony land of tombs 
 A strange Petrsea of late days, it treads ! 
 
 Within its court no high-tossed censer fumes ; 
 The night-rain beats its cells, the wind its beds. 
 
 Before its eyes no brass-bound, blazon' d tome 
 Reflects the splendour of a lamp high-hung : 
 
 Knowledge is banish'd from her earliest home 
 
 Like wealth : it whispers psalms that once it sung. 
 
 It is not bound by the vow celibate 
 
 Lest, through its ceasing, anguish too might cease ; 
 
122 QUOMODO SEDET SOLA. 
 
 In sorrow it brings forth ; and Death and Fate 
 Watch at Life's gate, and tithe the unripe in- 
 crease. 
 
 It wears not the Franciscan's cord or gown ; 
 
 The cord that binds it is the Stranger's chain : 
 Scarce seen for scorn, in fields of old renown 
 
 It breaks the clod ; another reaps the grain. 
 
 Year after year it fasts ; each third or fourth 
 So fasts that fasts of men to it are feast ; 
 
 Then of its brethren many in the earth 
 
 Are laid unrequiem'd like the mountain-beast. 
 
 Where are its cloisters ? Where the felon sleeps ! 
 
 Where its novitiate-? Where the last wolf died ! 
 From sea to sea its vigil long it keeps 
 
 Stern Foundress ! is its Rule not mortified 1 
 
 Thou that hast laid so many an Order waste, 
 A Nation is thine Order ! It was thine 
 
 Wide as a realm that Order's seed to cast, 
 And undispensed sustain its discipline. 
 
 QUOMODO SEDET SOLA.' 
 
 How sits the City lonely and uncrowned ; 
 
 (Thus the old Priests renewed that Hebrew song) * 
 She sits a widowed queen in weepings drowned ; 
 
 Her friends revile her who should mourn her wrong. 
 
 Behold, her streets are silent and her gate ; 
 And as the sea her sorrows are increased, 
 
 * ' The Lamentations. ' 
 
SPES UNICA. 123 
 
 The Daughter of my People, desolate ; 
 
 And no man mounteth to her solemn feast. 
 
 To them that brought her comfort she hath said, 
 ' My children strove, and each by each is slain : 
 
 I turned from Him to Whom my youth was wed : 
 Therefore the heathen hosts my courts profane. 
 
 ' The bruised reed He brake not ; neither cried, 
 
 Nor strove, nor smote : He set the prisoners free : 
 
 But sons of mine oppressed His poor, and lied. 
 Nor walked in judgment and in equity.' 
 
 Thus sang the Priests, and ended, ' Christ was led 
 Lamb-like to death. His mouth He opened not : 
 
 He gave His life to raise from death the dead : 
 That God Who sends our penance shared our lot.' 
 
 >SfP^>S' UNICA. 
 
 Between two mountains' granite walls one star 
 Shines in this sea-lake quiet as the grave; 
 
 The ocean moans against its rocky bar ; 
 That star no reflex finds in foam or wave. 
 
 II. 
 
 Saints of our country : if no more a Nation 
 Yain are henceforth her struggles, from on high 
 
 Fix in the bosom of her desolation 
 
 So much the more that Hope which cannot die ! 
 
124 SEDERUNT IN TERRA. 
 
 SEDERUNT IN TEBBA. 
 
 ' The Lord hath spread His net about her feet 
 
 And down hath hurled her wall in heaps around ; ' 
 
 Thus sang her Elders, as their breasts they beat, 
 Her virgins with their garlands on the ground. 
 
 ^ The head of Sion to the dust is brought : 
 
 Her Kings are slain or scattered by the sword : 
 
 Her ancient Law is made a thing of nought : 
 Her Prophets find not Vision from the Lord. 
 
 ' Because they showed thee not thy sin of old, 
 Servants this day have lordship o'er thy race : 
 
 From thine own wells thou draw'st thy drink for 
 gold; 
 And Gentile standards mock thy Holy Place. 
 
 * Thy little children made an idle quest 
 
 " Where where is bread 1 " As wounded men 
 they lay 
 
 In every street. Upon their mothers' breast 
 
 At last they breathed their souls in death away.' 
 
 The Priests made answer, ' Christ on Olivet 
 
 Prayed to His Father. Pray thou well this day. 
 
 His chalice passed Him not. Therefore thy debt 
 Is cancelled. Watch with Him one hour, and pray.' 
 
DEEP CKIETH UNTO DEEP. 125 
 
 DEEP GBIETH UNTO DEEP. 
 
 I. 
 Beside that Eastern sea there first exalted 
 
 Thus sang, not Bard, but Priest, *The Cross lies 
 low ! ' 
 Sad St. Sophia, 'neath thy roofs gold-vaulted 
 
 Who kneels this hour? the blind and turban'd 
 Foe ! 
 
 II. 
 O Eire ! a sister hast thou in thy sorrow ! 
 
 If thine the earlier, hers the bitterer moan : 
 She weeps to-day; great Home may weep to- 
 morrow ! 
 Claim not that o'er-proud boast to weep alone. 
 
 ADHJSSPf LINGUA LACTANTIS. 
 
 ' Thy woes have made thy heart as iron hard : 
 
 Lo ! the sea-monsters yield their young the breast ; 
 
 But thou the gates of thine increase hast barred ; 
 And scorn' st to grant thine offspring bread or rest. 
 
 ' Thy lordly ones within thy womb conceived 
 And nursed in scarlet, wither is thy drouth ; 
 
 The tongue of him, thy suckling babe, hath cleaved 
 To that dry skin which roofed his milkless mouth. 
 
 * Put down thy lips into the road-side dust ; 
 
 And whisper softly through that dust, and say, 
 " Although He slay me, yet in God I trust ; 
 
 He made, and can re-make me. Let Him slay ! " 
 
126 THE PROMISE. 
 
 ' Behold ! to tarry for the Lord is good ; 
 
 His faithfulness for ever shall remain ; 
 His mercies as the mornings are renewed : 
 
 The man that waits Him shall not wait in vain. 
 
 ' Within thy bones He made His lire to burn 
 
 That thou might' st hate the paths thy feet have 
 trod : 
 
 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return ; ' 
 
 Thus sang the Priests. ' Thy refuge is thy God.' 
 
 TRJE PROMISE. 
 
 As the church-bells rolled forth their sonorous Evan- 
 gel, 
 Their last ere the Stranger usurped the old pile, 
 I heard 'mid their clangour the voice of an Angel 
 Give words to that music which rushed o'er the 
 Isle: 
 ' In thousand-fold echoes, thy God, unforsaking. 
 That peal shall send back from the heavenly 
 bourne : 
 hearts that are broken, O hearts that are breaking. 
 Be strong, for the glories gone by shall return.' 
 
 Thenceforth in the wood and the tempests that din it 
 In the thunder of mountains the moan of the 
 shore. 
 That chime I can hear and the clear song within it 
 . The voice of that Angel who sings evermore, 
 
THE PROMISE. 127 
 
 ' The Faith shall grow vast though the Faithful grow 
 fewer ; 
 
 By sorrow uplifted ascend eth their Throne 
 Who resist the ill deed but not hate the ill-doer, 
 
 Who forgive, unpartaking, all sins but their own.' 
 
 Only a reed that sighed 
 
 And the Poplar grove hard by 
 From a million of babbling mouths replied, 
 
 * Who cares, who cares ? Not I ! ' 
 
 Only a dove's low moan 
 
 And the new-gorged raven near 
 Let fall from the red beak the last white bone, 
 
 And answered, half croak, half sneer. 
 
 Only the Silk of the Kine 
 
 Far driven on the foot that bled : 
 
 And only old Argial's bleeding pine ; 
 And the Black E-ose that once was red. 
 
 ODE. 
 
 THE CYCLIC RENOVATION. 
 
 The unvanquish'd Land puts forth each year 
 New growth of man and forest ; 
 
 Her children vanish ; but on her. 
 Stranger, in vain thou warrest ! 
 
128 ODE. 
 
 She wrestles, strong through hope sublime, 
 Thick darkness round her pressing 
 
 Wrestles with God's great Angel, Time 
 And wins, though maim'd, the blessing. 
 
 As night draws in what day sent forth 
 
 As Spring is born of Winter 
 As flowers that hide in parent earth 
 
 Re-issue from the centre, 
 Our Land takes back her wasted brood. 
 
 Our Land in respiration, 
 Breathes from her deep heart unsubdued 
 
 A renovated nation ! 
 
 III. 
 
 A Nation dies : a People lives : 
 
 Through Signs Celestial ranging 
 A Kace's Destiny survives 
 
 Unchanged, yet ever changing : 
 The many-centuried Wrath goes by ; 
 
 But while earth's tumult rages 
 ' In coelo quies.' Burst and die 
 
 Thou storm of temporal ages ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Burst, and thine utmost fury wreak 
 
 On things that are but seeming ! 
 First kill ; then die : that God may speak, 
 
 And man surcease from dreaming ! 
 That Love and Justice strong as love 
 
 May be the poles unshaken 
 Round which a world new-born may move 
 
 And Truth that slept may waken ! 
 
THE SPIRITUAL RENOVATION. 129 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL RENOVATION. 
 
 The Watchman stood on the turret : 
 
 He looked to the south and the east : 
 But the Kings of the south were sleeping, 
 
 And the eastern Kings at feast. 
 
