Volume 1 — From The Dublin Review. RECENT IRISH POETRY.

Lays of the Western Gael and other Poems. By SAMUEL FERGUSON. London: Bell & Daldy. 1865.

Poems. By SPERANZA (LADY WILDE). Dublin: Duffy. 1864.

Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland. A modern Poem. By WILLIAM ALLINGHAM. London: Macmillan & Co. 1864.

Inisfail, a Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland. By AUBREY DE VERE. Dublin: Duffy. 1864.

In the palmy days of Young Ireland, its writers and speakers were particularly prone to the quotation of that strange saying of Fletcher of Saltoun: "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a country." It has been the destiny of Young Ireland to make and to administer the laws of other countries than that for which its hot youth hoped to legislate. But it has certainly left Ireland a legacy of excellent ballads. A glance at the fortunes of some of the more prominent members of this brilliant but ill-fated party, as they present themselves to view at this moment, suggests curious contrasts and strange reflections. Mr. Gavan Duffy, who was assuredly the source of its noblest and wisest inspirations, after having within ten years occupied high office in three Victorian ministries, and laid the impress of his organizing genius deep on the constitutional foundations of that most rising of the Australian states, is on his way home from Melbourne for a brief European vacation. Mr. John Mitchel, [Footnote 96] who represented the more violent and revolutionary section of Young Ireland, was, before the American war commenced, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, one of the most extreme organs of secession, and afterward visited Paris with the hope of inducing the Emperor Napoleon to invade Ireland; but since the war was declared, he has resumed his post at Richmond—sometimes writing articles that are supposed more particularly to forecast President Davis's policy; sometimes serving in the ranks of General Lee's army as the driver of an ambulance wagon. His eldest son fired the first shot that struck Fort Sumter, and afterward was himself struck at the heart in its command by a northern bullet. Mitchel's favorite lieutenant, Devin Reilly, on the other hand, died in office at Washington, and his illness was attributed at the time to over-fatigue in one of the earliest of those great electioneering contests in which the supremacy of Mr. Lincoln finally came to be established over Mr. Stephen Douglas, "the little giant of the west," and the only man, in Mr. Reilly's ardent conviction, who could have saved the American Union. Mr. D'Arcy McGee, whose character bore to that of Devin Reilly about the same relation as Mr. Duffy's did to that of Mr. Mitchel, is at present a leading member of the executive council of Canada, and (the Duke of Newcastle was of opinion) the ablest statesman of British America; in proof of which it may suffice to say, that the project of the Canadian confederation was in a great degree originated and elaborated by him. The handsome young orator, whose fiery eloquence surpassed in its influence on an Irish audience in the Rotunda even the most brilliant effects of Sheil at the old Catholic Association, is now to be recognized in a bronzed and war-worn soldier, under {467} the style and title of Major-General Thomas Francis Meagher, of the United States army, commanding a division, which, after Sherman commenced his marvellous march on Savannah, was sent forward to hold the southern section of Tennessee, and was last heard of in camp at Chattanooga. One of this orator's favorite disciples, Eugene O'Reilly, holds an equivalent rank; but his line of service has lain not in America, but in Asia—his allegiance is not to the President Abraham Lincoln, but to the Sultan Abdul Aziz; he is known to all true believers under the style of O'Reilly Bey, one of the earliest of the Christian officers who took rank under the Hatti Hamayoun; and his sword's avenging justice was freely felt among the Mohammedan mob who horrified Christendom five years ago by the massacres of Syria. What region of the earth is not full of the labors of this party, sect, and school of all the Irish talents, of whom may well be sung the antique Milesian elegy, to which their prophet and guide gave words that complain "they have left but few heirs of their company?" [Footnote 97] The rabid violence and the underbred vulgarity of style which belong to so many of the Irish Nationalist party of the present day, are all unlike even the errors of Young Ireland. That party, though it tragically failed in fulfilling its hopes at home, has at all events justified its ambition abroad; and it was always and everywhere singularly true to its ideas. Scattered as it is, broken, and often apparently divided against itself, its members have not failed to yield loyal, valiant, and signal service to whatever cause they espoused or country they adopted. Its poets have had a principal hand in framing the constitutions of states manifestly destined to future greatness. Its orators have led forlorn hopes against fearful odds; and, whether in the marshes of the Chickahominy or in Syrian defiles, have not known how to show their backs to the enemy. It would be easy to trace over a far wider range the fortunes of its members since the great emigration that scattered them in the years that followed their catastrophe in '48. It is possible any day to find a Young Irelander, who at a more or less brief period after Ballingarry abiit, evasit, erupit, in the red baggy breeches of the Zouave, or in judicial crimson and ermine at the antipodes; in the black robe of a Passionist father or the silk gown of a queen's counsel; surveying a railroad in Dakotah, or organizing brigands in Sicily; helping in some subordinate way the Emperor Maximilian to found the Mexican empire, or on the high road to make himself a Yellow Button at Peking. As for American generals north and south, and colonial law-givers east and west, their names are legion and the legion's name very much begins with Mac or O'. May they make war and law to good advantage! It was not given to them to make either for Ireland; but, if Fletcher of Saltoun was a wise man in his generation, they in theirs have left their country a far more precious heritage.

