The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Cold, pure, reviving, med'cinable gales,
Sea-born, nor charged with breath of herb or flower,
That far o'er moonlight seas, perhaps this hour,
Trouble some sleeping pilot's whispering sails,
And pour into his ear consoling tales
Of ivy murmuring round a known church tower;
Crystalline airs, in love and pitying power,
Serving that God whose love o'er all prevails;
Hither in mercy also come, and lean
One moment on those lids and o'er this breast!
O cooled by all the shadows of your caves,
O fresh from mountain snows or loneliest waves,
O pure from haunts where man hath never been,
Come with ethereal dews and endless rest!

314

II. ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD KING.

Honour that dies not, grief that lives for aye,
And the benedictions of the suffering poor,
Come to thy grave, and there, as at the door
Of Heaven, their brows in mute expectance lay;
A mighty nation stands uncrowned this day:
This day a widowed people's heart is sore;
A sire this day each household doth deplore;
Each head hath lost its helm, each hand its stay.
Great king! a nation smiled upon thy birth;
A nation's prayers, each night, kept watch around thee:
Now thou obey'st the summons of the earth
Behold! a nation's duteous tears have crowned thee:
And millions at thy tomb to thee have given
A portion of their heart to waft with thee to heaven!

III. ON THE FALL OF A USURPER.

I wished thee length of years! the courtly crowd
Wished it less truly, and less fervently.
Thou livest! How many a head miscrowned hath bowed
In specious death! The slow shaft missed not thee.
Thou livest a posthumous life; reserved to see
The Future's verdict—laughter long and loud:—
Melted thy throne beneath thee like a cloud;
Like snow thy puissance vanished. Mockery
Answered when that usurping hand invoked
Thy host their hundred thousand swords to bare.
Unknown, alone, dethroned because uncloaked,
Thou fleddest; nor friend nor foe demanded where.
Thou livest! A King Batavian William died:—
By which the nations were disedified.

1848.

315

IV. POLAND.

Lo, as a prophet, old, and fierce, and gaunt,
Spurning the plains, when some detested foe
His country, and his country's hearths, lays low,
Makes in the mountain walls his caverned haunt;
There lurks; thence leans; half blind, yet vigilant,
Watches red morning tinge the ensanguined snow;
And bends his ear, and says, ‘Thy foot is slow,
Deliverer! see thy vengeance be not scant;’—
Not otherwise a trampled Nation waits,
Regioned in fell resolve; her heart thus feeds
On iron; muses thus on coming fates;
Revels in rapture of predestined deeds;
And finds at last the hour, and finds the way:—
Let sceptre-wielding Rebels fear that day!

1848.

V. TO THE NOBILITY OF ENGLAND, 1848.

Princes of England, undeposed as yet,
While panic-stricken thrones around you quake,
And perplexed kings themselves their sceptres break,
With a firm hand your house in order set:
If sound ye be at heart, external threat
That soundness can but probe to prove. Awake!
Hold fast your birthright for the people's sake:
Let high and low discharge their mutual debt.
Things hollow must collapse; effete decay:
But that which stablished first Nobility—
Valour and Truth—if these abide, her stay,
While live the nations she can never die.
Be true to England: to yourselves be true:
And England shall work out her furthest fates by you.

316

VI. ON A CONVENT.

Glorious the thought, not mortal the design,
Defamed by fools, in earthly hearts to raise
Unearthly citadels of prayer and praise;
Revering, to renounce all bonds that twine
With heavenly, earthly love; through Grace divine
To rise o'er Virtue's secondary ways;
Hidden to live with God; and, by His gaze
Illumed yet veiled, like noontide stars to shine!
Glorious the deed each waste and wilderness
And isle beleaguered by the raging main
To thrill with Christian chaunt and psalmic strain,
And make a conquered world her Lord confess!
Ye that conventual pomps denounce, begin
By fixing in your hearts conventual discipline.

VII. A CONVENT SCHOOL IN A CORRUPT CITY.

Hark how they laugh, those children at their sport!
O'er all this city vast that knows not sleep
Labour and Sin their ceaseless vigil keep:
Yet hither still good Angels make resort.
Innocence here and Mirth a single fort
Maintain: and though in many a snake-like sweep
Corruption round the weedy walls doth creep,
Its track not yet hath slimed this sunny court.
Glory to God, who so the world hath framed
That in all places children more abound
Than they by whom Humanity is shamed!
Children outnumber men: and millions die—
Who knows not this?—in blameless infancy,
Sowing with innocence our sin-stained ground.

317

VIII.

The reason why we love thee dost thou ask?
We love for many reasons joined in one:
Because thy face is fair to look upon;
Because, when pains or toils our hearts o'ertask,
In sunny smiles of thine thy love to bask;
Because thou honourest all, and harmest none:
Because thy froward moods so soon are gone:
Thy many faults and foibles wear no mask:—
Because thou art a woman. Unto me
A gracious woman is a child mature;
Docile, and gentle, though with many a lure
Enriched, and, in a soft subjection, free;
A sanguine creature, full of winning ways;
Athirst for love, and shyly pleased with praise.

IX. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.—1.

Had I been worthy of the love you gave
That love withdrawn had left me sad but strong;
My heart had been as silent as my tongue;
My bed had been unfevered as my grave:
I had not striven for what I could not save:
Back, back to heaven my great hopes I had flung:—
To have much suffered, having done no wrong,
Had seemed to me that noble part the brave
Account it ever. What this hour I am
Affirms the unworthiness that in me lurked:
Some sapping poison through my substance worked,
Some sin not trivial though it lacked a name,
Which ratifies the deed that you have done
With plain approval. Other plea seek none.

318

X. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.—2.

Give me one kiss, sweet love, and so farewell!
Those magic lips, when they were all my own,
To me were dearer than the loftiest throne
That ever made a Conqueror's bosom swell.
Those youthful eyes retain their luminous spell:
Fairer those brows, that droop like flowers o'erblown,
For the dim, dubious shadow o'er them thrown:
Still on that cheek the pure carnations dwell!
—Softly, of infidelity ashamed,
Yet with recovered freedom softly pleased,
She sighed: her hand unwillingly released,
Withdrew, yet something seemed to leave behind:—
She's gone! so fleets the fleeting stream unblamed;
So fleets the unquestioned cloud, the unchallenged wind!

XI. ON A PORTRAIT.

A deep still Sorrow, beautiful and bland,
Across those brooding brows and eastern eyes
Rests, as a broad shade on the mountain lies:
How few that Sorrow's cause shall understand!
Methinks, the years to come, a tragic band,
Move, heard by him, with funeral harmonies,
Up life's dim vale: and prescience, vainly wise,
Shadows a fair face with prophetic hand.
'Tis but a picture:—Stranger, grief-betrayed,
Weep not! The man, not portrait, hadst thou seen,
For early death then justly hadst thou prayed
To shield the mourner with the grave's kind screen
From woes, his portion destined from his birth,—
O noble souls, what do ye here on earth?

319

XII. FALSE FRIENDSHIP.

Alas, dear friends, we do each other wrong;
For we long years in love conjoined have been;
Many vicissitudes, and strange, have seen;
Joyed oft, wept oft, outgrown our grief ere long;
Yet what we were, still are we. Love is strong,
Through vigilant hate of all things base and mean,
To raise her votaries, and with fire make clean;
But we her awful aids away have flung,
Over complacent Friendship weakly doted
On virtues, oft through dim tears magnified,
Till Friendship, o'er-indulgent, scarcely noted
The faults hard-by; or, noting, feared to chide;
Therefore dishonoured Friendship asks too late,
‘My seat inglorious must I abdicate?’

XIII.

Free born, it is my purpose to die free.
Away, degrading cares; and ye not less,
Delights of sense and gauds of worldliness;
I have no part in you, nor you in me.
They that walk brave wear the world's livery:
Their badge of service is their sumptuous dress:
Seek then your prey in gilded palaces;
Revere my hovel's humble liberty.
Are there no flowers on earth, in heaven no stars,
That we must place in such low things our trust?
Let me have noble toils, if toil I must,
The Patriot's task, or Friendship's sacred cares—
Beside my board that man shall break no crust,
Who sells his birthright for a feast of dust.

320

XIV. THE POETRY OF LIFE.

Dian! thy brother of the golden beams
Is hailed for ever as the Lord of Song,
Master of manly verse, and mystic dreams:
Doth, then, no female lyre to thee belong?
Say, is that silver bow whose crescent gleams,
Above black pine-woods lifted, or low-hung
'Twixt hornèd rocks, or troubling midnight streams,
With immelodious cord, and silent, strung?
Ah no, not so! Thou too art musical!
The world is full of poetry unwrit;
Dew-woven nets that virgin hearts enthrall;
Darts of glad thought through infant brains that flit;
Hope and pursuit; loved bonds, and fancies free;—
Poor were our earth of these bereft and thee!

XV.

Painter, in endless fame most sure to live
If thou my Celia's face reveal to men,
Thy heart, all other schools forsaking, give
To him whom Parma boasts her citizen.
All gladdening forms, with exquisitest ken,
Scan thou like him; and sift as with a sieve
From each its dross:—then fix the fugitive,
Painting that Joy which mocks the poet's pen.
The new-born fountain, and the sea-bird's grace,
Be dear to thee. Whole hours, where violets gleam,
Muse thou on eyes as blue, and lids as white:
Where, under chestnut boughs, the moon's pale light
Glimmers o'er banks of primrose, sit and dream
Of those soft lustres on her innocent face!

321

XVI.

The happiest lovers that in verse have writ,
After all vows to perfect beauty paid
Full oft their hymns of triumph intermit,
And harp and brow with funeral chaplets shade:
A Babylonian choir on earth they sit
In garb of exiles: sadly they upbraid
Beauty and Joy that only bloom to fade,
And Love and Hope to Death and Ruin knit.
What shall we say? Have poets never loved?
(For small that love which fears that love can die):
Have those that earthly immortality
Award, the name itself a mockery proved?
Or of the Spirit of Life so full are they
That with Death's shadow they are pleased to play?