 Not yet is thy help : not yet 
 
 Hast thou paid the uttermost debt : 
 Not reached is the worst, thou Weeper : 
 
 Though thy feet God meteth their tread 
 
 Have dinted the green sea's bed, 
 There are depths in the mid sea deeper ! 
 Not all God's waves and His billows 
 
 As yet have gone over thy head, 
 That Penance and Faith should be lords o'er Death, 
 
 And that Hell should be vanquished. 
 
 II. 
 
 I heard thine Angel that sighed 
 
 Three times, ' Descend to the deep.' 
 I heard at his side the Archangel that cried 
 
 ' To the depth that is under the deep.' 
 Who made thee and shaped thee of old 
 
 It is He in the darkness that lays thee 
 With the cerements around thee ninefold ; 
 That Earth, when the waking is thine, 
 May look on His Hand divine. 
 
 And answer, ' None other might raise thee 
 
 III. 
 Noble, and Chieftain and Prince, 
 
 They were thine in thy day, and died : 
 
130 A SONG OF THE BRIGADE. 
 
 The head and the members were scattered long 
 since 1 
 
 Shall a sinew, or nerve abide 1 
 So long as of that dead clay 
 
 Two atoms together cleave 
 God's trumpet that calls thee thou canst not obey, 
 
 His promise receive and believe. 
 So long as the seed, the husk. 
 
 The body of death, and the prison. 
 Holds out, undissolved, in the dusk 
 
 So long in his pains and his chains 
 The unglorified Spirit remains ; 
 
 The New Body unrisen. 
 
 A SONG OF THE BRIGADE. 
 
 The Irish Brigade, consisting originally of soldiers of James 
 II., took service with more than one continental sovereign. In 
 many a land it made the name of Ireland famous. The Brigade 
 was recruited from Ireland till the latter part of the eigliteenth 
 century, and it is said that, from first to last, nearly 500,000 
 men belonged to it. 
 
 I SNATCHED a stone from the bloodied brook 
 And hurled it at my household door ! 
 
 No farewell of my love I took : 
 I shall see my friend no more. 
 
 I dashed across the churchyard bound : 
 I knelt not by my parents' graves : 
 
 There rang from my heart a clarion's sound 
 That summoned me o'er the weaves. 
 
 No land to me can native be 
 
 That strangers trample and tyrants stain : 
 
A SONG OF THE BRIGADE. 131 
 
 When the valleys I loved are cleansed and free 
 They are mine, they are mine again ! 
 
 Till then, in sunshine or sunless weather, 
 By Seine and Loire, and the broad Garonne, 
 
 My war-horse and I roam on together 
 Wherever God wills. On ! on ! 
 
 A SONa OF THE BBIGABE, 
 
 River that through this purple plain 
 Toilest once redder to the main 
 Go, kiss for me the banks of Seine ; 
 
 Tell him I loved, and love for aye, 
 That his I am though far away, 
 More his than on the marriage-day. 
 
 Tell him thy flowers for him I twine 
 When first the slow sad mornings shine 
 In thy dim glass ; for he is mine. 
 
 Tell him when evening's tearful light 
 
 Bathes those dark towers on Aughrim^s height 
 
 There where he fought in heart I fight. 
 
 A freeman's banner o'er him waves ! 
 
 So be it ! I but tend the graves 
 
 Where freemen sleep whose sons are slaves. 
 
 Tell him I nurse his noble race 
 Nor weep save o'er one sleeping face 
 Wherein those looks of his I trace. 
 
132 SONG. 
 
 For him my beads I count when falls 
 Moonbeam or shower at intervals 
 Upon our burn'd and blacken'd walls : 
 
 And bless him ! bless the bold Brigade 
 May God go with them, horse and blade, 
 For Faith's defence, and Ireland's aid ! 
 
 soNa. 
 I. 
 
 Not always the winter ! not always the wail ! 
 
 The heart heals perforce where the spirit is pure ! 
 The apple smells sweet in the glens of Imayle ; 
 
 The blackbird sings loud by the Slane and the 
 Suir ! 
 There are princes no more in Kincora and Tara, 
 But the gold-flower laughs out from the Mague at 
 
 Athdara ; 
 And the Spring-tide that wakens the leaf in the 
 
 bud, 
 Sad Mother, forgive us, shoots joy through our 
 blood ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Not always the winter ! not always the moan ! 
 
 Our fathers, they tell us, in old time were free : 
 Free to-day is the stag in the woods of Idrone, 
 
 And the eagle that fleets from Loch Lene o'er the 
 Lee! 
 The blue-bells rise up where the young May hath 
 
 trod ; 
 The souls of our martyrs are reigning with God ! 
 Sad Mother, forgive us ! yon skylark no choice 
 Permits ns ! From h^ven he is crying ' Eejoice ! ' 
 
A SONG OF THE BKIGADE. 133 
 
 A SONG OF THE BBIGABE, 
 
 A.D. 1706. 
 
 What sound goes up among the Alps ! 
 
 The shouts of Irish battle ! 
 The echoes reach their snowy scalps ; 
 
 From cliff to cliff they rattle ! 
 In vain he strove the Duke Eugene : 
 
 That flying host to rally : 
 The squadrons green, they swept it clean 
 
 Beyond Marsiglia's valley. 
 
 Who fixed their standards on thy wall, 
 
 Long-leaguered Barcelona ! 
 Unfallen, who saw the bravest fall ? 
 
 Beply, betrayed Cremona ! 
 O graves of Sarsfield and of Clare ! 
 
 O Ramillies and Landen,"^ 
 Their brand we bear : their faith we share 
 
 Their cause we'll ne'er abandon ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Years passed : again went by the Bard 
 The law that banned him braving : 
 
 Where blood of old had stained the sward 
 Summer corn was waving : 
 
 * O'Brien, Lord Clare, fell at the battle of Ramillies, a.d. 
 1706 ; Sarstield, Earl of Lncan, on the field of Landen, A.D. 
 1693. Catching in his hand the blood that trickled from his 
 death-wound, he exclaimed, ' that this had been for Ireland ! ' 
 
134 
 
 THE SEA-WATCHEE. 
 
 The tempest of a sudden joy 
 Uplifting stave and stanza, 
 
 The valleys echoed ' Fontenoy,' 
 The wild sea-shore ' Almanza ! 
 
 THE SEA-WATCHER. 
 
 The crags lay dark in strange eclipse : 
 
 Fi-om waves late flushed the glow was gone 
 The topsails of the far-off ships 
 
 Alone in lessening radiance shone : 
 Against a stranded boat a maid 
 
 Stood leaning gunwale to her breast, 
 As though its pain that pressui-e stayed : 
 
 Her large eyes rested on the west. 
 
 II. 
 
 ' Beyond the sea ! beyond the sea ! 
 
 The weeks, the months, the years go by ! 
 Ah ! when will some one say of me 
 
 " Beyond the sky ! beyond the sky ! " 
 And yet I would not have thee here 
 
 To look upon thy country's shame : 
 For me the tear : for me the bier : 
 
 For thee fair field, and honest fame. 
 
THE FRIENDLY BLIGHT. 135 
 
 THE FRIENDLY BLIGHT, 
 
 A MARCH-WIND sang in a frosty wood 
 
 'Twas in Oriel's land on a mountain brown 
 While the woodman stared at the hard black bud, 
 
 And the sun through mist went down : 
 ' Not always,' it sang, * shall triumph the wrong 
 
 For God is stronger than man, they say : ' 
 Let no man tell of the March- wind's song. 
 
 Till comes the appointed day. 
 
 ' Sheaf after sheaf upon Moira's plain, 
 
 And snow upon snow on the hills of Mourne ! 
 Full many a harvest-moon must wane 
 
 Full many a Spring return ! 
 The Eight shall triumph at last o'er wrong : 
 
 Yet none knows how, and none the day : ' 
 The March- wind sang ; and bit ^mid the song 
 
 The little black bud away ! 
 
 IIL 
 
 ' Blow south- wind on through my vineyard blow ! ' 
 
 So pray'd that land of the palm and vine ; 
 O Eire, 'tis the north wind and wintry snow 
 
 That strengthen thine oak and pine ! 
 The storm breaks oft upon Uladh's hills ; 
 
 Oft bursts the wave on the stones by Saul ; 
 In God's time cometh the thing God wills 
 
 For God is the Lord of all ! 
 
136 THE NEW RACE. 
 
 THE NEW RACE. 
 
 O YE who have vanquish'd the Land and retain it, 
 
 How little ye know what ye miss of delight ! 
 There are worlds in her heart, could ye seek it or 
 gain it. 
 That would clothe a true Noble with glory and 
 might. 
 What is she, this Isle which ye trample and ravage, 
 Which ye plough with oppression and reap with 
 the sword. 
 But a harp, never strung, in the hall of a savage 
 Or a fair wife embraced by a husband abhorr'd ? 
 
 II. 
 
 The chiefs of the Gael were the People embodied ; 
 
 The chiefs were the blossom, the People the root ! 
 Their conquerors the Normans, high-souFd, and high- 
 blooded. 
 
 Grew Irish at last from the scalp to the foot. 
 But ye ! ye are hirelings and satraps not Nobles ! 
 
 Your slaves, they detest you ; your masters, they 
 scorn ! 
 The river lives on ; but its sun-painted bubbles 
 
 Pass quick, to the rapids insensibly borne. 
 
THE IRISH EXILE AT FIESOLE. 137 
 
 THE lEISH EXILE AT FIESOLE. 
 
