IN MEMORIAM
Reading edition
OF
R. A. WILSON, ESQ.,
EDITOR OF THE BELFAST MORNING NEWS.
Fair vales of Ulster! in the noontide smiling, Blue Northern mountains, frowning to the sky; Rivers that flow along, with song beguiling The summer day your beauties, too, must die!
Know ye no requiem? Ah! streamlets borrow Your tones from tearful voices! Mountains blue, O'er your high heads let heavy clouds of sorrow Tell that ye mourn the death of Patriot true.
Erin! green Erin! let your great heart feel it! Bid all your sons and daughters, fair and brave, By dropping tears and mourning faces tell it, As they place laurels on a new-made grave!
Lowly he lies to day? Death's deep, calm slumber Has claimed another of our cherished ones; As he, the talented, ranks with the number Of Erin's lost, best-loved—her gifted sons!
"Barney Maglone" is dead! Let the winds sighing On their fleet wings, bear far the wail of woe To every land. Let them in wild, sad crying Tell out to all the sorrow that we know.
Our Poet, and not all Westminster's glory Could ever give him half so loved a grave As this green mound, with simple cross, whose story Shall live 'mong annals of our gifted brave!
Methinks that far among old Ireland's mountains I hear the breezes sing a sad dirge, low, Wild, and yet soft, with tears from many fountains And murmuring riven wailing in their flow.
The grand old woods, with leafy branches waving, Mingle their many harps in one refrain, Blent with the waves, whose foam our coast is laving, Rolling afar, weeping aloud the strain—
Waters and wondrous deep, Mountains and valleys; Woodlands and heathery steep, Lone greenwood alleys,
Sound the long wail of woe, Tell the news, sad and low, Let all the wide world know Of the loved, lost one!
Waves of deep, boundless sea, Boiling for ever free, Tell through the time to be Of the bright, lost one!
Erin, whose bosom green, His own, his loved shrine has been, Feel the woe thou hast seen For the true, lost one!
His land, in weal or woe, In dark gloom or sunny glow, Do all Ireland's great ones know Such zeal as this lost one?
Bright dreams! ah, how fleeting Was his life's fair story! Swift, swift was the meeting Of Death, with earth's glory!
Unrivalled in splendour His sky was at morning, Still brightening, its grandeur His noonday adorning.
But a dark cloud rose glooming, Ah, me! 'twas Death's shadow! It chilled the heat blooming Of hillside or meadow!
Oh, waters and wondrous deep, Mountains and valleys, Woodlands and heathery steep, Lone greenwood alleys—
Sound the weird wail of woe, Tell the news sad and low, Let all the wide world knew Of Erin's best lost one!