XVII. A POET TO A PAINTER.

That which my fault has made me, O paint not:
Paint me as that which I desire to be:
The unaccomplished good that died in thought,
That Limbo of high hopes, seek out, set free,
And all I might have been concede to me:
The mask my errors and the world have wrought
Remove: the cloud disperse: erase the blot:
Bid from my brow the temporal darkness flee.
In that celestial and pure fount whereof
Some drops affused my childhood, bathe me wholly;
And shield me from my own deserts: lest they
Who now but see me by the light of love
A sterner insight learn from thee one day;
And love pass from them like some outworn folly.

322

XVIII. THE FALL OF BACON.

Apologist for a great man, take heed!
Needs he such aid? Of errors worse is none
Than fond excuses urged for deeds ill-done
By men whose actions mould a nation's creed.
They that in might of mind their race exceed,
And walk this earth like Spirits from the sun,
By them should Virtue's palms not less be won:—
These if they reach not, let the victim bleed!
And who shall dare lament them? All are frail,
Though Nemesis the meaner culprit slights:
Adversity and Justice, hail, O hail!
Sacred the laurelled head your lightning smites!
Him from the prosperous herd ye raise, and down
On crowns of fortune drop a kinglier crown.

XIX. GRACE DIEU.

When Francis Beaumont wandered in old time
Beside that stream which throws, as then it threw,
A music sweeter than the poet's rhyme
O'er the grey ruins of ‘forlorn Grace Dieu,’
How oft, while bat and owl around them flew,
Mourned the great Bard that blood-stained Monarch's crime;
How often yearned to hear that convent chime
Which, century after century, shook the dew
From Charnwood's forest branches eve and dawn!
De Lisle! God's Grace it was thy heart that stirred!
All praise to Him, the Angelus is heard
Once more from hill and woodland, crag and lawn:
And yon Cistercian abbey on the height
Once more ‘with psalms resoundeth, and the chaunted rite.’

323

XX. TO S. C.

‘Sleep dwell within thine eyes, peace in thy breast:’
To-night the memory of thy native hills,
To-night the charm of unforgotten rills,
Be kind to fevered nerves and thoughts opprest!
Yet, if the mourners are most surely blest;
If He, who only wounds to heal us, wills
That thou shouldst have thy load of twofold ills,
And, shorn of strength, in vain solicit rest;
Then like a cross thy patient hands put forth,
And gently welcome that which God accords:
And let the sharpest of terrestrial swords
Transfix, unblamed, the meekest heart on earth:
Nor Sleep nor Death repose so perfect gives
As in entire Submission wakes and lives.

XXI. FROM PETRARCH.

Ah me! how beauteous were those tears of hers
The gathered cloud of Passion, melting, bred
When that deep grief whereon her heart had fed
Rose to her eyes, those tender, starlike spheres!
Wandered adown her delicate face her tears,
Wandered o'er pale cheeks touched with faintest red,
As some clear stream through meads with flowers o'erspread,
White flowers with sanguine mingled, softly steers.
Love in that rain bewitching stood embowered
Like blithesome bird on which the longed-for rays
Blended with drops of gentlest rain are showered,
And, weeping 'mid his home in those fair eyes,
Shot from the bosom of that sad, sweet haze
Gleams of an ever-brightening Paradise!

324

XXII. FROM PETRARCH.

That nightingale which wails with such sweet woe
Haply its young ones, haply its dear mate,
Fills the dark heavens and makes the fields overflow
With its wild, broken chaunt disconsolate:
Beside me all night long, where'er I go,
Its dirge upbraids me with my own sad fate,
And chides my blindness which refused to know
That Death divine things too can subjugate.
Ah! easy 'tis to cheat the self-deluded!
Yet who had ever dreamed those sunlike eyes
Setting, should leave the world in darkness shrouded?
But I my pain's high mission recognise:
It means that I should weep and live, and so
Learn that delight abides not here below!

XXIII. FROM PETRARCH.

Thou Valley filled for ever with my plaint,
River with tears of mine so oft increased,
Fair woodland creatures, wandering bird or beast,
Or, 'twixt your green banks flickering, fishes quaint;
Air by my sighs made warm, and hushed, and faint,
Loved path that, shadowed now, forth issuest,
Hill, happy haunt, to which, now haunt unblest,
Love leads me still, and Custom's dear constraint;
In you full well I trace your features old,
Not in myself, who, of that life bereaven,
Am made a mansion of perpetual woe:
Here I beheld my love; here still behold
The spot from which she passed, disrobed, to Heaven,
Ah, leaving still that beauteous robe below!

325

XXIV. IN MEMORY OF SIR WILLIAM R. HAMILTON.—1.

Friend of past years, the holy and the blest,
When all my day shone out, a long sunrise;
When aspirations seemed but sympathies,
In such familiar nearness were they dressed;
When Song, with swan-like plumes and starry crest,
O'er-circled earth and beat against the skies,
And fearless Science raised her reverent eyes
From heaven to heaven, that each its God confessed
With homage ever widening! Friend beloved!
From me those days are passed; yet still, O, still,
This night my heart with influx strange they fill
Of beaming memories from my vanished youth:
On thee—the temporal veil by Death removed—
Rests the great Vision of Eternal Truth!

Jan. 10, 1880.

XXV. AFTER READING AGAIN HIS LETTERS.—2.

At times I see that ample forehead lit,
Bright as the day-spring round the mounted lark;
At times I see thee stand in musing fit;
At times in woodlands of that twilight park,
Deciphering well-loved names on beechen bark:
Where Rotha's moonlight ripples past thee flit,
I see the kiss a grave—then by it sit—
Her grave that left the land's chief Poet dark.
This day I read thy letters. Word and scene
Recur with strangely mingled joy and ruth;
Thy soul translucent; yet thine insight keen,
Thy heart's deep yearnings and perpetual youth;
Thy courtesy, thy reverence, and thy truth—
All that thou wert, and all thou mightst have been!

Abbotstown.

That of Wordsworth's daughter.

326

XXVI. TRUE AND FALSE LOVE OF FREEDOM. 1860.

They that for freedom feel not love but lust,
Irreverent, knowing not her spiritual claim,
And they, the votaries blind of windy fame,
And they who cry “I will because I must,”
They too that launch, screened by her shield august,
A bandit's shaft, revenge or greed their aim,
And they that make her sacred cause their game
From restlessness or spleen or sheer disgust
At duteous days; all these, the brood of night,
Diverse, by one black note detected stand,
Their scorn of every barrier raised by Right
To awe self-will. Howe'er by virtue bann'd,
By reason spurned, that act the moment needs
Licensed they deem; holy whate'er succeeds.

XXVII. NATIONAL APOSTACY.

Trampling a dark hill, a red sun athwart,
I saw a host that rent their clothes and hair, [glare,
And dashed their spread hands 'gainst that sunset
And cried, ‘Go from us, God, since God thou art!
Utterly from our coasts and towns depart,
Court, camp, and senate-hall, and mountain bare;
Our pomp Thou troublest, and our feast dost scare,
And with Thy temples dost confuse our mart!
Depart Thou from our hearing and our seeing:
Depart Thou from the works and ways of men;
Their laws, their thoughts, the inmost of their being:
Black Nightmare, hence! that earth may breathe again.’
‘Can God depart?’ I said. A Voice replied,
Close by—‘Not so: each Sin at heart is Decide.”

327

XXVIII.

Romans, that lift to Liberty, your God,
Not vows but swords, suppliants self-deified,
Betwixt her altars and your rock of pride
A stream there rolls fiercer than Alpine flood,
A fatal stream of murdered Rossi's blood!
For Liberty he lived; and when he died,
Prisoner, that new Rienzi's corse beside,
The king, the pontiff, and the father stood!
What rite piacular from that impious deed
Hath cleansed your hands? Accuse not adverse stars,
If guilt unwept achieve not virtue's meed.
Years heal not treason. All his sands old Time
Shakes down to keep unblurred those calendars,
Which blazon red their Feasts of prosperous crime.

1860.

TO IRELAND.

AGAINST FALSE FREEDOM.

1860.

I.

The Nations have their parts assigned:
The deaf one watches for the blind:
The blind for him that hears not hears:
Harmonious as the heavenly spheres

328

Despite their outward fret and jar
Their mutual ministrations are,
Some shine on history's earlier page;
Some prop the world's declining age:
One, one reserves her buried bloom
To flower—perchance on Winter's tomb.

II.

Greece, weak of Will but strong in Thought,
To Rome her arts and science brought:
Rome, strong yet barbarous gained from her
A staff, but, like Saint Christopher,
Knew not for whom his strength to use,
What yoke to bear, what master choose.
His neck the giant bent!—thereon
The Babe of Bethlehem sat! Anon
That staff his prop, that sacred freight
His guide, he waded through the strait,
And entered at a new world's gate.

III.

On that new stage were played once more
The parts in Greece rehearsed before:
Round fame's Olympic stadium vast
The new-born, emulous Nations raced;
Now Spain, now France the headship won,
Unrisen the Russian Macedon:
But naught, O Ireland, like to thee
Hath been! A Sphinx-like mystery,
At the world's feast thou sat'st death-pale;
And blood-stains tinged thy sable veil.

329

IV.

Apostle, first, of worlds unseen!
For ages, then, deject and mean:
Be sure, sad land, a concord lay
Between thy darkness and thy day!
Thy hand, had temporal gifts been thine,
Had lost, perchance, the things divine.
Truth's witness sole! The insurgent North
Gave way when error's flood went forth:
On the scarred coasts deformed and cleft
Thou, like the Church's Rock, wert left!

V.