 Here to thine exile rest is sweet : 
 
 Here, Mother-land, thy breath is near him ! 
 Thy pontiff, Donat, raised his seat 
 
 On these fair hills that still revere him ; 
 Like him that thrill'd the Helvetian vale, 
 
 St. Gall's, with rock-resounded anthem : 
 For their sakes honoured is the Gael : 
 
 The peace they gave to men God grant them ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Far down in pomp the Arno winds 
 
 By domes the boast of old Keligion ; 
 The eternal azure shining blinds 
 
 Serene Ausonia's queenliest region. 
 Assunta be her name ! for bright 
 
 She sits, assumed 'mid heavenly glories ; 
 But ah ! more dear, though dark like night, 
 
 To me, my loved and lost Dolores ! 
 
 III. 
 
 The mild Franciscans say and sigh 
 
 ' Weep not except for Christ's dear Passion ! ' 
 They never saw their Florence lie. 
 
 Like her I mourn, in desolation ! 
 On this high crest they brood in rest. 
 
 The pines their Saint and them embowering, 
 While centuries blossom round their nest 
 
 Like those slow aloes seldom flowering. 
 
138 THE lEISH EXILE AT FIESOLB. 
 
 IV. 
 
 ' Salvete, flores Marty rum 1 ' 
 
 Such was the Roman Philip's greeting 
 In banner'd streets with myrtles dumb 
 
 The grave-eyed English college meeting : 
 There lived an older martyr-land ! 
 
 All realms revered her ; none would aid her 
 Or reaching forth a tardy hand 
 
 Enfeebled first, at last betrayed her ! 
 
 V. 
 
 Men named that land a ' younger Rome ! ' 
 She lit the north with radiance golden ; 
 
 Alone survives the Catacomb 
 
 Of all that Boman greatness olden ! 
 
 Her Cathall at Taranto sate : 
 
 Virgilius ! Saltzburgh was thy mission ! 
 Who sow'd the Faith fast long, feast late ; 
 
 Who reap'd retain unvex'd fruition. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Peace settles on the whitening hair ; 
 
 The heart that burned grows cold and colder ; 
 My Resurrection spot is there 
 
 Where those Etrurian ruins moulder. 
 Foot-sore, by yonder pillar's base 
 
 My rest I make, unknown and lowly : 
 And teach the legend-loving race 
 
 To weep a Troy than theirs more holy. 
 
WINTER SONG. 139 
 
 WINTER SONG. 
 
 The high-piled cloud drifts on as in scorn 
 Like a ghost, half pining, half stately, 
 
 Or a white ice-island in silence borne 
 O'er seas congeal'd but lately. 
 
 With nose to the ground like a wilder'd hound 
 O'er wood-leaves yellow and sodden 
 
 On races the wind but cannot find 
 
 One sweet track where Spring hath trodden. 
 
 The moor is black ; with frosty rime 
 
 The wither'd brier is beaded ; 
 The sluggard Spring hath o'erslept her time, 
 
 The Spring that was never more needed. 
 
 What says the oak-leaf in the night-cold noon, 
 And the beech-stock scofiing and surly % 
 
 ' Who comes too soon is a witless loon 
 Like the clown that is up too early.' 
 
 But the moss grows fair when the trees are bare. 
 The dumb year finds a pillow there ; 
 And beside it the fern with its green crown saith 
 ' Best bloometh the Hope that is rooted in death.' 
 
 GAIETY IN PENAL DAYS. 
 
 BEATI IMMACULATI. 
 
 ' The storm has roar'd by ; and the flowers reappear 
 Like a babe on the battle-field born, the new year 
 Through wrecks of the forest looks up on the skies 
 With a smile like the windflovver's, and violet eyes. 
 
140 . DIRGE. 
 
 ' There's warmth in the sunshine ; there's song in 
 
 the wood : . 
 There's faith in the spirit, and life in the blood ; 
 We'll dance though the Stranger inherits the soil : 
 We'll sow though we reap not ! For God be the 
 
 toil! 
 
 ' O Earth that renewest thy beautiful youth ! 
 "The meek shall possess thee \" Unchangeable Truth ! 
 A childhood thou giv'st us 'mid grey hairs reborn 
 As the gates we approach of perpetual morn ! ' 
 
 In the halls of their fathers an alien held feast ; 
 Their church was a cave and an outlaw their priest ; 
 The birds have their nests and the foxes have holes 
 What had these 1 Like a sunrise God shone in their 
 souls ! 
 
 DIRGE, 
 
 Ye trumpets of long-buried hosts 
 
 Peal, peal no longer in mine ears ! 
 No more afflict me, wailing ghosts 
 
 Of princedoms quell'd and vanished years ! 
 
 Freeze on my face, forbidden tears : 
 And thou, O heart whose hopes are dead 
 Sleep well, like hearts that sleep in lead 
 
 Embalmed 'mid royal sepulchres. 
 
 II. 
 
 The stream that one time rolled in blood 
 A stainless crystal winds to-day : 
 
UNA. 141 
 
 Fresh scions of the branded wood 
 Detain the flying feet of May : 
 The linnet chants 'mid ruins grey ; 
 The young lambs bound the graves among : 
 O Mother-land ! he does thee wrong 
 
 Who with thy playmates scorns to play. 
 
 UNA. 
 
 To the knee she stood 'mid rushes 
 
 And the broad, dark stream swept by her 
 
 Smiles went o'er her, smiles and blushes 
 As the stranger's bark drew nigh her ; 
 
 Near to Clonmacnoise she stood : 
 
 Shannon past her wound in flood. 
 
 By her side a wolf-hound wrestled 
 With a bright boy bold as Mars ; 
 
 On her breast an infant nestled 
 Like to her, but none of hers ; 
 
 A golden iris graced her hand 
 
 All her gold was in that wand. 
 
 O'er the misty, moorish margin 
 
 Frown'd a ruin'd tower afar ; 
 Some one said, ' This peasant virgin 
 
 Comes from chieftains great in war ! 
 Princes once had bow'd before her : 
 Now the reeds alone adore her ! ' 
 
 Eefluent dropt, that bark on gliding, 
 The wave it heaved along the bank : 
 
142 DOUBLE-LIVED. 
 
 Like worldings still with fortune siding 
 The reed-beds with it backward sank. 
 Farewell to her ! The rushing river 
 Must have its way. Farewell for ever ! 
 
 DOUBLE-LIVED; 
 
 OR, RACES CROWNED. 
 
 I. 
 
 Before the award, in those bright Halls 
 
 That rest upon the rolling spheres, 
 Like kingly patriarchs God instals 
 
 Long-suffering Kaces proved by years ; 
 They stand, the counterparts sublime 
 
 Of shapes that walk this world of woe. 
 Triumphant there in endless prime 
 
 While militant on earth below. 
 
 II. 
 
 As earth-mists build the snowy cloud 
 
 So Spirits risen, that conquered Fate, 
 Age after age up-borne in crowd, 
 
 That counterpart Assumed create : 
 Some form the statue's hand or head : 
 
 Some add the sceptre or the crown : 
 Till the great Image, perfected, 
 
 Smiles on its mortal semblance down. 
 
 III. 
 
 There stand the Nations just in act, 
 
 Or cleansed by suffering, cleansed not changed 
 
ADDUXIT IN TENEBRIS. 143 
 
 They stand of martyr Souls compact, 
 
 Round heaven's crystalline bastions ranged. 
 
 Among those Gods Elect art thou, 
 My Country loftier hour by hour ! 
 
 The earthly Erin bleeds below : 
 
 The heavenly reigns and rules in power. 
 
 ADDUXIT IN TENEBBIS. 
 
 They wish thee strong : they wish thee great ! 
 
 Thy royalty is in thy heart ! 
 Thy children mourn thy widow'd state 
 
 In funeral groves. Be what thou art ! 
 
 Across the world's vainglorious waste, 
 
 As o'er Egyptian sands, in thee 
 God's hieroglyph. His shade is cast, 
 
 A bar of black from Calvary. 
 
 Around thee many a land and race 
 
 Have wealth or sway or name in story ; 
 
 But on that brow discrown' d we trace 
 The crown expiatory. 
 
 DIRGE. 
 
 O WOODS that o'er the waters breathe 
 
 A sigh that grows from morn till night ; 
 
 O waters with your voice like death, 
 And yet consoling in your might ; 
 
144 IRISH AIRS. 
 
 Ye draw, ye drag me with a charm, 
 As when a river draws a leaf, 
 
 From silken court and citied swarm 
 To your cold homes of peace in grief. 
 
 II. 
 
 In boyhood's pride I trod the shore 
 
 While slowly sank a crimson sun 
 Revealed at moments, hid once more 
 
 By rolling mountains gold or dun : 
 But now I haunt its marge when day 
 
 Hath laid his fulgent sceptre by. 
 And tremble over waters grey 
 
 Long windows of a hueless sky. 
 
 IBIBH AIRS 
 
 I. 
 
 On darksome hills thy songs I hear : 
 
 Nor growths they seem of minstrel art 
 Nor wanderers from Urania's sphere. 
 
 But voices from thine own deep heart ! 
 They seem thine own sad oracles 
 
 Not uttered by thy sons but thee, 
 Like waters forced through stony cells 
 
 Or winds from cave and hollow tree. 
 
 II. 
 
 From thee what forced them ? Futile quest ! 
 
 What draws to widowed eyes the tears ? 
 The milk to Rachel's childless breast % 
 
 The blood to wounds unstaunched of years ? 
 