Irish poetry certainly existed before Young Ireland, and was even considered, like oratory, to be a quality naturally and easily indigenous to the Irish genius. Moore had not unworthily sustained the reputation of his country in an age of great poets; and it was Moore's own avowed belief that his "Irish Melodies" were the very flowering of his inspiration, and were indeed alone warranted to preserve his fame to future ages. But neither Moore, nor any other poet of Irish birth, had attempted to give to the Irish that poetry "racy of the soil," wherein every image and syllable smacks of their own native nationality, which Burns and Scott, and a host of minor poets, had created for the Scotch. This is the work which Young Ireland deliberately and avowedly attempted, and in which it has assuredly succeeded. When the effort was first made, it is {468} told that several of the writers who afterward wrote what, in its order of ballad poetry, is unexcelled in the language—and notably Mr. Davis were quite unaware of any possession of the poetic faculty, and took to the task as a boy takes to his tale of Latin spondees and dactyls at college. But the stream was in the rock, and when the rock was tapped the stream flowed. In the course of less than a year "The Spirit of the Nation" was published, in which, with much undeniable rubbish, there appeared a number of ballads and songs that won the admiration of all good critics; and to which the far more important testimony of their popular acceptance is still given in the form of continuously recurring and increasing editions. A Scotch publisher— Mr. Griffin, of Glasgow—ten years ago had heard such accounts of this curious flood-tide of Irish verse, that he thought it might be a safe speculation to try whether, despite its politics, it might not make its way in the British market. The edition was very soon exhausted, and the book is now, we believe, out of print. These facts are of even more value than the high opinion which so experienced and accomplished a critic as Lord Jeffrey expressed about the same time of the poetic gifts of Davis and Duffy; for by universal consent the test of sale loses all its vulgarity when applied to that most ethereal compound of the human intellect, poetry. The poet is born, and not made, according to Horace; but in so far as he is made anything by man, it is by process of universal suffrage over the counter. Gradual, growing, general recognition, testified by many editions, at last, in the course of thirty years, establishes the irrefragable position of a Tennyson; against which a Tupper, long struggling, in the end finds his level, and lines trunks.