That Tudor tyranny which stood
'Mid wrecks of Faith, was quenched in blood
When Charles, its child and victim, lay
The Rebel-Prophet's bleeding prey.
Once more the destined wheel goes round!
Heads royal long are half discrowned:
Ancestral rights decline and die:
Thus Despotism and Anarchy
Alternate each the other chase,
Twin Bacchantes wreathed around one vase.

VI.

The future sleeps in night: but thou
O Island of the branded brow,
Her flatteries scorn who reared by Seine
Fraternity's ensanguined reign,
And for a sceptre twice abhorred
Twice welcomed the Cæsarian sword!

330

Thy past, thy hopes, are thine alone!
Though crushed around thee and o'erthrown,
The majesty of civil might
The hierarchy of social right
Firm state in thee for ever hold!
Religion was their life and mould.

VII.

The vulgar, dog-like eye can see
Only the ignobler traits in thee;
Quaint follies of a fleeting time;
Dark reliques of the oppressor's crime.
The Seer—what sees he? What the West
Hath seldom save in thee possessed;
The childlike Faith, the Will like fate,
And that Theistic Instinct great
New worlds that summons from the abyss
‘The balance to redress of this.’

VIII.

Wait thou the end; and spurn the while
False Freedom's meretricious smile!
Stoop not thy front to anticipate
A triumph certain! Watch and wait!
The schismatic, by birth akin
To Socialist and Jacobin,
Will claim, when shift the scales of power,
His natural place. Be thine that hour
With good his evil to requite;
To save him in his own despite;
And backward scare the brood of night!

331

THE BATTLE OF CLONTARF;

OR, THE KING'S SACRIFICE.

(Ireland in the Eleventh Century.)

[_]

The battle of Clontarf, fought A.D. 1014, annulled for ever the Danish power in Ireland. During two centuries and more the sons of the North had landed on the Irish coasts, sacked the monasteries, burned the cities and churches, and in many places well-nigh destroyed the Christian civilisation of earlier times, although they were never able to establish a monarchy in Ireland. The native dynasties for the most part remained; and Brian the Great, then King of all Ireland, though aged and blind, led forth the native hosts against the invaders for one supreme effort. He placed his son Murrough in command; but he offered up, notwithstanding, his life for his country, and wrought her deliverance. His sons and his grandson partook his glory and his fate. His death was a favourite theme with the chroniclers and bards of ancient Erin.

I.

‘Answer, thou that from the height
Look'st to left, and look'st to right,
Answer thou, how goes the fight?’

II.

Thus spake King Brian, by his tent
Kneeling, with sceptred hands that leant
Upon that altar which, where'er
He marched, kept pure his path with prayer.
For after all his triumphs past
That made him wondrous 'mid his peers,
On the blind King God's will had cast
The burden of his fourscore years:

332

And therefore when that morn, at nine,
He rode along the battle's van,
No sword he lifted, but the Sign
Of Him Who died for man.
King Brian's fleshly strength decayed,
Three times in puissance waxed his spirit,
And tall like oak-trees towered his merit,
And like a praying host he prayed:—
From nine to twelve, with crown on head,
Full fifty prayers the King had said;
And unto each such power was given,
It shook the unopening gates of heaven.

III.

‘O King, the battle goes this hour
As when two seas are met in might,
When billow billow doth devour,
And tide with tide doth fight:

‘I watch the waves of war; but none
Can see what banners rise or fall;
Sea-clouds on rush, sea-crests on run,
And blood is over all.’

IV.

Then prayed the King once more, head-bare,
And made himself a cross in prayer,
With outstretched arms, and forehead prone
Staid on that topmost altar-stone
Gem-charged, and cleansed from mortal taint,
And strong with bones of many a Saint.

333

In youth his heart for God had yearned,
And Eire: now thrice his youth returned:
A child full oft, ere woke the bird,
The convent's nocturns he had heard,
In old Kincora, or that isle
Which guards, thus late, its wasted pile,
While winds of night the tall towers shook;
And he would peer into that Book
Which lay, lamp-lit, on eagle's wings,
Wherein God's Saints in gold and blue
Stood up, and Prophets stood, and Kings;
And he the Martyrs knew,
And maids, and confessors each one,
And—tabernacled there in light—
That blissful Virgin enough bright
To light a burnt-out sun.
The blazoned Letters well he kenned
That stood like gateways keeping ward,
Before the Feast-Days set, to guard
Long ways of wisdom without end:
He knew the music notes black-barred,
And music notes, like planted spears,
Whereon who bends a fixed regard
The gathering anthem hears,
Like wakening storms 'mid pines that lean
Ere sunrise o'er some dusk ravine.—
The thoughts that nursed his youth, that hour
Were with his age, and armed with power.

V.

So fifty Psalms he sang, and then
Rolled round his sightless eyes again,
And spake; ‘Thou watcher on the height,
Make answer quick, how goes the fight?’

334

VI.

‘O King, the battle goes as when
The mill-wheel circles round and round:
The battle reels; and bones of men
Beneath its wheel are ground:

‘The war-field lies like Tomar's wood
By axes marred, or charred with fire,
When, black o'er wood-ways ruin-strewed,
Rises the last oak spire.’

VII.

Then to his altar by the tent
Once more King Brian turned, and bent
Unsceptred hands and head discrowned
Down from that altar to the ground,
In such sort that the cold March air
With fir-cones swept his snow-white hair;
And prayed, ‘O Thou that from the skies
Dost see what is, and what must be,
Make mine and me Thy Sacrifice,
But set this People free!’

VIII.

That hour, he knew, in many a fane
Late ravaged by the Pagan Dane,
God's priests were offering, far and wide,
The Mass of the Presanctified:
For lo! it was Good Friday morn,
And Christ once more was crowned with thorn:
God's Church, he knew, from niche and shrine
Had swept those gauds that time consumes,

335

Whate'er sea-cave, or wood, or mine
Yield from their sunless wombs:
Veiled were the sacred images,
He knew, like vapour-shrouded trees,
Vanished gold lamp, and chalice rare;
The astonished altars stripped and bare,
Because upon the cross, stone-dead,
Christ lay that hour disraimented.

IX.

He prayed—then spake—‘How goes the fight?’
Then answer reached him from the height:

X.

‘O King, the battle goes as though
God weighed two nations in His scale;
And now the fates of Eire sink low,
Now theirs that wear the mail:

‘O King, thy sons, through God's decree,
Are dead save one, the best of all,
Murrough—and now, ah woe is me!
I see his standard fall!’

XI.

It fell: but as it fell, above
Through lightning-lighted skies on drove
A thousand heavenly standards, dyed
In martyrdom's ensanguined tide;
And every tower, and town, and fane
That blazed of old round Erin's shore,
Down crashed, it seemed, in heaven again;
So dire that thunder's roar!

336

The wrath had come: the Danes gave way;
For Brian's prayer had power that day;
Seaward they rushed, the race abhorred;
The sword of prayer had quelled their sword.
So fled they to the ship-thronged coast;
But, random-borne through Tolga's glade,
A remnant from that routed host
Rushed by where Brian prayed;
And, swinging forth his brand, down leap'd
Black Brodar, he that foremost rode,
And from the kingly shoulders swept
The old head, praising God;
And cried aloud, ‘Let all men tell
That Brodar, he that leagues with Hell,
That Brodar of the magic mail
Slew Brian of the Gael.’

XII.

Him God destroyed! The Accursed One lay
Like beast, unburied where he fell:
But Brian and his sons this day
In Armagh Church sleep well.
And Brian's grandson strong and fair,
Clutching a Sea-King by the hair,
Went with him far through Tolga's wave;
Went with him to the same sea-grave.
So Eire gave thanks to God, though sad,
And took the blessing and the bale,
And sang, in funeral garments clad,
The vengeance of the Gael.
Silent all night the Northmen haled
Their dead adown the bleeding wharf:
Far north at dawn the Pirates sailed;
But on thy shore, Clontarf,

337

Old Eire once more, with wan cheeks wet,
Gave thanks that He who shakes the skies
Had burst His people's bond, and yet
Decreed that Sacrifice:
For God is One that gives and takes;
That lifts the low, and fells the proud;
That loves His land of Eire, and makes
His rainbow in His cloud.

Thus sang to Eire her Bard of old;
Thus sang to trampled kerne and serf,
While, sunset-like, her age of gold
Came back to green Clontarf.

THE BARD ETHELL.

(Ireland in the 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.
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,

338

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 feastful 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 honoured the Bards, and gave gold for song.
If rebels arose he put out their eyes;
If robbers plundered or burned 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 wronged 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;

339

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 drained 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 scorned 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!

V.

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 pawned to avenge a spite:
No Bard or prophet his birth foretold:
He was guarded and warded both day and night:
He counselled with fools and had boors at his feast;
He was cruel to Christian and kind to beast:
Men smiled when they talked 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 sinned; 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!

340

VI.

The sun has risen: on lip and brow
He greets me—I feel it—with golden wand:
Ah, bright-faced Norna! I see thee now;
Where first I saw thee I see thee stand!
From the trellis the girl looked down on me:
Her maidens stood near: it was late in spring:
The grey priests laughed 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 fashioned 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 prayed me, her smile with the sweet voice blending,
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.
Norna was never long time the same:
By a spirit so strong was her slight form moulded
The curves swelled 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 taught her the hymn of Patrick the Apostle,
And the marvels of Bridget and Columkille:

341

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 Brendan who found afar
Another world 'neath the western star;
Of our three great bishops in Lindisfarne 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.
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 blow
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 sharpened 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 dropped as dead: bereaven
Is earth when her holy ones leave her for heaven:

342

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 staff 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 Iorras' shore
That convent where now the Franciscans dwell:
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?
At forgiveness like that I spit and laugh!
My chief, in his wine-cups, forgave twelve men;
And of these a dozen rebelled again!
There never was chief more brave than he!
The night he was born Loch Gur up-burst:

343

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 scorned 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-blackened yet ridged with white!
There were comely wonders before he died:
The eagle barked, and the Banshee cried;
The witch-elm wept with a blighted bud:
The spray of the torrent was red with blood:
The chief, returned from the mountain's bound,
Forgat to ask after 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 I 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 wronged one sued me to right his wrong
With the flail of the Satire and fierce Ode's fan.