HOPE IN DEATH. 145 
 
 Long cling the storm-drops cling yet shake 
 
 On cypress-spire and cedar's fan : 
 Long rust upon the guilty brake 
 
 The heart-drops of the murdered man. 
 
 HOPE IN DEATH. 
 
 Descend, O Sun, o'er yonder waste, 
 
 O'er moors and meads and meadows : 
 Make gold a world but late o'ercast ; 
 
 With purple tinge the shadows ! 
 Thou goest to bless some happier clime 
 
 Than ours ; but sinking slowly 
 To us thou leav'st a hope sublime 
 
 Disguised in melancholy. 
 
 II. 
 
 A Love there is that shall restore 
 
 What Death and Fate take from us ; 
 A secret Love whose gift is more 
 
 Than Faith's authentic promise, 
 A Love that says, ' I hide awhile 
 
 For sense, that blinds, is round you : ' 
 well-loved dead ! ere now the smile 
 
 Of that great Love has found you ! 
 
 v. 
 
146 THE DECREE. 
 
 THE DEGREE. 
 
 Hate nob the Oppressor ! He fulfils 
 
 Thy destiny decreed no more : 
 What Cometh, that the Eternal wills : 
 
 Be ours to suffer and adore. 
 O Thou the All-Holy, Thou the All-Just ! 
 
 Thou fling'st Thy plague upon the blast : 
 We hide our foreheads 'mid the dust 
 
 In penance till the wrath be past. 
 
 II. 
 
 The nations sink, the nations rise 
 
 On the dread fount of endless Being, 
 Bubbles that burst beneath the eyes 
 
 Of Him the all-shaping and all-seeing. 
 Thou breath' st, and they are made ! Behold, 
 
 Thy breath withdrawn they melt, they cease 
 Our fathers were Thy Saints of old, 
 
 O grant at last their country peatse ! 
 
 SAINT BRIGID OF THE LEGENDS. 
 
 A BARD SONG. 
 
 A SOFT child-saint she lit the shade 
 With brightness more than human : 
 
 Her little hand was soft, they said. 
 As any breast of woman. 
 
SAINT BRIGID OF THE LEGENDS. 147 
 
 Through ways bemired to haunts of woe 
 
 She sped, nor hindrance heeded : 
 Yet still her foot retained its snow ; 
 
 No stream her white robe needed. 
 
 It chanced one eve she moved, foot-bare, 
 
 Among the kine sweet-breathing, 
 With boughs the insect tribe to scare 
 
 Their horned foreheads wreathing. 
 
 Slowly on her their dark eyes grave 
 
 They rolled in sleepy pleasure 
 Like things by music charmed, and gave 
 
 Their milk in twofold measure. 
 
 That hour there passed a beggar clan 
 
 Through sultry fields on faring : 
 * Come drink,' she cried, ' from pail and pan ! ' 
 
 That small hand was unsparing. 
 
 In wrath her Mother near them drew : 
 Those pails that late held nothing, 
 
 Like fountains tapped foamed up anew 
 And buzzed with milk-floods frothinij ! 
 
 't> 
 
 O Saint, the favourite of the poor, 
 The afflicted, weak, and weary ! 
 
 Like Mary's was that face she bore : 
 Men called her ' Erin's Mary.' 
 
 In triple vision God to her 
 Revealed her country's story : 
 
 She saw the cloud its greatness blur 
 She saw, beyond, its glory ! 
 
148 SAINT columba's stork. 
 
 Kildare of Oaks ! thy quenchless Faith, 
 Her gift it was : she taught it ! 
 
 The shroud Saint Patrick wore in death, 
 'Twas she, 'twas she that wrought it ! 
 
 Thus sang they on the sunburnt land 
 Among the stacks of barley ; 
 
 And singing, smiled, by breezes fanned 
 From Erin's dream-land early. 
 
 SAINT COLUMBA'S STORK. 
 
 A MINSTREL SONG. 
 
 CoLUMBA dashed into the war : 
 
 Heart-stricken then for penance prayed : 
 ' See thou thy native land no more : ' 
 
 The Hermit spake : the Saint obeyed. 
 
 He sailed : he reached an island green ; 
 
 Alone he clomb its grassy steep : 
 Though dimly, Eire could still be seen : 
 
 Once more he launched into the deep. ' 
 
 lona's soil at last he trod ; 
 
 There, there once more, they say he mixed 
 His hymns of Eire with hymns of God 
 
 Standing with wide eyes southward fixed. 
 
 Three years went by. One stormy morn 
 He grasped a Monk that near him stood : 
 
 ' Go down to yonder beach forlorn 
 
 O'er which the nortJiward sea -mists scud. 
 
THE GRAVES. 149 
 
 ' There, bleeding thou shalt find ere long 
 A Stork from Eire that loves her well 
 
 Sore wounded by the tempest's wrong : 
 Uplift and bear her to thy cell. 
 
 ' Three days that Stork shall be thy guest : 
 
 The fourth o'er yonder raging main 
 The exile, strong through food and rest, 
 
 Will seek her native Eire again.' 
 
 The Monk obeyed. The Stork he found, 
 And fed, three days. Those three days o'er 
 
 The exile, soaring, gazed around. 
 
 Then winged her to her native shore. 
 
 The Harper ended. Loud and shrill 
 
 They raised their shout and praised that Stork, 
 
 And praised the Saint that, exiled, still 
 Could sing for Eire ; for God could work. 
 
 THE GRAVES. 
 
 In the Cambrian valleys with sea-murmurs haunted 
 The grave-yards at noontide are fresh with dawn- 
 dew ; 
 
 On the virginal bosom white lilies are planted 
 'Mid the monotone whisper of pine-tree and yew. 
 
 In the dells of Etruria, where all day long warbles 
 The night-bird, the faithful 'mid cloisters repose : 
 And the long cypress shadow falls black upon 
 marbles 
 That cool aching hearts like the Apennines' 
 snows. 
 
150 THE LONG DYING. 
 
 In Ireland, in Ireland the wind ever sighing 
 
 Sings alone the death-dirge o'er the just and the 
 good; 
 In the abbeys of Ireland the bones are round lying 
 Like blocks where the hewer stands hewing the 
 wood. 
 
 THE LONG DYING, 
 
 The dying tree no pang sustains ; 
 
 But, by degrees relinquishing 
 Companionship of beams and rains, 
 
 Forgets the balmy breath of Spring : 
 
 From off the enringed trunk that keeps 
 His annual count of ages gone 
 
 Th' embrace of Summer slowly slips : 
 Still stands the giant in the sun : 
 
 His myriad lips, that suck'd of old 
 The dewy breasts of heaven, are dry ; 
 
 His root remit the crag, the mould ; 
 Yet painless is his latest sigh : 
 
 He falls ; the forests round him roar ; 
 Ere long on quiet bank and copse 
 
 Untrembling moonbeams rest ; once more 
 The startled babe his head down-drops : 
 
 But ah for one who never drew 
 
 From age to age a painless breath ! 
 
 And ah the old wrong ever new ! 
 And ah the many-centuried death 
 
A bard's love for ERIN. 151 
 
 A B ABB'S LOVE FOB EBIK 
 
 I THOUGHT it was thy voice I heard ; 
 Ah no ! the ripple burst and died ; 
 
 Among cold reeds the night-wind stirr'd ; 
 
 The yew-tree sigh'd ; the earliest bird 
 Answer'd the white dawn far descried. 
 
 II. 
 
 I thought it was a tress of thine 
 
 That grazed my cheek and touched my brow 
 Ah no ! in sad but calm decline 
 'Twas but my ever grapeless vine 
 
 Slow-waving from the blighted bough. 
 
 III. 
 
 O Eire, it is not ended ! Soon, 
 
 Or late, thy flower renews its bud ! 
 In sunless quarries still unhewn 
 Thy statue waits ; thy sunken moon 
 
 Shall light once more the autumnal flood ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Memory for me her hands but warms 
 
 O'er ashes of thy greatness gone ; 
 Or lifts to heaven phantasmal arms, 
 Muttering of talismans and charms, 
 And grappling after glories flown. 
 
 Tired brain, poor worn-out palimpsest ! 
 Sleep, sleep ! man's troubles soon are o'er 
 
152 UNREVEALED. 
 
 When in dark crypts my relics rest 
 Star -high shall flash my Country's crest, 
 Where birds of darkness cannot soar ! 
 
 UNBEVEALEB. 
 
 Grey Harper, rest ! O maid, the Fates 
 On those sad lips have press'd their seal ! 
 
 Thy song's sweet rage but indicates 
 That mystery it can ne'er reveal. 
 
 Take comfort ! Yales and lakes and skies, 
 Blue seas, and sunset-girded shore, 
 
 Love-beaming brows, love-lighted eyes, 
 
 Contend like thee. What can they more 1 
 
 SHANWS KEEP. 
 
 A Conqueror stood upon Shanid's brow 
 
 And, ' Build me aloft,' he cried, 
 ' A castle to rule o'er the meads below 
 
 From the hills to the ocean's side ! ' 
 In green Ardineer, far down, alone 
 
 A beggar girl sang her song, 
 A sorrowful dirge for a roof o'erthrown 
 
 And a fire stamped out by wrong. 
 
 II. 
 
 The beggar girl's song in the wind was drowned 
 A moment it lived : no more : 
 
SAINT BRIGID OF THE CONVENTS. 153 
 
 The Conqueror's castle went back to the ground, 
 
 Went back after centuries four : 
 The great halls crumbled from roof to moat ; 
 
 The grey Keep alone remains : 
 But echoes still of the girl's song float 
 
 All over the lonely plains. 
 