Much of the poetry of this time was, consciously or unconsciously, mimetic—mainly of Sir Walter Scott and of Lord Macaulay, whose "Lays of Ancient Rome" had recently been published. Scott, indeed, more distinctly suggested the elements out of which the Young Ireland poetry grew. Burns wrote in a peculiar provincial dialect, and with the exception of a few glorious lyrics, which will occur to every reader's recollection, he wrote for a district and for a class. But in Scott's mind all the elements of the Scottish nationality were equally confluent and homogeneous—the Highlander, the Lowlander, and the Islander; the Celt, the Saxon, and the Dane; the laird, the presbyter, and the peasant; and his imagination equally vivified all times—from those of the Varangians at Constantinople to those of the Jacobites at Culloden. But in Ireland there was no formed dialect like the Lowland Scotch, with a settled vocabulary and a concrete form. The language of the peasantry in many parts of the country was the same sort of base English that a foreigner speaks—scanty in its range of words, ill-articulated and aspirated, loose in the use of the liquid letters, formed according to alien idioms, and flavored with alien expletives. The language of the best of the ballads of the peasantry was that of a period in which the people still thought in Irish, and expressed themselves in broken English, uttered with the deep and somewhat guttural tones of the Celt, and garnished now and then with the more racy epithets, or endearments, or shibboleths, of their native speech. For a time the example of Lord Macaulay's ballad poetry prevailed, with its long rolling metre, its picturesque nomenclature, its contrasts rather rhetorical than poetical. It was possible to describe that decisive charge of the Irish brigade at Fontenoy, which Mr. Carlyle treats as a mere myth, in strains which instantly suggest those of the "Battle of Ivry." And so did Davis in a very memorable ballad; but the likeness was mainly in the measure, and Lord Macaulay had no copyright in lines of fourteen feet. The poem itself was Irish to the manor born; and, it might be pleaded, was only as like the verse of Lord Macaulay as the prose of Lord Macaulay is like the prose of Edmund Burke. {469} Beyond this task-work, however, which, although very ingeniously and fluently done, was still as much task-work as college themes, there arose a difficulty and a hope. Was it possible to transfuse the peculiar spirit of the Irish native poetry into the English tongue? The researches of the Archaeological Society were at this time rapidly disentombing the long-hidden historical and poetical treasures of the Irish language. Many of these had been translated by Clarence Mangan, in a style which did not pretend to be literally faithful, but which so expanded, illustrated, and harmonized the original that the poem, while losing none of its idiosyncrasy, gained in every quality of grace, freedom, and force. The rich, the sometimes redundant array of epithets, the mobile, passionate transitions, the tender and melancholy spirit of veneration for a vanishing civilization, for perishing houses, scattering clans, and a persecuted Church—some even of the more graceful of the idioms and more musical of the metres—might surely be naturalized in the English language; and so an Irish poetical dialect be absolutely invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was known how an Irish peasant spoke broken English, and put it into rhyme that did not want a strange wild melody, that was to more finished and scholarly verse as the flavor of poteen is to the flavor of Burgundy. But how would an Irish bard, drawing his inspiration from the primeval Ossianic sources, and thinking in the true ecstatic spirit of the Irish muse, speak, if he were condemned to speak, in the speech of the Saxon? This was the bold conception; and no one who is familiar with the poetry of Ireland during the last twenty years, will deny that it has been in great part fulfilled.

The poet to whom its execution is especially due can hardly be called a Young Irelander in the political sense of the word. But Young Ireland was a literary school as well as a political sect; and any one who remembers, or may read, Mr. Ferguson's wonderful "Lament for Thomas Davis," which it is to be greatly regretted he has not included in the present edition of his poems, will recognize the strong elective affinities which attached him to their action and influence. As it is, this volume is by far the most remarkable recent contribution of the Irish poetical genius to English literature. Mr. Ferguson has accomplished the problem of conveying the absolute spirit of Irish poetry into English verse, and he has done so under the most difficult conceivable conditions—for he prefers a certain simple and unluxuriant structure in the plan of his poems, and he uses in their composition the most strictly Saxon words he can find. But all the accessories and figures, and still more a certain weird melody in the rhythm that reminds the ear of the wild grace of the native music, indicate at every turn what Mr. Froude has half-reproachfully called "the subtle spell of the Irish mind." It is not surprising to find even careful and accomplished English critics unable to reach to the essential meaning of this poetry, which, to many, evidently appears as bald as the style of Burns first seemed to southron eyes when he became the fashion at Edinburgh eighty years ago. And yet to master the dialect of Burns is at least as difficult as to master the dialect of Chaucer, while Mr. Ferguson rarely uses a word that would not be passed by Swift or Defoe. Before one of the most beautiful, simple, and graceful of his later poems a recent critic paused, evidently dismayed by the introduction, of which, however, not willing to dispute the beauty, he quoted a few lines. It was an old Irish legend, versified with surpassing grace and spirit, of which this is the argument. Fergus MacRoy, king of Ulster in the old pagan times, was a very good king of his kind. He loved his people and they loved him. He was handsome, and strong, and tall. He bore himself well in war and in the chase. He drank with discretion. {470} Nevertheless his life had two troubles. He did not love the law; and he did love a widow. To listen as chief justiciary to the causes, of which a constant crop sprang up at Emania, tares and corn thickly set together, troubled him sorely. To make verses to the widow, on the other hand, came as easy as sipping usquebaugh or metheglin. He proposed, and though a king was refused; but not discouraged, pressed his suit again and again. And at last Nessa the fair yielded, but she made a condition that her son Conor should sit on the judgment-seat daily by his stepfather's side.. This easily agreed, Nessa became queen, while, as Fergus tells the tale:

In this wise a year passed, the youth diligently observant, with faculties ripening and brightening as his majesty's grew more consciously rusty and slow; and then a crisis came, which Mr. Ferguson describes in verses of which it is hard to say whether they best deserve the coif or the laurel, for in every line there is the sharp wit of the lawyer as well as the vivid fancy of the poet:

In these exquisite verses, the language is as strict to the point as if it were taken from Mr. Smith's "Action at Law;" but the reader will remark how every figure reminds him, and yet not in any mere mimetic fashion, of the spirit and illustrations of the Ossianic poetry. Nevertheless each word taken by itself is simple Saxon. Its Celtic character only runs like a vein through the poem, but it colors and saturates it through and through.

The greatest of Mr. Ferguson's poems, however, is undoubtedly "The Welshmen of Tirawley," a ballad which, we do not fear to say, is unsurpassed in the English language, or perhaps in even the Spanish. Its epic proportion and integrity, the vivid picturesqueness of its phraseology, its wild and original metre, its extraordinary realization of the laws and customs of an Irish clan's daily life, the stern brevity of its general narrative, and the richness of its figures, though all barbaric pearl and gold, give it a pre-eminent place among ballads. Scott would have devoted three volumes to the story, were it not for the difficulty of telling some of its incidents. Mr. Ferguson exhibits no little skill in the way that he hurries his readers past what he could not altogether omit. For the facts upon which the ballad is founded are simply horrible, and they are historically true.

After the time of Strongbow, several Welsh families who had followed his flag settled in Connaught. Among {471} these "kindly Britons" of Tirawley, were the Walshes or Wallises, the Heils (a quibus MacHale, and, possibly, that most perfect instance of the Hibernis ipsis Hibemior, the archbishop of Tuam); also the Lynotts and the Barretts, with whom we are at present more particularly concerned. These last claimed descent from the high steward of the manor of Camelot, and their end is a story fit for the Round Table. The great toparch of the territory was the MacWilliam Burke, as the Irish called the head of the de Burgos, descended from William FitzAdelm de Burgo, conqueror of Connaught, and therein commonly called William Conquer—of whom the Marquis of Clanricarde is the present lineal representative; being to Connaught even still somewhat as the MacCallummore is to Argyle, more especially when he happens to be in the cabinet, and to have the patronage of the post-office. Now the Lynotts were subject to the Barretts, and the Barretts were subject to the Burkes. But when the Barretts' bailiff, Scorna Boy, came to collect the Lynotts' taxes, he so demeaned himself that the whole clan rose as one man, even as Jack Cade, and slew him. Whereupon the vengeful Barretts gave to all mankind among the Lynott clan a terrible choice—of which one alternative was blindness; and the bearded men were all of their own preference blinded, and led to the river Duvowen, and told to walk over the stepping stones of Clochan-na-n'all; and they all stumbled into the flood and were drowned, except old Emon Lynott, of Garranard—whom accordingly the Barretts brought back and blinded over again, by running needles through his eyeballs.