344

I sang to the chieftains: each stock I 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.

XII.

Great is our Order; but greater far
Were its pomp and power in the days of old,
When the five Chief Bards in peace or war
Had thirty bards each in his train enrolled;
When Ollave Fodhla in Tara's hall
Fed bards and kings: when the boy, king Nial,
Was trained by Torna: when Britain and Gaul
Sent crowns of laurel to Dallan 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!

345

For that first song's sake let our bards hold fast
To Truth and Justice from first to last!
'Tis over! some think we erred 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:—
I have scorned 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 sinned some sin, or has God forgotten?
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.

346

For one now living the strong land then
Gave kindly food and raiment to ten.
No doubt they waxed 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!
I have often feared 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, besides 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 say,
‘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.

347

Our hope is Christ. I have wept full oft
He came not to Eire in Oisin's time;
Though love, and those new monks, would make men soft
If they were not hardened 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 missed 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.
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 Norna—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 I have injured forgiveness seek.

348

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!

Ossian's son, Oscar.

THE SISTERS; OR, WEAL IN WOE.

(Ireland in the Nineteenth Century.)

Dedicated to my friend and kinsman, Stephen E. Spring Rice, June 2, 1861.

[_]

[This tale, written in happier times, was intended to illustrate that nobler side of Irish life and character which is too often ignored, and which remains the hope of Ireland's true friends in her darkest days.] January, 1884.

From nine to twelve my guest was eloquent
In anger, mixed with sorrow, at the things
He saw around us; lands half marsh, half weeds,
Gates from the gate-posts miserably divorced,
Hovels ill-thatched, wild fences, fissured roads—
‘Your people never for the future plan;
They live but for the moment.’ Thus he spake,
A youth just entering on his broad domains,
A senator in prorogation time
Travelling for knowledge, Oxford's accurate scholar,
A perfect rider, clean in all his ways,
But by traditions narrowed. As the moon
Turns but one side to earth, so showed that world
Whereon he gazed, for stubborn was his will,
And Ireland he had never loved. ‘You err,’

349

I answered, taking in good part his wrath,
‘Our peasant too has prescience; far he sees;
Earth is his foreground only, rough or smooth;
In him from seriousness the lightness comes:
Too serious is he to make sacrifice
For fleeting good; the battles of this world
He with the left hand fights, and half in sport;
He has his moment—and eternity.’
‘Ay, ay,’ exclaimed my guest, ‘your Church, she does it!
Your feasts and fasts and wakes and social rites,
With “Sir,” and “Ma'am,” and usages of Court:—
I've seen a hundred men leave plough and spade
To take a three weeks' infant to its grave,
A cripple pay two shillings for a cart
To bear him to the Holy Well. Sick Land!
Look up! the proof is round you written large!
Your Faith is in the balance wanting found:
Your shipless seas confess it; bridgeless streams;
Your wasted wealth of ore, and moor, and bay!
Beneath the Upas shade of Faith depraved
All things lie dead — wealth, comfort, freedom, power—
All that great Nations boast!’ ‘Such things,’ I answered,
‘The Gentiles seek; and you new tests have found;
“Ecclesiæ stantis vel cadentis,” friend;—
“Blessed the rich: blessed whom all men praise:”
New Scriptures, these; the Irish keep the old!
Say, are there not diversities of gifts?
Are there not virtues—Industry is one—
Which reap on earth, whilst others sow for heaven?
Faith, hope, and love, and purity, and patience,
Humility, and self-forgetfulness,

350

These too are virtues; yet they rear not States.
What then? Of many Nations earth is made:
Each hath its function; each its part for others:
If all were hand, where then were ear or eye?
If all were foot, where head? You rail, my friend,
Not at my country only but your own.
The land that gave us birth our service claims,
The suffering land our love. Yet England, too,
They love, and they the most, who flatter not.
A thousand years of nobleness she lived
Whereof you rob her! In this isle are men
By ancient lineage hers. Such men might say,
“My England was entombed ere yours had birth.”
Dates she from Arkwright only? Rose the Nation
With Alfred, or those Tudor Kings who built
The Golden Gate of England's modern time,
But built it upon liberties annulled,
Old glories quenched, the old nobles dead or quelled—
Ay, wrecks more sad?’ His host, I could not use
Words rough as his albeit to shield a land
For every shaft a targe; so changed the theme
To her he knew—thence loved.

He loved his country;
An older man than he for things less great
Had loved that land. Yet who could gaze, unmoved,
From Windsor's terraced heights o'er those broad meads
Lit by the pomp of silver-winding Thames
Dropping past templed grove, and hall, and farm,
Toward the great City? Who, unthrilled, could mark
Her Minsters, towering far away, with heads
That stay the sunset of old times; or them,
Oxford and Cambridge, England's anchors twain,

351

That to her moorings hold her? Fresh from these
Who, who could tread, O Wye, thy watery vale
Where Tintern reigns in ruin; who could rest
Where Bolton finds in Wharf a warbling choir,
Or where the sea-wind fans thy brow discrown'd,
Furness, nor love and wonder? Who untouch'd,
When evening creeps from Scawfell toward Black Combe,
Could wander by thy darkly gleaming lakes
Embayed 'mid sylvan garniture and isles
From saint or anchoret named, within the embrace
Of rural mountains green, or sound, scent, touch,
Of kine-besprinkled, soft, partitioned vales,
Almost domestic? Shadow-haunted land!
By Southey's lake Saint Herbert holds his own!
The knightly armour now by Yew-dale's crag
Rings loud no longer: Grasmere's reddening glass
Reflects no more the on-rushing clan: yet still
Thy Saxon Kings, and ever-virgin Queens
Possess thee with a quiet pathos; still,
Like tarnished path forlorn of moon that sets
Over wide-watered moor and marsh, thy Past
A spiritual sceptre, though deposed, extends
From sea to sea—from century-worn St. Bees
To Cuthbert's tomb under those eastern towers
On Durham's bowery steep!

He loved his country:
That love I honoured. Great and strong he called her:
But well I knew that had her greatness waned,
His loved had waxed.

As thus we talk'd the sun
Launched through the hurrying clouds a rainy beam
That smote the hills. My guest exclaimed, ‘Come forth:

352

We waste the day! Yon ridge my fancy takes;
Climb we its crest!’ The wolf-hound at our feet,
Our drift divining, bounded sudden on us
In rapture of prospective gratitude.

We passed the offending gate; a plank for bridge,
We passed the offending stream which dashed its spray
Contemptuous on us, proud of liberty.
I laughed; ‘Our passionate Ireland is the stream;
Seven hundred years at will it mocks or chides;
You have not made it turn your English mill!’
We scaled the hills; we pushed through miles of trees
Which, sire and son, had held their own since first
The tall elk trod their ways. Lightning and storm
Had left large wrecks: election wars, not less,
Or hospitalities as fierce, when home
A thousand chiefless clansmen dragged the bride,
Or danced around a cradle,—ah, brave hearts!
Loyal where cause for loyalty was scant!
Vast were those woods and fair; rock, oak, and yew,
Grey, green, and black, in varying measures striking
That three-stringed lyre which charms not ear but eye.
Long climbing, from the woodland we emerged
And paced a rocky neck of pale green pasture,
The limit of two counties. Full in face
Rushed, ocean-scented, the harmonic wind:
Round us the sheep-bells chimed; a shower late past
With jewelry had hung the blackberry bush,
And gorse-brake half in gold. On either side
Thin-skinned, ascetic, slippery, the descent
Down slanted toward the creeping mists. Our goal

353

We reached at last—a broad and rocky mass
Forth leaning, lordly, unto lands remote,
The lion's head of all those feebler hills
That cowering slunk behind it. Far around
Low down, subjected, stretched the sea-like waste
Shade-swept, unbounded, like infinity.
An hour before his time the sun had dropped
Behind a mountain-wall of barrier cloud
Wide as the world: but five great beams converged
Toward the invisible seat of his eclipse;
And over many a river, bay, and mere
Lay the dull red of ante-dated eve.

That summit was a churchyard. Cross-engraven
Thronged the close tomb-stones. Each one prayed for peace;
And some were raised by men whose heads were white
Ere selfless toil had won the hoarded coins
That honoured thus a parent. In the midst
A tomb-like chapel, thirty feet by ten,
Stood monumental, with stone roof and walls
The wrestling centuries slid from. Nigh we sat
While, by the polished angle split, the wind
Hissed like a forkèd serpent. Silent long
My friend remain'd; his sallies all had ceased,
A man of tender nerve though stubborn thought.
The scene weighed on him like a Prophet's scroll
Troubling some unjust City. Far and near
He scanned the desolate region, and at last
Prayed me the hieroglyphic to expound.
‘Yon tower which blurs the lonely lake far off,
What is it?’ And I answered, ‘Know you not?
He built it, he that Norman horsed and mailed,

354

Who, strong in Henry's might and Adrian's bull,
Rent from the Gaelic monarch half his realm;—
The rest came later, dowry of the bride.’

Once more he mused; then, westward pointing, spake:
‘Yon lovely hills, yet low, with Phidian line,
That melt into the horizon:—on their curve
A ruined castle stands; the sky glares through it,
Red, like a conflagration?’ I replied:
‘Four hundred years the Norman held his own:
He spake the people's language; they in turn
His war-cry had resounded far and wide;
Their history he had grown, impersonate.
The land rejoiced in him, and of his greatness
Uplifted, glorying, on a neck high held
The beautiful burden, as the wild stag lifts
O'er rocky Torc his antlers! Would you more?
The Desmond was unloved beside the Thames;
The right of the great Palatine was trampled;
His Faith by law proscribed. O'er tombs defaced,
In old Askeaton's Abbey, of his sires
He vowed unwilling war. Long years the realm
Reel'd like a drunken man. Behold the end!
Yon wreck speaks all!’