 SAINT BBIGID OF THE CONVENTS. 
 
 She looked not on the face of man : 
 
 Nor husband hers, nor brother : 
 But where she passed the children ran 
 
 And hailed that Maid their Mother ! 
 
 In haste she fled soft mead and grove 
 
 For Virtue's region hilly : 
 They called her, 'mid the birds, the Dove, 
 
 Among the flowers, the Lily. 
 
 In woods of Oriel Leix's vales 
 
 Her convent homes she planted 
 Where Erin's cloistered nightingales 
 
 Their nocturns darkling chanted. 
 
 By many a Scottish moorland wide. 
 
 By many an English river. 
 Men loved of old their ' good Saint Bride ; ' 
 
 But Erin loves for ever ! 
 
 A sword went forth ; thy fanes they burn'd ! 
 
 Sweet Saint, no anger fret thee ! 
 There are that ne'er thy grace have spurned : 
 
 There are that ne'er forget thee ! 
 
154 IN FAR LANDS. 
 
 Thus sang they while the autumnal glade 
 Exchanged green leaf for golden ; 
 
 And later griefs were lighter made 
 By thought of glories olden. 
 
 IN FAB LANDS. 
 
 I SEE, I see the domes ascend 
 
 Seville, o'er thy Guadalquiver : 
 
 I see thy breeze-touched cypress bend ; 
 
 1 hear thy moonlit palm-grove shiver : 
 
 I know that honour here to those 
 Who suffered for the Faith is given ; 
 
 I know, I know that earthly woes 
 
 Are secret blessings crowned in heaven : 
 
 But ah ! against Dunluce's crags 
 
 To watch our green sea-billows swelling ! 
 
 And ah ! once more to hear the stags 
 In Coona's stormy oakwoods belling ! 
 
 SAINT COLUMBA'S F ABE WELL. 
 
 A MINSTREL SONG. 
 
 The exiles gazed on headlands theirs no more, 
 Lough S willy's mountain portals dimly seen : 
 Sing us that song Columba sang of yoro 
 Then sang the Minstrel, *mid the sad, serene. 
 
SAINT COLUMBA's FAREWELL. 155 
 
 Farewell to Aran Isle, farewell ! 
 
 I steer for Hy : "^ my heart is sore : 
 The breakers burst, the billows swell 
 
 'Twixt Aran Isle and Alba's f shore. 
 
 Thus spake the Son of God, ' Depart ! * 
 
 Aran Isle, God's will be done ! 
 
 By Angels thronged this hour thou art : 
 
 1 sit within my bark alone. 
 
 O Modan, well for thee the while ! 
 
 Fair falls thy lot, and well art thou ! 
 Thy seat is set in Aran's Isle : 
 
 !N'orthward to Alba turns my prow. 
 
 Aran, Sun of all the West ! 
 
 My heart is thine ! As sweet to close 
 Our dying eyes in thee as rest 
 
 Where Peter and where Paul repose ! 
 
 O Aran, Sun of all the West ! 
 
 My heart in thee its grave hath found : 
 He walks in regions of the blest 
 
 The man that hears thy church-bells sound ! 
 
 O Aran blest, Aran blest ! 
 
 Accursed the man that loves not thee ! 
 The dead man cradled in thy breast 
 
 No demon scares him : Well is he ! 
 
 Each Sunday Gabriel from on high 
 
 For so did Christ our Lord ordain 
 Thy Masses come to sanctify 
 
 With fifty angels in his train. 
 
 * lona. t Scotland. 
 
156 ARBOR NOBILIS. 
 
 Each Monday Michael issues forth 
 
 To touch with blood each sacred fane : 
 
 Each Tuesday cometh Raphael 
 
 To bless the hearth and bless the grain 
 
 Each Wednesday cometh Uriel, 
 
 Each Thursday Sariel, fresh from God ; 
 
 Each Friday cometh Ramael 
 
 To bless thy stones and bless thy sod. 
 
 Each Saturday comes Mary, 
 
 Comes Babe in arm, 'mid heavenly hosts ! 
 O Aran, near to heaven is he 
 
 That hears God's angels bless thy coasts ! 
 
 The Minstrel sang, and ceased ; while women's tears 
 Shone, sunset-brightened, on pure cheeks and pale ; 
 
 And dreadful less became in children's ears 
 The hoarse sea-dirges, and the rising gale. 
 
 ARBOR NOBILIS, 
 
 I. 
 
 Like a cedar our greatness arose from the earth ; 
 
 Or a plane by some broad-flowing river ; 
 Like arms that give blessing its boughs it put forth 
 
 We thought it would bless us for ever. 
 The birds of the air in its branches found rest ; 
 
 The old lions couched in its shadow ; 
 Like a cloud o'er the sea was its pendulous crest ; 
 
 It murmur' d for leagues o'er the meadow. 
 
ST. OOLUMliA OF THE LEGENDS. 157 
 
 Was a worm at its root ? Was it lightning that 
 charr'd 
 
 What age after age had created 1 
 Not so ! 'Twas the merchant its glory that marr'd 
 
 And the malice that, fearing it, hated. 
 Its branches lie splintered ; the hollow trunk groans 
 
 Like a church that survives desolations ; 
 But the leaves, scatter'd far when the hurricane 
 moans, 
 
 For the healing are sent to the nations ! 
 
 ST. GOLUMBA OF THE LEGENDS. 
 
 A WEEK ere yet her Saint was born 
 
 Columba's mother prayed alone 
 Thus sang the Bard on Ascension Morn^ 
 
 Then the Angel of Eire before her shone. 
 
 He lifted a Veil snow-white, yet red 
 
 With Boses wrought around and around : 
 
 And ' These are the Wounds of Love,' he said. 
 
 ' That heal the wounded, and wound hearts sound. 
 
 He dropped that Veil on her head ; and lo ! 
 
 A wind from God outstretched it wide ; 
 And a golden glory suif used its snow ; 
 
 And the heart of its Roses grew deeplier dyed. 
 
 Like a cloud of dawn on the breeze it flew ; 
 
 Yet it clung to her holy head the while ; 
 It spanned the woods, and the headlands blue ; 
 
 It circled and girdled with joy the Isle ! 
 
158 THE hermit's counsel. 
 
 And this was a sign that, come what might, 
 
 In gloom or glory, in good or ill, 
 Columba's Gospel with love and light 
 
 Should clasp and comfort his Erin still : 
 
 A sign, and a pledge, and a holy troth 
 That hath not failed her, and never can ; 
 
 For God to Columba sware an oath 
 
 That Eire should be dear to the God made Man ; 
 
 More dear as the centuries onward roiled, 
 
 When her bread should be. shame, and grief- her 
 wine ; 
 
 And mantled more closely with fold on fold 
 Of healing radiance and strength divine. 
 
 Thus sang to the vanquished the Bard Maelmire, 
 As the tide swelled up on the grassy shore 
 
 And the smooth sea filled with the sunset's fire : 
 He sang ; and the weepers wept no more. 
 
 TE^ HERMITS COUNSEL. 
 
 Thus spake the hermit : Count it gain. 
 
 The scoii* , the stab, the freezing fear : 
 Expiate on earth thine earthly stain ; 
 
 The fire that cleanseth, find it here ! 
 Nearest we stand to heavenly light 
 
 Y/hen girt by Purgatorial glooms : 
 That Church which crowns the Roman height 
 
 Three centuries trod the Catacombs ! 
 
EVENING MELODY. 159 
 
 II. 
 
 But when thy God His Hand withdraws, 
 
 And all things round seem glad and fair. 
 Unchallenged Faith, impartial laws, 
 
 And wealth and honour, then beware ! 
 Beware lest sin in splendour deck'd 
 
 Make null the years of holy sighs, 
 And God's great People, grief -elect, 
 
 Her birthright scorning, miss the prize. 
 
 EVENING MELODY. 
 
 Fresh eve, that hang'st in yon blue sky 
 On breeze-like pinions swaying. 
 
 And leav'st our earth reluctantly 
 Departing, yet delaying ! 
 
 Along the beach the ripples rake ; 
 
 Dew-drench'd the thicket flushes : 
 And last year's leaves in bower and brake 
 
 Are dying 'mid their blushes. 
 
 Is this the world we knew of yore. 
 Long bound in wintry whiteness 
 
 Which here consummates more and more 
 Its talismanic brightness ? 
 
 To music wedded well-known lines 
 
 Let forth a hidden glory : 
 Thus, bathed in sunset, swells and shines 
 
 Lake, woodland, promontory. 
 
160 CARO REQUIESCET. 
 
 New Edens pure from Adam's crime 
 
 Invite the just to enter ; 
 The spheres of wrongfull Life and Time 
 
 Grow lustrous to their centre. 
 
 Rejoice, glad planet ! Sin and Woe, 
 The void, the incompleteness, 
 
 Shall cease at last ; and thou shalt know 
 The mystery of thy greatness ! 
 
 CAEO REQUIESCET. 
 
 Look forth, O Sun, with beam oblique 
 O'er crags and lowlands mellow ; 
 
 The dusky beech-grove lire, and strike 
 The sea-green larch-wood yellow : 
 
 All round the deep, new-flooded meads 
 Send thy broad glories straying ; 
 
 Each herd that feeds 'mid flowers and weeds 
 In golden spoils arraying : 
 
 Flash from the river to the bridge 
 Red glance with glance pursuing ; 
 
 Fleet from low sedge to mountain ridge. 
 Whatever thou dost undoing : 
 
 Kiss with moist lip those vapoury bands 
 That swathe yon slopes of tillage ; 
 
 Clasp with a hundred sudden hands 
 The gables of yon village : 
 
THE SECRET OF POWER. 161 
 
 But O, thus sharping to a point 
 O, brightening thus while dying, 
 
 Ere yet thou diest the graves anoint 
 Where my beloved are lying ! 
 
 Ye shades that mount the moorland dells 
 
 Ascend, the tree tops dimming ; 
 But leave those amethystine hills 
 
 Awhile in glory swimming ! 
 
 THE SECRET OF POWER. 
 
 Dark, dark that grove at the Attic gate 
 
 By the sad Eumenides haunted 
 Where the Theban King in his blindness sat 
 
 While the nightingales round him chanted ! 
 
 In a grove as dark of cypress, and bay 
 
 Upgrown to a forest's stature 
 In vision I saw at the close of day 
 
 A Woman of godlike feature. 
 
 She stood like a Queen, and her vesture green 
 Shone out as a laurel sun-lighted ; 
 
 And she sang a wild song like a Mourner's keen 
 With an Angel's triumph united. 
 
 She sang like one whose grief is done ; 
 
 Who has solved Life's dread enigma ; 
 A beam from the sun on her brow was thrown 
 
 And I saw there the conquering Stigma. 
 
 V. 
 
162 EVENING MELODY. 
 
 EVENING MELODY. 
 
 THAT the pines which crown yon steep 
 Their fires might ne'er surrender ! 
 
 O that yon fervid knoll might keep 
 While lasts the world, its splendour ! 
 
 Pale poplars on the breeze that lean 
 
 And in the sunset shiver 
 O that your golden stems might screen 
 
 For aye yon glassy river ! 
 
 That yon white bird on homeward wing 
 
 Soft-sliding without motion 
 And now in blue air vanishing 
 
 Like snow-flake lost in ocean 
 
 Beyond our sight might never flee, 
 
 Yet forward still be flying, 
 And all the dying day might be 
 
 Immortal in its dying ! 
 
 Pellucid thus in saintly trance 
 
 Thus mute in expectation 
 What waits the Earth ? Deliverance 1 
 
 Ah no ! Transfiguration ! 
 
 She dreams of that ' New Earth ' divine 
 Conceived of seed immortal ; 
 
 She sings ' Not mine the holier shrine. 
 Yet mine the steps and portal ! ' 
 
THE 'OLD LAND.' 163 
 
 THE 'OLD land: 
 
 Ah, kindly and sweet, we must love thee perforce ! 
 
 The disloyal, the coward alone would not love thee : 
 Ah, Mother of heroes ! strong Mother ! soft nurse ! 
 We are thine while the large cloud swims onward 
 above thee ! 
 By thy hills ever-blue that draw Heaven so near ; 
 By thy cliffs, by thy lakes, by thine ocean-lull'd 
 highlands ; 
 And more by thy records disastrous and dear. 
 
 The shrines on thy headlands, the cells in thine 
 islands ! 
 
 11. 
 
 Ah, well sings the thrush by Lixnaw and Traigh-li ! 
 
 Ah, well breaks the wave upon Umbhall and 
 Brandon ! 
 Thy breeze o'er the upland blows clement and free 
 
 And o'er fields, once his own, which the hind must 
 abandon. 
 A caitiff the noble who draws from thy plains 
 
 His all, yet reveres not the source of his greatness; 
 A clown and a serf 'mid his boundless domains 
 
 His spirit consumes in the prison of its straitness. 
 
 III. 
 
 Through the cloud of its pathos thy face is more fair: 
 In old time thou wert sun-clad ; the gold robe thou 
 worest ! 
 To thee the heart turns as the deer to her lair 
 
 Ere she dies her first bed in the gloom of the 
 forest. 
 
164 TO ETHNEA READING HOMER. 
 
 Our glory, our sorrow, our Mother ! Thy God 
 
 In thy worst dereliction forsook but to prove thee ! 
 
 Blind, blind as the blindworm ; cold, cold as the clod 
 Who seeing thee see not, possess but not love thee ! 
 
 TO ETHNEA READING HOMER. 
 
 Ah, happy he who shaped the words 
 Which bind thee in their magic net ; 
 
 Who draws from those old Grecian chords 
 The harmonies that charm thee yet ! 
 
 Who waves from that illumined brow 
 The dark locks back ; upon that cheek 
 
 Pallid erewhile as Pindan snow 
 
 Makes thus the Pindan morning break ! 
 
 'Tis he that fringes lids depress'd 
 
 With lashes heavier for a tear 
 And shakes that inexperienced breast 
 
 With womanhood. Upon the bier 
 
 Lies cold in death the hope of Troy ; 
 
 Thou- hear' st the Elders sob around. 
 The widow' d wife, the orphan'd boy. 
 
 The old grey King, the realm discrown'd. 
 
 Hadst thou but lived that hour by thee 
 Well wept had been the heroic dead ; 
 
 The heroic hands well kissed ; thy knee 
 Had propp'd the pallid princely head ! 
 
TO ETHNEA READING HOMER. 165 
 
 From thee Andromache had caught 
 
 Dirges more sweet ; and she who burn'd 
 
 With self-accusing grief shame-fraught 
 A holier woe from thee had learn'd ! 
 
 Ah child ! Thy Troy in ruin lies 
 
 Like theirs ! Her princes too are cold : 
 
 Again Cassandra prophesies 
 Vainly prophetic as of old. 
 
 Brandon to Ida's cloudy verge 
 
 Responds. Tirawley's kingless shore 
 
 Wails like the Lycian when its marge 
 Saintly Sarpedon trod no more. 
 
 Not Gods benign, like Sleep and Death 
 Who bore that shepherd-monarch home 
 
 But famine's tooth and fever's breath 
 Our exiles hunt o'er ocean's foam. 
 
 Peace reigns in heaven. The Fates each hour 
 Roll round earth's wheel through darkness vast : 
 
 Alone survives the Poet's power, 
 A manlike Art that from the past 
 
 Draws forth that line whose sanguine track 
 The wicked fear, the weak desert; 
 
 That clue which leads through centuries back 
 The patriot to his Country's heart. 
 
166 GRATTAN. 
 
 GBATTAK 
 
 God works through man, not hills or snows ! 
 
 In man, not men, is the godlike power ; 
 The man, God's potentate, God foreknows ; 
 
 He sends him strength at the destined hour : 
 His Spirit He breathes into one deep heart : 
 His cloud He bids from one mind depart : 
 A Saint ! and a race is to God re-born ! 
 A Man ! One man makes a Nation's morn ! 
 
 II. 
 
 A man, and the blind land by slow degrees 
 
 Gains sight ! A man, and the deaf land hears ! 
 A man, and the dumb land like wakening seas 
 
 Thunders low dirges in proud, dull ears ! 
 A man, and the People, a three days' corse. 
 Stands up, and the grave-bands fall off perforce ; 
 One man, and the nation in height a span 
 To the measure ascends of the perfect man. 
 
 III. 
 
 Thus wept unto God the land of Eire : 
 
 Yet there rose no man and her hope was dead: 
 In the ashes she sat of a burn'd-out fire ; 
 
 And sackcloth was over her queenly head. 
 But a man in her latter days arose ; 
 A Deliverer stepp'd from the camp of her foes : 
 He spake ; the great and the proud gave way, 
 And the dawn began which shall end in day ! 
 
THE SECllET JOY, 167 
 
 THE SECRET JOY. 
 
 O, BLITHESOME at times is life perforce 
 
 When Death is the gate of Hope not Fear ; 
 
 Rich streams lie dumb; over rough stones course 
 The runlets that charm the ear. 
 
 * Her heart is hard ; she can laugh,' men say ; 
 
 ' That light one can jest who has cause to sigh ! ' 
 Her conscience is light ; and with God are they 
 
 She loves : they are safe and nigh. 
 
 God's light shines brightest on cheeks grief -pale! 
 
 The song of the darkling is sad and dark : 
 That proud one boasts of her nightingale ! 
 
 Eire, keep thou thy lark ! 
 
 INSIGHT 
 
 Sharp stretch the shades o'er the sward close-bitten 
 
 Which the affluent meadows receive but half ; 
 Truth lies clear-edged on the soul grief-smitten 
 Congeal' d there in epitaph. 
 
 A vision is thine by the haughty lost ; 
 
 An Insight reserved for the sad and pure : 
 On the mountain cold in the grey hoar frost 
 Thy Shepherd's track lies sure ! 
 
168 SONG, 
 
 SONa. 
 
 The Little Black Rose * shall be red at last ! 
 
 What made it black but the East wind dry 
 And the tear of the widow that fell on it fast 1 
 
 It shall redden the hills when June is nigh ! 
 
 '&' 
 
 The Silk of the Kine * shall rest at last ! 
 
 What drave her forth but the dragon-fly ? 
 In the golden vale she shall feed full fast 
 
 With her mild gold horn, and her slow dark eye. 
 
 The wounded wood-dove lies dead at last : 
 The pine long-bleeding, it shall not die ! 
 
 This song is secret. Mine ear it pass'd 
 In a wind o'er the stone-plain of Athenry. 
 
 THE GLUE. 
 
 To one in dungeons bound there came, 
 The last long night before he died. 
 
 An Angel garlanded with flame 
 
 Who raised his hand and prophesied : 
 
 ' Thy life hath been a dream : but lo ! 
 