Thus question after question
Dragged, maimed and mangled, dragged reluctant forth
Time's dread confession! Crime replied to crime:
Whom Tudor planted Cromwell rooted out;
For Charles they fought;—to fight for Kings, their spoilers,
The rebel named rebellion! William next!

355

Once more the Nobles were down hurled; once more
Nobility as in commission placed
By God among the lowly. Loyalty
To native Princes, or to Norman chiefs
Their lawless conquerors, or to British Kings,
Or her the Mother Church that ne'er betrayed,
Had met the same reward. The legend spake
Words few but plain, grim rubric traced in blood;
While, like a Fury fleeting through the air,
History from all the octaves of her lyre
Struck but one note! What rifted tower and keep
Witnessed of tyrannous and relentless wars,
That shipless gulfs, that bridgeless streams and moors,
Black as if lightning-scarred, or curst of God,
Proclaimed of laws blacker than brand or blight—
Those Penal Laws. The tale was none of mine;
Stone railed at stone; grey ruins dumbly frowned
Defiance, and the ruin-handled blast
Scattered the fragments of Cassandra's curse
From the far mountains to the tombs close by,
Which muttered treason.

That sad scene to me
Had lost by use its pathos as the scent
Which thrills us while we pass the garden palls
On one within it tarrying. To my friend
It spake its natural language: and as he
Who, hard through habit, reads with voice unmoved
A ballad that once touched him, if perchance
Some listener weeps, partakes that listener's trouble
Even so the stranger's sorrow struck on mine,
And I believed the things which I beheld,
There sitting silent. When at last he spake

356

The spirit of the man in part was changed;
The things but heard of he had seen: the truths
Coldly conceded now he realized:
Justice at last with terrible recoil
Leap'd up full-armed, a strong man after sleep,
And dashed itself against the wrong! I answered:
‘Once more you speak the words you spake this morn,
“Look up, the proof is round you, written large:”
But in an altered sense.’

I spake, and left him:
Left him to seek a tomb which three long years
Holds one I honoured. Half an hour went by;
Then he rejoined me. With a knitted brow,
And clear vindictiveness of speech, like him
Who, loving, hates the sin of whom he loves,
He spake against the men who, having won
By right or wrong the mastery of this isle
(For in our annals he was versed, nor ran
In custom's blinkers save on modern roads),
Could make of it, seven hundred years gone by,
No more than this! Then I: ‘No country loved they:
Her least, the imperial realm! 'Tis late to mourn;
Let past be past.’ ‘The Past,’ he said, ‘is present;
And o'er the Future stretches far a hand
Shadowy and minatory.’ ‘Come what may,’
I said, ‘no suffering can to us be new;
No shadow fail to dew some soul with grace.
The history of a Soul holds in it more
Than doth a Nation's! In its every chance
Eternity lies hid; from every step
Branch forth two paths piercing infinity.
These things look noblest from their spiritual side:

357

A statesman, on the secular side you see them,
And doubt a future based on such a past.
'Tis true, with wrong dies not the effect of wrong,
Or sense thereof: 'tis true stern Power with time
Changes its modes, not instinct: true it is
That hollow peace is war that wears a mask:
Yet let us quell to-day unquiet thoughts:
She rests who lies in yonder tomb: sore pains
She suffered: yet within her there was peace:
In God's high Will she rests, and why not we?’

Thus we conversed till twilight, thickening, crept
Compassionate, o'er a scene to which we said
Twilight seemed native, day a garish vest
Worn by a slave. Returning, oft my friend
Cast loose in wrath the arch-rebel Truth; I answered:
‘She rests, and why not we? O suffering land!
Thee, too, God shields; and only for this cause
Can they that love thee sleep.’—
Holy were all as she, the wrongs long past
Would rack our age no longer: for that cause
The blinder they who mock her country's Faith.
Thousands are like her! Ireland's undergrowths—
Her hope is there, and not in cloud or sunshine
That beat her mountain-tops. The maiden's tale
He sought with instance. 'Twas not marvellous,
I told him: yet to calm his thoughts perturbed,
Thus, while the broad moon o'er the lonely moor
Rose, blanching as she soared, till pools, at first
With trembling light o'erlaid, gave back her face,
And all the woodland waves as eve advanced
Shone bright o'er sombre hollows, I recounted
The fragments of a noteless Irish life,

358

Not strange esteemed among us. Such a theme
I sought not. Ill it were to forge for friend
A providence, or snare him though to Truth.
Yet I was pleased he sought that tale. 'Twas sad
But in its dusky glass—and this I hid not—
Shadowed a phantom image of my country,
Vanquished yet victor, in her weal and woe.

The father in the prime of manhood died;
The mother followed soon; their children twain,
Margaret Mac Carthy, and her sister Mary,
The eldest scarcely ten years old, survived
To spread cold hands upon a close-sealed grave,
And cry to those who answered not. The man
Who, in that narrow spot to them the world,
Stood up and seemed as God; that gentler one
Who overhung like Heaven their earliest thought,
And in the bosom of whose sleepless love
Reborn they seemed each morning, both were dead.
In grief's bewilderment the orphans stood
Like one by fraud betrayed: nor moon, nor sun,
Nor trees, nor grass, nor herds, nor hills appeared
To them what they had been. In saddened eyes,
Frightened yet dull, in voice subdued, and feet
That moved as though they feared to wake the dead,
Men saw that nowhere loneliness more lives
Than in the breasts of children. Time went by;
The farm was lost; and to her own small home
Their father's mother led them. 'Twas not far;
They could behold the orchard they had loved;
Behind the hedge could hear the robin sing,
And the bees murmur. Slowly, as the trance
Of grief dissolved, the present lived once more;
The past became a dream!

359

I see them still!
Softly the beauty-making years on went,
And each one as he passed our planet's verge
Looked back, and left a gift. A darker shade
Dropped on the deepening hair; a brighter gleam
Forth flashed from sea-blue eyes with darkness fringed.
Like, each to each, their stature growing kept
Unchanged gradation. To her grandmother
A quick eye and a serviceable hand
Endeared the elder most; she kept the house;
Hers was the rosier cheek, the livelier mind,
The smile of readier cheer. In Mary lived
A visionary and pathetic grace
Through all her form diffused, from those small feet
Up to that beauteous-shaped and netted head,
Which from the slender shoulders and slight bust
Rose like a queen's. Alone, not solitary,
Full often half an autumn day she sat
On the high grass-banks, foot with foot enclasped,
Now twisting osiers, watching cloud-shades now,
Or rushing vapours through whose chasms there shone
Far off an alien race of clouds like Alps
O'er Courmayeur white-gleaming, and like them
To stillness frozen. Well that orphan knew them,
Those marvellous clouds that roof our Irish wastes;
Spring's lightsome veil outblown, sad Autumn's bier,
And Winter's pillar of electric light
Slanted from heaven. A spirit-world, so seemed it,
In them was imaged forth to her.

With us
The childish heart betroths itself full oft
In vehement friendship. Mary's was of these;
And thus her fancy found that counterweight

360

Which kept her feet on earth. With her there walked
Two years a little maiden of the place,
Her comrade, as men called her. Eve by eve
Homeward from school we saw them as they passed,
One arm of each about the other's neck,
Above both heads a single cloak. She died,
To Mary leaving what she valued most,
A rosary strung with beads from Olivet.
Daily did Mary count those beads; from each
The picture of some Christian Truth ascending,
Till all the radiant Mysteries shone on high
Like constellations, and man's gloomy life
For her to music rolled on poles of love
Through realms of glory. Hope makes Love immortal!
That friend she ne'er forgot. In later years
Working with other maidens equal-aged,
(A lady of the land instructed them,)
In circle on the grass, not them she saw,
Heard not the song they sang: alone she sat,
And heard 'mid sighing pines and murmuring streams
The voice of the departed.

Smoothly flowed
Till Margaret had attained her eighteenth year
The tenor of their lives; and they became,
Those sisters twain, a name in all the vale
For beauty, kindness, truth, for modest grace,
And all that makes that fairest flower of all
Earth bears, heaven fosters—peasant nobleness:—
For industry the elder. Mary failed
In this, a dreamer; indolence her fault,
And self-indulgence, not that coarser sort
Which seeks delight, but that which shuns annoy.

361

And yet she did her best. The dull red morn
Shone, beamless, through the wintry hedge while passed
That pair with panniers, or, on whitest brows
The balanced milk-pails. Margaret ruled serene
A wire-fenced empire smiling through soft glooms,
The pure, health-breathing dairy. Softer hand
Than Mary's ne'er let loose the wool; no eye
Finer pursued the on-flowing line: her wheel
Murmured complacent joy like kitten pleased:
With us such days abide not.

Sudden fell
Famine, the Terror never absent long,
Upon our land. It shrank—the daily dole;
The oatmeal trickled from a tighter grasp;
Hunger grew wild through panic; infant cries
Maddened at times the gentle into wrong:
Death's gentleness more oft for death made way;
And like a lamb that openeth not its mouth
The sacrificial People, fillet-bound,
Stood up to die. Amid inviolate herds
Not few the sacraments of death received,
Then waited God's decree. These things are known:
Strangers have witness'd to them; strangers writ
The epitaph again and yet again:
The nettles and the weeds by the way-side
Men ate: from sharpening features and sunk eyes
Hunger glared forth, a wolf more lean each hour;
Children seemed pigmies shrivelled to sudden age;
And the deserted babe too weak to wail
But shook if hands, pitying or curious, raised
The rag across him thrown. In England alms
From many a private hearth were largely sent,
As ofttimes they have been. 'Twas vain. The land

362

Wept while her sons sank back into her graves
Like drowners 'mid still seas. Who could escaped:
And on a ghost-thronged deck, amid such cries
As from the battle-field ascend at night
When stumbling widows grope o'er heaps of slain,
Amid such cries stood Mary, when the ship
Its cable slipped and, on the populous quays
Grating, without a wind, on the slow tide,
Dropped downward to the main.