 This night thine eyes shall see the truth : 
 That which thou thoughtest weal was woe ; 
 
 And that was joy thou thoughtest ruth. 
 
 ' Thy Land hath conquer'd through her loss ; 
 With her God's chief of Creatures plain'd, 
 
 ^' Mystical names applied to Ireland by her Bards. 
 
ODE ON THE FIRST REPEAL OF THE PENAL LAWvS. 169 
 
 The same who scaled of old the Cross 
 When Mary's self beneath remain'd.* 
 
 ' Thou fought'st upon the righteous side : 
 Yet, being dust, thou wroughtest sin : 
 
 Once twice thy hand was raised in pride : 
 The Promised Land thou may'st not win ; 
 
 'But they, thy children, shall.' Next morn 
 Around the Patriot-martyr press'd 
 
 A throng that cursed him. He in turn. 
 
 The sentenced, bless'd them and was bless'd. 
 
 ODE ON THE FIRST REPEAL OF THE 
 PENAL LAWS. 
 
 A.D. 1778. 
 
 I. 
 
 The hour has struck ! at last in heaven 
 The golden shield an Angel smites ! 
 
 On Erin's altars thunder-riven 
 A happier Destiny alights. 
 
 'Tis done that cannot be undone 
 
 The lordlier ages have begun ; 
 
 The flood that widens as it flows 
 
 Is loosed ; fulfilled the Triple Woes ! 
 
 II. 
 
 Once more the Faith uplifts her forehead 
 Star-circled to the starry skies : 
 
 * Dante's description of Holy Poverty. 
 
170 ODE ON THE FlllST REPEAL OF THE PENAL LAWS. 
 
 Fangless at last, a snake abhorred, 
 Beneath her foot Oppression lies : 
 Above the waning moon of Time 
 The Apparition stands sublime 
 From hands immaculate, hands of light 
 Down scattering gifts of saintly might. 
 
 III. 
 
 Long for her martyrs Erin waited : 
 
 They came at last. Rejoice this hour 
 Ye tonsured heads, or consecrated 
 
 That sank beneath the stony shower ! 
 Thou Land for centuries dark and dumb 
 Arise and shine ! thy light is come ! 
 Return ; for they are dead their knife 
 Who raised, and sought the young child's life. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Again the wells of ancient knowledge 
 Shall cheer the thirsty lip and dry : 
 
 Again waste places, fane and college, 
 The radiance wear of days gone by ! 
 
 Once more shall rise the Minster porch ; 
 
 Once more shall laugh the village church 
 
 O'er plains that yield the autumnal feast 
 
 Once more to industry released ! 
 
 V. 
 
 Once more the far sea-tide returneth 
 And feeds the rivers of the Land : 
 
 Once more her heart maternal yearneth 
 With hopes the growth of memories grand. 
 
 Immortal longings swell her breast 
 
 Quickened from dust of Saints at rest : 
 
ODE ON THE FIRST REPEAL OF THE PENAL LAWS. 171 
 
 Once more six centuries bud and flower 
 To share the triumph of this hour ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 Wlio was it called thee the Forsaken 1 
 A consort judged 1 a Wife put by 1 
 He at whose nod the heavens are shaken 
 'Tis He Who hails thee from on high. 
 ' I loved thee from of old : I saved : 
 Upon My palms thy name is graved : 
 With blood were sealed the bridal vows ; 
 For lo, thy Maker is thy Spouse ! ' 
 
 VII. 
 
 Who, who are those like clouds of morning 
 That sail to thee o'er seas of gold 1 
 
 That fly, like doves, their exile scorning, 
 To windows known and loved of old 1 
 
 To thee the Isles their hands shall raise ; 
 
 Thy sons have taught them songs of praise ; 
 
 And Kings rebuild thy wall, or wait 
 
 Beside thy never-closing gate. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 As from the fig-tree, tempest-wasted 
 
 The untimely fruitage falleth crude. 
 So dropped around thee, blighted, blasted 
 
 Age after age thy sentenced brood. 
 To thee this day thine own are given : 
 Yet what are these to thine in heaven 1 
 They left thee in thy years of pain : 
 Thy cause they pleaded not in vain. 
 
172 THE CAUSE. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Those years are o'er : made soft by distance 
 Old wars like war-songs soon will seem, 
 
 The aggression dire, the wild resistance 
 Put on the moonlight of a dream. 
 
 Ah, gentle Foes ! If wholly past - 
 
 That Norman foe was friend at last ! 
 
 Like him, the ill deed redress, recall 
 
 In Erin's heart is room for all. 
 
 THE CAUSE. 
 
 The Kings are dead that raised their swords 
 
 In Erin's right of old ; 
 The Bards that dash'd from fearless chords 
 
 Her name and praise lie cold : 
 But fix'd as fate her altars stand ; 
 
 Unchanged, like God, her Faith ; 
 Her Church still holds in equal hiind 
 
 The keys of life and death. 
 
 II. 
 
 As well call up the sunken reefs 
 
 Atlantic waves rush o'er 
 As that old time of native chiefs 
 
 And Gaelic Bards restore ! 
 Things heavenly rise : things earthly sink : 
 
 God works through Nature's laws ; 
 Sad Isle, 'tis He that bids thee link 
 
 Thine Action with thy Cause ! 
 
MEMORY. 173 
 
 MEMORY. 
 
 ' Tfey are past, the old days : let the past be for- 
 gotten : 
 Let them die the old wrongs and old woes that 
 were ours 
 Like the leaves of the winter down-trampled and 
 rotten 
 That light in the spring-time the forest with 
 flowers.' 
 
 So sings the sweet voice ! But the sad voice 
 replieth ; 
 ' Unstaunch'd is the wound while the insult re- 
 mains ; 
 The Tudor' s black banner above us still flieth ; 
 
 The Faith of our fathers is spurned in their fanes ! 
 
 ' Distrust the repentance that clings to its booty ! 
 Give the people their Church and the priesthood 
 its right : 
 Till then, to remember the past is a duty, 
 
 For the past is our Cause, and our Cause is our 
 might.' 
 
 ALL-HALL0W8; OB, THE MONK'S DREAM. 
 
 A PROPHECY. 
 I. 
 
 I TROD once more that place of tombs : 
 
 Death-rooted elder full in flower 
 Oppress' d me with its sad perfumes. 
 
 Pathetic breath of arch and tower : 
 
1 74 ALL-HALLOWS ; OR, THE MONK's DREAM. 
 
 The ivy on the cloister wall 
 
 Waved, gusty with a silver gleam : 
 
 The moon sank low : the billows' fall 
 In moulds of music shaped my dream. 
 
 In sleep a funeral chant I heard 
 
 A ' De profundis ' far below ; 
 On the long grass the rain-drops stirr'd 
 
 As when the distant tempests blow : 
 Then slowly, like a heaving sea, 
 
 The graves were troubled all around j 
 And two by two, and three by three, 
 
 The monks ascended from the ground. 
 
 III. 
 
 From sin absolved, redeem'd from tears 
 
 There stood they, beautiful and calm. 
 The brethren of a thousand years 
 
 With lifted brows and palm to palm ! 
 On heaven they gazed in holy trance ; 
 
 Low stream'd their beards and tresses hoar; 
 And each transfigured countenance 
 
 The Benedictine impress bore. 
 
 IV. 
 
 By Angels borne the Holy Rood 
 
 Encircled thrice the church-yard bound ; 
 They paced behind it, paced in blood. 
 
 With bleeding feet, but foreheads crown' d ; 
 And thrice they breathed that hymn benign, 
 
 Which angels sang when Christ was born ; 
 And thrice I wept, ere tower or shrine 
 
 Had caught the first white beam of morn. 
 
all-hallows; or, the monk's dream. 175 
 
 V. 
 
 Down on the earth my brows I laid ; 
 
 In these, His Saints, I worshipp'd God : 
 And then returned that grief which made 
 
 My heart since youth a frozen clod : 
 ' ye,' I wept, ^ whose woes are past 
 
 Look round on all these prostrate stones ! 
 To these can Life return at last 1 
 
 Can Spirit lift once more these bones 1 ' 
 
 VI. 
 
 The smile of him the end who knows 
 
 Went, luminous, o'er them as I spake ; 
 Their white locks shone like mountain snows 
 
 O'er which the orient mornings break : 
 They stood : they pointed to the West : 
 
 And lo ! where darkness late had lain 
 Bose many a kingdom's citied crest 
 
 Reflected in a kindling main ! 
 
 VIL 
 
 * Not only these, the fanes o'erthrown, 
 
 Shall rise,' they said, 'but myriads more ; 
 The seed, far hence by tempests blown, 
 
 Still sleeps on yon expectant shore. 
 Send forth, sad Isle, thy reaper bands ! 
 
 Assert and pass thine old renown : 
 Not here alone in farthest lands 
 
 For thee thy sons shall weave the crown.' 
 
 VIII. 
 
 They spake ; and like a cloud down sank 
 The just and filial grief of years ; 
 
176 all-hallows; or, the monk's dream. 
 
 And I that peace celestial drank 
 
 Which shines but o'er the seas of tears. 
 
 Thy Mission flashed before me plain, 
 O thou by many woes anneal' d ! 
 
 And I discern' d how axe and chain 
 
 Had thy great destinies sign'd and seal'd ! 
 
 IX. 
 