For western shores
Those emigrants were bound. At Liverpool,
Fann'd by the ocean breeze the smouldering fire
Of fever burst into a sudden flame;
The stricken there were left; among them Mary.
How long she knew not in an hospital,
A Babel of confused distress, she lay,
Dinned with delirious strife. But o'er her brow
God shook the dew of dreams wherein she trod
The shadowed wood-walks of old days once more,
And dabbled in old streams. Ere long, still weak,
Abroad she roamed, a basket on her arm,
With violets heaped. The watchman of the city
Laid his strong hand upon her drooping head
Banning the impostor. 'Twas her rags, she thought,
Incensed him, and in meekness moved she on.
When one with lubrique smile toyed with her flowers,
And spake of violet eyes and easier life,
She understood not, but misliked, and passed.
In Liverpool an aged priest she found,
A kinsman of her mother's. Much to her
Of emigrants he spake, and of their trials,
Old ties annull'd, and 'mid temptations strange
Lacking full oft the Bread of Life. She wept;
Before the tabernacle's lamp she prayed

363

Freshly-absolved and heavenliest, with a prayer
That showered God's blessing o'er the wanderers down:
But dead was her desire to cross the main.
Her strength restored, beyond the city-bound
With others of her nation she abode,
Amid the gardens labouring. A rough clan
Those outcasts seemed: not like their race at home:
Nor chapel theirs, nor school. Their strength was prized;
Themselves were so esteemed as that sad tribe
Beside the Babylonian streams that wept,
By those that loved not Sion.

Weeks grew months;
And, with the strength to suffer, sorrow came.
Hard by their nomad camp a youth there lived
Of wealthier sort, who looked upon this maid:
Her country was his own: he loved it not:
Had rooted quickly in the stranger's land;
And versatile, cordial, specious, seeming-frank,
Contracting for himself a separate peace,
Had prosper'd, but had prospered in such sort
As they that starve within. Her confidence
He gained. To love unworthy, still he loved her:
Loved with the love of an unloving heart,
That love which either is in shallows lost,
Or in its black depth breeds the poison weed.
She knew him not; how could she? He himself
Knew scantly. Near her what was best within him
Her golden smile sunned forth; but, dark and cold,
Like a benighted hemisphere abode
A moiety of his being which she saw not.
His was a superficial nature, vain,
And hard, to good impressions sensitive,

364

And most admiring virtues least his own;
A mirror that took in a seeming world,
And yet remained blank surface. He was crafty,
Followed the plough with diplomatic heart;
His acts were still like the knight's move at chess,
Each a surprise; not less, to nature's self
Who heard him still referr'd them. ‘What!’ men said,
‘Marry the portionless!’ Strange are fortune's freaks!
The wedding-day was fixed, the ring brought home,
When from a distant uncle tidings came:
His latest son was dead. ‘Take thou my farm,
And share my house’—So spake the stern old man—
‘And wed the wife whom I for thee have found.’
He showed the maid that letter. Slowly the weeds
Made way adown the thick and stifled stream,
And others followed; slowly sailed the cloud
Through the dull sky, and others followed slowly:
At last he spake. Low were his words and thin,
Many, but scarcely heard. He asked—her counsel!
Her cheek one moment burned. Death-cold, once more
A little while she sat; then rose and said;
‘You would be free; I free you; go in peace.’
'Twas the good angel in his heart that loved her;
'Twas not the man himself! He wept, but went.
The woman of the house that night was sure
The girl had loved him not. She thought not so
When, four months past, she mark'd her mouth, aside,
Tremble, his name but uttered.

Sharp the wrong!
Yet they on Life's bewildered book would force
A partial gloss it bears not who assume

365

The injured wholly free from blame. The world
Is not a board in squares of black and white,
Or else the judgment-executing tongue
Would lack probation. Wronged men are not angels;
Wrong's chiefest sin is this—it genders wrong;
So stands the offender in his own esteem
Exculpate; while the feebly-judging starve
The just cause, babbling ‘mutual was the offence!’
The man was weak; not wholly vile. 'Twas well,
Doubtless, to free him; yet in after years,
When early blight had struck his radiant head,
The girl bewailed the pride that left thus tempted
The man she loved; arraigned the wrath that left him
Almost without farewell. His letter too,
Unopen'd she returned. 'Twas strange! so sweet—
Not less there lived within her, down, far down,
A fire-spring seldom wakened! When a child,
At times, by some strange jealousy distrubed
From her still dream she flashed in passion quelled
Ere from her staider sister's large blue eyes
The astonishment had passed. Such moods remained
Though rare—that wrath of tender hearts, which scorns
Revenge, which scarcely utters its complaint,
And yet forgives but slowly.

In those days
Within the maiden's bosom there arose
Sea-longings, and desire to sail away
She knew not whither; and her arms she spread,
Weeping, to winds and waves, and shores unknown,
Lighted by other skies; and inly thus
She reasoned self-deceived. ‘What keeps thee here?
'Twas for a farther bourne thou bad'st farewell
To those at home, and here thou art as one

366

That hangs between two callings.’ In her heart
Tempests low-toned to ocean-tempests yearned,
And ever when she marked the shipmast forest
That on the smoky river swayed far off,
Her wish became a craving. Soon once more
Alone 'mid hundreds on a rain-washed deck
She stood, and saw the billows heave around
And all the passions of that headlong world.
Dark-visaged ocean frowned with hoary brows
Against dark skies; huge, lumbering water-weights
Went shouldering through the abysses: streaming clouds
Ran on the lower levels of the wind;
And in the universe of things she seemed
An atom random blown. Full many a morn
Rose red through mists, like babe that weeps to rise;
Full many an evening died from wave to wave;
Then gradual peace possessed her. Love may wound
But 'tis self-love that wound exasperates;
A noble nature casts out bitterness,
And o'er the scar, like pine-tree incorrupt,
Weeps healing gums. Heart-whole she gazed at last,
On the great city chiefest of that realm
Which wears the Future's glory. Landed, soon
Back to old duties with a mightier zest
Her heart, its weakening sadness passed, returned
Kindness made service easier, and the tasks
At first distasteful smiled on her ere long.
There she was loved once more; there all went well;
And there in peace she might have lived and died;
Yet in that region she abode not long:
In part a wayward instinct drave her forth;
In part a will that from the accomplished end
Unstable swerved; in part a hope forlorn:

367

She sought a site, their sojourn who had left
Long since her village. There old names, old voices,
Faces unknown, yet recognized, thronged round her
In unconsummate union, (hearts still like,
Yet all beside so different,) not like Souls
Re-met in heaven—more like those Shades antique
That, 'mid the empurpled fields, of other airs
Mindful, in silence trod the lordly land,
Or flocked around the latest guest of Death
With question sad of home. Imperfect ties
Rub severance into soreness. Mary passed,
Thus urged, ere long to lonelier climes: she tracked
Companioned sometimes, sometimes without friend,
The boundless prairie, sailed the sea-like lake,
Descended the broad river as it rushed
Through immemorial forests: lastly stood
Sole, 'mid that city by the southern sea.
There sickness fell upon her: there her hand
Dropt, heavier daily, on her task half done;
Her feet wore chains unseen. The end, she thought,
Was coming. Ofttimes, in her happier days,
She wished to die and be with God: yet now,
Wearied by many griefs, to life she clung,
Upbraiding things foregone and inly sighing
‘None loves to die.’ Sorrow, earth-born, in some
Breeds first the Earth-infection; in them works,
Like those pomegranate seeds that barred from light
For aye sad Ceres' child! Alas! how many,
The ill-honoured ecstasies of youth surceased,
Exchange its clear spring for the mire! Hope sick,
How oft Faith dies! How few are they in whom
Virgin but yields to Vestal; casual pureness
Merged in essential; childhood's matin dew
Fixed, ere exhaled, in the Soul's adamant!

368

Mary with these had part; to her help came—
That help the proud despise. One eve it chanced
Upon the vast and dusking quays she stood
Alone and weeping. She that morn had sent
Her latest hoardings to her grandmother,
And half was sorry she had naught retained:
The warm rain wet her hair: she heard within
The silver ringing of its drops commingling
With that still mere beside her childhood's home,
And with the tawny sedge that girt it round,
And with its winter dogwood far away
Reddening the faint, still gleam. As thus she stood
Upon her shoulder sank a hand. She turned:
It was a noble lady clothed in black,
And veiled. That veil thrown back, she recognized
At once the luminous stillness and the calm
Ethereal which the sacred cloister breeds.
A voice as pure and sweet as if from heaven,
Toned as friend speaks to friend, addressed her thus:
‘You lack a home: our convent is hard by.’
The lady, Spanish half, and Irish half,
No answer sought, but with compulsion soft
Drew her, magnetic, as the tree hard by
Draws the poor creeper on the ground diffused,
And lifts it into light. The child's cold hand
Lurked soon in hers: and in that home which seemed
An isle of heaven the meek lay-sister lived,
Ere long by healthier airs to strength restored,
A rapturous life of Christian freedom masked
In what but servitude had been to one
Lacking vocation true. The Life Divine,
‘Hidden with God,’ is hidden from the world
Lest Virtue should be dimmed by Virtue's praise.

369

Heroic Virtue least by men is prized:
The hero in the saint the crowd can honour,
The saint at best forgive. To this world's ken
Convents, of sanctity chief citadels,
Though sanctity in every place is found,
The snowy banners and bright oriflambs
Of that resplendent realm by Counsels ruled,
Not Precept only, spread in vain, despised,
Or for their earthly good alone revered,
Not for their claims celestial. Different far
The lesson Mary learned. The poor were fed,
The orphan nursed; around the sick man's couch
Gentle as light hovered the healing hand;
And beautiful seemed, on mountain-tops of truth,
The foot that brought good tidings! Times of trial
Were changed to Sabbaths; and the rude, rough girl,
Waiting another service, found a home
Where that which years had marred returned once more
Like infant flesh clothing the leprous limb.
Yet these things Mary found were blossoms only:
The tree's deep root was secret. From the Vow
Which bound the Will's infinitude to God,
Upwelled that peaceful strength whose fount was God:
From Him behind His sacramental veil
In holy passion for long hours adored
Came that great Love which made the bonds of earth
Needless, thence irksome. Wondering, there she learned
The creature was not for the creature made
But for the sole Creator; that His kingdom,
Glorious hereafter, lies around us here,
Its visible splendour painfully suppressing,

370

And waiting its transfigurance. Was it strange,
If while those Brides of Christ around her moved
Her heart sang hymns to God? Much had she suffered:
Much of her suffering gladly there she learned
Came of her fault; and much had kindliest ends
Not yet in her fulfilled. A light o'ershone her
Which slays Illusion, that white snake which slimes
The labyrinth of self-love's more tender ways
Virtue's most specious mimic. She was loosed:
The actual by the seeming thraldom slain;
Her life was from within and from above;
And as, when Winter dies, and Spring new-born
Her whisper breathes o'er earth, the earlier flowers,
Unlike the wine-dark growths of Autumn, dipped
In the year's sunset, rise in lightest hues,
An astral gleam, white, green, or delicate yellow
More light than colour, so the maiden's thoughts
Flashed with a radiance that permitted scarce
Human affections tragic. Oft, she told me,
As faithless to old friends she blamed herself:—
One hand touched Calvary, one the Eternal Gates;
The present nothing seemed. The years passed on:
The honeymoon of this heart-bridal waned;
But nothing of its spousal truth was lost,
Nor of its serious joy. If failures came—
And much she marvelled at her slow advance,
And for the first time, pierced by that stern grace
Wherein no sin looks trivial, feared;—what then?
Failures that deepened humbleness but sank
Foundations deeper for a loftier pile
Of solid virtue: transports homeward summoned
For more disinterested love made way,
More perfect made Obedience.

371

If a Soul,
Half-way to heaven, death past, once more to earth
Were sent, it could but feel as Mary felt
When on the convent grates a letter smote
Loud, harsh, with summons from the outward world.
Her sister, such its tidings, was a wife,
(That matron whom you praised:—ay, comely is she,
And good; laborious, kindly, faithful, true;
Yet Time has done Time's work, her spiritual beauty
Transposing gently to a lower key;)
Her grandmother bereft, and weak through age,
Needed her tendance sorely. Would she come?
Alas! what could she? Duty stretched from far
An iron hand that stayed her mounting steps;
The little novices wept loud, ‘Abide!’
Long on her neck the saintly sisterhood
Hung ere they blessed her: then she turned and went.

And so once more she trod this rocky vale,
And scarcely older looked at twenty-six
Than at sixteen. Before so gentle, now
A humbler gentleness was o'er her thrown;
Nor ruffled was she ever as of yore
With gusts of flying spleen: nor feared she now
Hindrance unlovely, or the word that jarred.
The sadness hers at first dispers'd ere long,
And such strange sweetness came to her, men said
A mad dog would not bite her. Lowliest toils
Were by her hand ennobled: Labour's staff
Beneath it burst in blossom. In the garden,
'Mid earliest birds, and singing like a bird,
She moved, her grandmother asleep. She mixed
The reverence due to years with tenderness
The infant's claim. 'Twas hers to bring the crutch,

372

Nor mark the lameness; hers with question apt
To prompt, not task, the memory. Tales twice-told
Wearied not her, nor orders each with each
At odds, nor causeless blame. Wiles she had many
To anticipate harsh moods, lest one rash word
Might draw a cloud 'twixt helpless eld and heaven,
Blotting the Eternal Vision felt not seen
By hearts in grace. With works of gay caprice,
Needless—yet prized—she made the spectre Want
Seem farther off. Thus love in narrow space
Built a great world. The grandmother preferred
To her, that dreamful girl of old, the woman
Who from the mystic precinct first had learned
Humanity, yet seemed a human creature
O'erruled by some angelic guest. At heart
Ever a nun, she ministered with looks
That healed the sick. The newly-widowed door
Its gloom remitted when she passed; stern foes
Downtrod their legend of old wrongs. To her
Sacred were those that grieved;—those tearless yet
Sacred scarce less because they smiled, nor knew
The ambushed fate before them. When a child,
Grey-haired companionship or solitude
Had pleased her more than childish mates; but now
All the long eves of summer in the porch
The children of her sister and the neighbours,
A spotless flock, sat round her. From her smiles
The sluggish mind caught light, the timid heart
Courage and strength. Unconscious thus, each day
Her soft and blithesome feet one letter traced
In God's great Book above. So passed her life;—
Sorrow had o'er it hung a gentle cloud;
But, like an autumn-mocking day in Spring,

373

Dewy and dim yet ending in pure gold,
The sweets were sweeter for the rain, the growth
Stronger for shadow.

You have seen her tomb!
Upon the young and beautiful it closed:
Her grandmother yet lingers! What is Time?
Shut out the sun, and all the summer long
The fruit-tree stands as barren as the rock;
May's offering March can bring us. Of the twain
The younger doubtless in the eyes of God
Had inly lived the longest. She had learned
From action much, from suffering more, far more,
For stern Experience is a sword whose point
Makes way for Truth. Her trials, great and little,
And trials ever keep proportion just
With high vocations and the spirit's growth,
Had done their work till all her inner being
Freed from asperities, in the light of God
Shone like the feet of some old crucifix
Kissed into smoothness. Here I fain would end,
Leaving her harboured; but her stern, kind fates
Not thus forewent her. Like her life her death,
Not negative or neutral; great in pains,
In consolations greater. Many a week
Much ailed her; what the cause remained in doubt;
When certainty had come she trembled not:
Fixed was her heart. Those pangs that shook her frame,
Like tempests roaring round a mountain church,
Shook not that peace within her! She was thankful;
‘More pain if such Thy Will, and patience more,’
This was her prayer; or wiping from moist eyes
The trembling tear, she whispered, ‘Give me, Lord,

374

On earth Thy cleansing fire that I may see
Sooner Thy Face, death past!’

Alleviations,
Many and great, God granted her. Once more
Her sister was her sister! Unlike fortunes
Had placed at angles those two lives that once
Lay side by side; and love that could not die
Had seemed to sleep. It woke: and, as from mist,
Once more shone out their childhood! Laughed and flashed
Once more the garden-beds whose bright accost
Had cheered them for their parents mourning. Tears
Remembered stayed the course of later tears;
The prosperous from the unprosperous sister sought
Heart-peace; nor wealth nor care could part them more;
And sometimes Margaret's children seemed to her
As children of another! Greetings sweet
Cheered her from distant regions. Once it chanced
The nuns a relic sent her ne'er before
Seen in our vales, a fragment of that Cross
Whereon the world's Redeemer hung three hours:—
The neighbours entering knelt and wept, and smote
Their breasts; her hands she raised in prayer; and straight
Such Love, such Reverence in her heart there rose
Her anguish, like a fiend exorcised, fled;
And for an hour at peace she lay as one
Imparadised. A solace too was hers
Known but to babes. Her body, not her mind,
Was racked; the pang to come she little feared,
Nor lengthened out morose the pang foregone;
Once o'er, to sleep she sank in thankful prayer.

375

A week ere Mary died all suffering left her;
And from the realms of glory beams, as though
Further restraint they brooked not, fell on her
Yet militant below, as there she lay
In monumental whiteness, spirit-lit.
The anthems of her convent charmed once more
Her dreams; and scents from woods where she had sat
In tears. Then spake she of her wandering days;—
Herself she scarcely seemed to see in them;
Plainly thus much I saw: When all went well,
Danger stood nigh; but soon as sorrow came
Within that darkness nearer by her side
Walked her good Angel. In that latest week
Some treasures hidden ever near her heart
She showed me: faded flowers; her mother's hair;
Gold pieces that have raised our chapel's Cross;
A riband by her youthful comrade worn:—
Upon its cover some few words I found
There traced when first beyond the western main
She heard the homeless cuckoo's cry well-known:
‘When will my People to their land return?’

From the first hour her grandchild sank, once more
She that for years bed-ridden lay had risen,
And, autumn past, put forth a wintry strength,
Ministering. Her frame was stronger than her mind;
O'er that at times a dimness hung, like cloud
That creeps from pine to pine. Inly she missed
Her wonted place of homage lost; she mused
Sadly upon the solitary future;
But in her there abode a rock-like will,
And from her tearless service night or day
No man might push her. Seldom spake the woman:

376

She called her grandchild by her daughter's name,
Her daughter buried thirty years and more,
And once she said in wrath, ‘Why toil they thus?
Nora is dead.’ She laboured till the end:
It came—that mortal close! 'Twas Christmas Eve;
Far, far away were heard the city bells:
The sufferer slept. At midnight I went forth;
Along the ice-filmed road a dull gleam lay,
And a sepulchral wind in woods far off
Sang dirges deep. Upon her crutches bent
The aged woman stood beside the door,
With that long gaze intense which is an act
Silently looking toward that hill of graves
We trod to-day; a sinking moon shone o'er it:
Then whispered she—the light of buried years
Edging once more her eyes—‘Each Saturday,
Of those that in that churchyard sleep three Souls,
Their penance done, ascend, and are with God.’