 That seed which grows must seem to die : 
 
 In thee, when earthly hope was none. 
 The heaven-born hope of days gone by 
 
 By martyrdom matured, lived on ; 
 Conceal' d, like limbs of royal mould 
 
 In some Egyptian pyramid, 
 Or statued shape 'mid cities old 
 
 Beneath Yesuvian ashes hid. 
 
 X. 
 
 For this cause by a power divine 
 
 Each temporal aid was frustrated : 
 Tyrone, Tirconnell, Geraldine 
 
 In vain they fought ', in vain they bled : 
 Successive, 'neath th' usurping hand 
 
 Sank ill-starr'd Mary ; erring James : 
 Nor Spain nor France might wield the brand 
 
 Which, for her own, Religion claims ! 
 
 XI. 
 
 Arise, long stricken ! mightier far 
 Are they who fight for God and thee 
 
 Than those that head the adverse war ! 
 Sad prophet ! lift thy face and see ! 
 
 Behold, with eyes no longer wrong'd 
 By mists the sense exterior breeds, 
 
ALL-HALLOWS ; OR, THE MONK's DREAM. 177 
 
 The hills of heaven around thee throng'd 
 With fiery chariots and with steeds ! 
 
 XII. 
 
 The years baptized in blood are thine ; 
 
 The exile's prayer from many a strand ; 
 The woes of those this hour who pine 
 
 Poor aliens in their native land ; 
 Angels and Saints from heaven down-bent 
 
 Watch thy long conflict without pause ; 
 And the most Holy Sacrament 
 
 From all thine altars pleads thy cause ! 
 
 XIII. 
 
 O great through Suffering, rise at last 
 
 Through kindred Action tenfold great ! 
 Thy future calls on thee thy past 
 
 Its soul survives to consummate ! 
 Let women weep ; let children moan : 
 
 Kise, men and brethren, to the fight : 
 One cause hath Earth, and one alone : 
 
 For it, the cause of God, unite ! 
 
 XIV, 
 
 Let others trust in trade and trafiic ! 
 
 Be ours, O God, to trust in Thee ! 
 Cherubic Wisdom, Love Seraphic, 
 
 Beseem that land the Truth makes free. 
 The earth-quelling sword let others vaunt ; 
 
 Such toys allure the youth, the boy : 
 Be ours for loftier wreaths to pant. 
 
 The Apostles' crown of Faith and Joy ! 
 
 V. N 
 
178 HYMN. 
 
 XV. 
 
 Hope of my country ! House of God ! 
 
 All-Hallows ! Blessed feet are those 
 By which thy coui'ts shall yet be trod 
 
 Once more as ere the spoiler rose : 
 Blessed the winds that waft them forth 
 
 To victory o'er the rough sea foam : 
 That race to God which conquers earth 
 
 Can God forget that race at home ? 
 
 HYMN. 
 
 ECCLESIA DEI. 
 
 Who is She that stands triumphant 
 
 Bock in strength upon the Rock, 
 
 Like some city crown'd with turrets 
 
 Braving storm and earthquake shock ? 
 Who is she her arms extending ; 
 
 Blessing thus a world restored ; 
 All the anthems of creation 
 Lifting to creation's Lord 1 
 
 Hers that Kingdom, hers the Sceptre ! 
 
 Fall, ye nations, at her feet ! 
 Hers that Truth whose fruit is freedom ; 
 Light her yoke ', her burden sweet. 
 
 II. 
 
 As the moon its splendour borrows 
 From a sun unseen all night 
 
HYMN. 179 
 
 So from Christ, the Sun of Justice, 
 
 Draws His Church her sacred light. 
 Touch'd by His her hands have heaHng, 
 
 Bread of Life, absolving Key : 
 Christ Incarnate is her Bridegroom ; 
 The Spirit hers j His Temple she. 
 
 Hers the Kingdom, hers the Sceptre ! 
 
 Fall, ye nations, at her feet ! 
 Hers that Truth whose fruit is freedom ; 
 Light her yoke : her burden sweet ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Empires rise and sink like billows ; 
 
 Vanish and are seen no more ; 
 Glorious as the star of morning 
 
 She o'erlooks their wild uproar : 
 Hers the Household all-embracing, 
 
 Hers the Vine that shadows earth ; 
 Blest thy children, mighty Mother ! 
 Safe the stranger at thy hearth. 
 
 Hers the Kingdom ; hers the Sceptre ! 
 
 Fall, ye nations, at her feet ! 
 Hers that Truth whose fruit is freedom ; 
 Light her yoke ; her burden sweet I 
 
 IV. 
 
 Like her Bridegroom, heavenly, human, 
 
 Crown'd and militant in one. 
 Chanting Nature's great Assumption 
 
 And the Abasement of the Son, 
 Her magnificats, her dirges 
 
 Harmonise the jarring years ; 
 Hands that fling to heaven the censer 
 
 Wipe away the orphan's tears. 
 
180 ELECTA. 
 
 Hers the Kingdom, hers the Sceptre ! 
 
 Fall, ye nations, at her feet ! 
 Hers that Truth whose fruit is freedom 
 
 Light her yoke ; her burden sweet ! 
 
 ELECTA. 
 
 The Hour must come. Long since, and now 
 
 The shaft decreed is on the wing : 
 Loosed from the Eternal Archer's bow 
 
 The flying fate shall pierce the ring : 
 The Hour that comes to seal the right ; 
 
 The Hour that comes to judge the wrong ; 
 To lift the vales, and thunder-smite 
 
 Those cliffs the full-gorged eagles throng. 
 
 II. 
 
 Rejoice, Elect of Isles ! Eejoice 
 
 Pale image of the Church of God ! 
 Like her afflicted, lift thy voice 
 
 Like her, and hail, and hymn the rod ! 
 Thou warr'st on eartli : at each new groan 
 
 In heaven thy Guardian claps his hands ; 
 And glitters o'er the expectant Throne 
 
 A crown inwoven of angel bands ! 
 
SONG. 181 
 
 SONG. 
 
 While autumn flashed from woods of gold 
 
 Her challenge to the setting sun 
 And storm-clouds, breaking, seaward rolled 
 
 O'er brightening waves, their passion done, 
 The linnets on a rain-washed beech 
 
 So thronged I saw not branch for bird : 
 My skill is scant in forest speech 
 
 But thus they sang or thus I heard. 
 
 II. 
 'Twas all a dream the wrong, the strife. 
 
 The scorn, the blow, the loss, the pain ! 
 Immortal Gladness, Love and Life 
 
 Alone are lords by right and reign : 
 The Earth is tossed about as though 
 
 Young Angels tossed a cowslip ball ; 
 But, rough or level, high or low, 
 
 What matter % God is all in all. 
 
 THE CHANGE. 
 
 Was it Truth ; was it Vision ? The old year was 
 dying ; 
 Clear rang the last chime from the turret of stone ; 
 The mountain hung black o'er the village low-lying ; 
 O'er the moon, rushing forward, loose vapours 
 were blown ; 
 
182 SEMPER EADEM. 
 
 When I saw an angelical choir with bow'd faces 
 Wafting on, like a bier, upon pinions outspread 
 
 An angel-like Form that of death had no traces : 
 Without pain she had died in her sleep ; but was 
 dead. 
 
 II. 
 
 Was it Truth; was it Vision? The darkness was 
 riven ; 
 Once more through the infinite breast of pure 
 night 
 From heaven there looked downward, more beauteous 
 than heaven, 
 A visage whose sadness was lost in its light : 
 ' Why seek'st thou, my son, 'mid the dead for the 
 living 1 
 Thy Country is risen, and lives on in thy Faith ; 
 I died but to live ; and now, Life and Life-giving, 
 Where'er the Cross triumphs I conquer in death.' 
 
 SEMPER EADEM. 
 
 The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean. 
 
 Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright ; 
 And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotion 
 
 Swells up as to meet it, and clings to its light : 
 The orb unabiding grows whiter, mounts higher ; 
 
 The pathos of darkness descends on the brine : 
 O Erin ! the North drew its light from thy pyre : 
 
 Thy light woke the nations ; the embers wen 
 thine ! 
 
EPILOGUE, 183 
 
 II. 
 
 Tis sunrise ! The mountains flash forth ; and, new- 
 redden'd, 
 
 The billows grow lustrous, so lately forlorn ; 
 From the orient with vapours long darkened and 
 deaden' d 
 
 The trumpets of Godhead are pealing ' the Morn ! ' 
 He rises, the Sun, in his might re-ascending ; 
 
 Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea ! 
 O Erin ! Who proved thee returns to thee, blending 
 
 The future and past in one garland for thee ! 
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
 With spices and urns they come : ah me, how sorrow 
 can babble ! 
 Nothing abides save Love ; and to Love comes 
 gladness at last ; 
 Sad was the legend yet sweet ; though its truth was 
 mingled with fable ; 
 Dire was the conflict and long ; but the rage of 
 the conflict is past. 
 
 They are past, the three great Woes ; and the days 
 of the dread Desolation ; 
 To amethyst changed are the stones blood-stain'd 
 of the temple-floor : 
 A Spiritual Power she lives who seem'd to die as a 
 Nation ; 
 Her story is that of a Soul : and the story of Earth 
 is no more. 
 
184 EPILOGUE. 
 
 Endurance it was that won ; Suffering, than Action 
 thrice greater ; 
 For Suffering humbly acts. Away with sigh and 
 with tear ! 
 She has gone before you and waits : She has gifts for 
 the blinded who hate her ; 
 And that bright Shape by the death-cave in music 
 answers, ' Not here.' 
 
 9f4 
 
 7 
 61 ft 
 
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