Thus as she spake a cry was heard within,
And many voices raised the Litany
For a departing Soul. Long time—to long—
Had seemed that dying! Now the hour was come,
And change ineffable announced that Death
At last was standing on the floor. O hour!
When in brief space our life is lived again!
Down cast the latest stake! when fiends ascend,
Beckoning the phantoms of forgotten sins
Conscience to scare, or launching as from slings
Temptations new; while Angels hold before us
The Cross unshaken as the sun in heaven,
And whisper, ‘Christ.’ O hour! when prayer is all;
And they that clasp the hand are thrown apart
By the world's breadth from that they love! The act

377

Sin's dread bequest that makes an end of sinning,
Long lasted, while the heart-strings snapt, and all
The elements of the wondrous sensuous world
Slid from the fading sense, and those poor fingers,
As the loose precipice of life down crumbled,
Plucked as at roots. Storm-winged the hours rushed by;
There lay she like some bark on midnight seas,
Now toiling through the windless vale, anon
Hurled on and up to meet the implacable blast
Upon the rolling ridge, when not a foot
Can tread the decks, and all the sobbing planks
Tremble o'erspent. The morning dawned at last
Whitening the frosty pane; the lights removed,
(Save that tall candle in her hand sustained
By others,) she descried it: ‘Ah!’ she said,
‘Thank God! another day!’ Then, nothing one
Who near her knelt, she said, ‘The night is sped,
And you have had no sleep; alas! I thought
Ere midnight I should die.’ Her eyelids closed;
Into a sleep as quiet as a babe's
Gradual she sank; and while the ascending sun
Shot 'gainst the western hill his earliest beam,
In sleep, without a sigh, her spirit passed.

I would you could have seen her face in death!
I would you could have heard that last dread rite,
The mighty Mother's, o'er the stormy gulf
And all the moanings of the unknown abyss
Flinging victorious anthems, or the strength
Of piercing prayer: ‘Oh! ye at least, my friends,
Have pity on me! plead for me with God!’
That Rite complete, the dark procession wound
Interminably through the fields and farms,
While wailing like a midnight wind, the keen

378

Expired o'er moor and heath. At eve we reached
The graveyard; slowly, as to-day, the sun
Behind a tomb-like bank of leaden cloud
Dropt while the coffin sank, and died away
The latest Miserere—

More than once
I would have ceased; but he, my friend and guest,
Or touched or courteous, willed me to proceed.
Perhaps that tale the wild scene harmonized
By sympathy occult; perhaps it touched him,
Contrasting with his recent life—with England,
With Oxford, long his home; its ordered pomp;
Its intermingled groves, and fields, and spires,
Its bridges spanning waters calm and clear;
The frequentation of its courts; its chimes;
Its sunset towers, and strangely youthful gardens
That breathe the ardours of the budding year
On the hoar breadth of grove-like cloisters old,
Chapels, and libraries, and statued halls,
England's still saintly City! Time has there
A stone tradition built like that all round
Woven by the inviolate hedges, where the bird
Her nest has made and warbled to her young,
May after May secure, since the third Edward
Held his last tournament, and Chaucer sang
To Blanche and to Philippa lays of love—
Not like Iernian records. Sad we rose,
That tale complete; and, after silence long,
As homeward through the braided forest-skirt
We trod the moonlight-spotted rocks, my friend
Resumed, with pregnant matter oft more just
In thought than application; but his voice
Was softer than it used to be. At last,
After our home attained, we turned, and lo!

379

With festal fires the hills were lit! Thine eve,
Saint John, had come once more; and for thy sake,
As though but yesterday thy crown were won,
Amid their ruinous realm uncomforted
The Irish people triumphed. Gloomy lay
The intermediate space: thence brightlier burned
The circling fires beyond it. ‘Lo!’ said I,
‘Man's life as viewed by Ireland's sons; a vale
With many a pitfall throng'd, and shade, and briar,
Yet over-blown by angel-haunted airs,
And by the Light Eternal girdled round.’

Brief supper passed, within the porch we sat
As fire by fire burned low. We spake; were mute;
Resumed; but our discourse was gently toned,
Touched by a spirit from that wind-beaten grave,
Which breathed among its pauses, as of old
That converse Bede records, when by the sea,
'Twixt Tyne and Wear, facing toward Lindisfarne,
Saxon Ceolfrid and his Irish guest,
Evangelist from old Iona's isle,
'Mid the half Pagan land in cloisters dim
Discuss'd the Tonsure, and the Paschal time,
Sole themes whereon, in sacred doctrine one,
They differed; but discussed them in such sort
That mutual reverence deeper grew. We heard
The bridgeless brook that sang far off, and sang
Alone: for not among us builds that bird
Which changes light to music, haply ill-pleased
That Ireland bears not yet, in song's domain
To Spenser worthy fruit. Our beds at last,
Wearied, yet glad, we sought. Ere long the wind,
Gathering its manifold voices and the might
Of all its wills in valleys far, and rolled
From wood to wood o'er ridge and ravine, woke

380

Those Spectres which o'erhang my sleep in storm,
A hundred hills to me by sound well known,
That stand dark clustered in the night, and bend
With rainy skirt o'er lake and prone morass,
Or by sea-bays leaned out procumbent brows,
Waiting the rising sun.

At morn we met
Once more, my friend and I. The evening's glow
Had from his feelings passed: in their old channels
They flowed, scarce tinged. But still his thoughts retained
The trace of late impressions quaintly linked
With kindred thought-notes earlier. Half his mind
Scholastic was; his fancy deep; the age
Alone had stamped him modern. Much he spake
Of England wise and wealthy—now no more,
He said, ‘a haughty nation proud in arms,’
Nor, as in Saxon times, a crownèd child
Propped 'against the Church's knee; but ocean's Queen,
Spanning the world with golden zone twin-clasped
By Commerce and by Freedom! But no less
Of pride and suffering spake he, and that frown
Sun-pressed on brows once pure. Of Ireland next:—
‘How strange a race, more apt to fly than walk;
Soaring yet slight; missing the good things round them,
Yet ever out of ashes raking gems;
In instincts loyal, yet respecting law
Far less than usage: changeful, yet unchanged!
Timid, yet enterprising: frank, yet secret:
Untruthful oft in speech, yet living truth,
And Truth in things divine to life preferring:—

381

Scarce men; yet possible angels! “Isle of Saints!”
Such doubtless was your land—again it might be—
Strong, prosperous, manly never! ye are Greeks
In intellect, and Hebrews in the soul:
The solid Roman heart, the corporate strength
Is England's dower!’ ‘Unequally if so,’
I said, ‘in your esteem the Isles are matched:—
They live in distant ages, alien climes;
Native they are to diverse elements:
Our swan walks awkwardly upon dry land;
Your boasted strength in spiritual needs so helps you
As armour helps the knight who swims a flood.’
He laughed. ‘At least no siren streams for us,
Nor holy wells! We love “the fat of the land,”
Meads such as Rubens painted! Strange our fates!
Our feast is still the feast of fox and stork,
The platter broad, and amphora long-necked;—
Ill sorted yoke-mates truly. Strength, meanwhile,
Lords it o'er weakness!’ ‘Never yet,’ I answered,
‘Was husband vassal to an intricate wife
But roared he ruled her;’ ere his smile had ceased,
Continuing thus:—‘Ay! strength o'er weakness rules!
Strength hath in this no choice. But what is Strength?
Two Strengths there are. Club-lifting Hercules,
A mountained mass of gnarled and knotted sinews,
How shows he near the intense, Phœbean Might
That, godlike, spurns the ostent of thews o'ergrown;
That sees far off the victory fixed and sure,
And, without effort, wings the divine death
Like light, into the Python's heart? My friend,

382

Justice is strength; union on justice built;—
Good-will is strength—kind words—silence—that truth
Which hurls no random charge. Your scribes long time
Blow on our island like a scythèd wind:
The good they see not, nor the cause of ill;
They tear the bandage from the wound half-healed:—
Is not such onset weakness? Were it better,
Tell me, free-trader staunch, for sister Nations
To make exchange for aye of scorn for scorn,
Or blend the nobler powers and aims of each,
Diverse, and for that cause correlative,
True commerce, noblest, holiest, frankest, best,
And breed at last some destiny to God
Glorious, and kind to man?—If torn apart
One must her empire lose, and one her all.’

Thus as we spake, the hall clock vast and old,
A waif from Spain's Armada, chimed eleven:
And from the stables drew a long-hair'd boy
Who led a horse as shaggy as a dog,
A splenetic child of thistles and hill blast,
Rock-ribbed, and rich in craft of every race
From weasel to the beast that feigns to die.
Mounting—alas! that friends should ever part,—
My guest bade thus adieu: ‘For good or ill
Our lands are linked.’ And I rejoined, ‘For which?
This shall you answer when, your pledge fulfilled,
Before the swallow you return, and meet
The unblown Spring in our barbaric vale.’

1860.

University of Virginia Library

MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS.

I.

II. ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD KING.

III. ON THE FALL OF A USURPER.

IV. POLAND.

V. TO THE NOBILITY OF ENGLAND, 1848.

VI. ON A CONVENT.

VII. A CONVENT SCHOOL IN A CORRUPT CITY.

VIII.

IX. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.—1.

X. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.—2.

XI. ON A PORTRAIT.

XII. FALSE FRIENDSHIP.

XIII.

XIV. THE POETRY OF LIFE.

XV.

XVI.

XVII. A POET TO A PAINTER.

XVIII. THE FALL OF BACON.

XIX. GRACE DIEU.

XX. TO S. C.

XXI. FROM PETRARCH.

XXII. FROM PETRARCH.

XXIII. FROM PETRARCH.

XXIV. IN MEMORY OF SIR WILLIAM R. HAMILTON.—1.

XXV. AFTER READING AGAIN HIS LETTERS.—2.

XXVI. TRUE AND FALSE LOVE OF FREEDOM. 1860.

XXVII. NATIONAL APOSTACY.

XXVIII.

TO IRELAND.

AGAINST FALSE FREEDOM.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

THE BATTLE OF CLONTARF;

OR, THE KING'S SACRIFICE.

(Ireland in the Eleventh Century.)

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

THE BARD ETHELL.

(Ireland in the Thirteenth Century.)

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

THE SISTERS; OR, WEAL IN WOE.

(Ireland in the Nineteenth Century.)