And so leaving "loud-shriek-echoing Garranard," the Lynott, with his wife and seven children, abandons his home, and takes refuge in Glen Nephin, where, in the course of a year, a son is born to him, whom he dedicates from the first breath to his vengeance. He trains this boy with assiduous care to all the accomplishments of a Celtic cavalier;

Fifteen years have passed and the youth is perfected in all the accomplishments of sport and war, and the Lynott thinks it is time to return to the world and work out the scheme of his vengeance. So the father and son quit their mountain solitude, and journey southward to the bailey of Castlebar; and in a few fine touches the picture of Mac William's grandeur, as it strikes {472} the boy's wondering eyes, rises before us; the stone house, strong and great, and the horse-host at the gate and their captain in armor, and the beautiful Bantierna by his side with her little pearl of a daughter. Who should this be but the mighty MacWilliam! Into his presence ride the Lynotts; and, after salutations, the old man declares his business. He has come to claim, as gossip-law allows, the fosterage of MacWilliam's son. Ever since William Conquer's time, his race were wont to place a MacWilliam Oge in the charge of a Briton of Tirawley; and the young Lynott was a pledge for his father's capacity in such tutelage. When MacWilliam saw the young Lynott ride, run, and shoot, he said he would give the spoil of a county to have his son so accomplished. When Lady MacWilliam heard him speak, and scanned his fresh and hardy air, she said she would give a purse of red gold that her Tibbot had such a nurse as had reared the young Briton. The custom was allowed. The young MacWilliam was sent under the guidance of old Lynott into Tirawley, and Emon Oge remained as a hostage in Castlebar. So back to Garranard, no longer the "loud-shriek-echoing," old Lynott returns—

And then the young Tibbot was taught all manner of feats of body, to swim, to shoot, to gallop, to wrestle, to fence, and to run, until he grew up as deft and as tough as Emon Oge. But he was taught other lessons as well, which were not in the bond of his foster-father.

Shame and rage track his passage, till one night the young Barretts of the Bac fell upon him at Cornassack and slew him. His body was borne to Castlebar. The Brehons were summoned to judgment; and over the bier of MacWilliam Oge began the plea for an eric to be imposed upon the Barretts for their crime; and the Brehons decreed the mulct, and Lynott's share of it was nine ploughlands and nine score of cattle. And now the ultimate hour of the blind old man's vengeance had come, not to be sated with land and kine. "Rejoice," he cried, "in your ploughlands and your cattle, which I renounce throughout Tirawley." But, expert in all the rules and customs of the clans, he asks the Brehons, Is it not the law that the foster-father may, if he please, applot the short eric? And they say it is so. Whereupon, formally rejecting his own share of the mulct, he makes his award—that the land of the Barretts shall be equally divided on every side with the Burkes, and that MacWilliam shall have a seat in every Barrett's hall, a stall in every Barrett's stable, and needful grooming from every hosteler for every Burke who shall ride throughout Tirawley for ever. And then, in a speech full of barbaric sublimity and tragic concentration of passion, he confesses "the patient search and vigil long" of his vengeance. It is almost unjust to break the closely-wrought chain of this speech by a single quotation, and we have been already unduly tempted to extract from this extraordinary poem; but, perhaps, this one verse may be separated from the rest as containing the very culmination of the old man's hideous rage.

Another moment and he has done. "Father and son," says MacWilliam, {473} "hang them high!" and old Lynott they hanged forthwith; but young Lynott had eloped with MacWilliam's daughter to Scotland, and there changed his name to Edmund Lindsay. The judgment of the short eric was, however, held good; and the Burkes rode rough-shod over the Barretts, until, as Mr. Ferguson, almost verbally versifying the Chronicle of Duald Mac Firbis, says:

a process of eviction which Mr. Ferguson, not merely for the sake of poetical justice, but out of the invincible ignorance of pure puritanical Protestantism, appears on the whole very highly to approve.

This ballad is indeed unique in its order: no Irish ballad approaches its wild sublimity and the thoroughness of detail with which it is conceived and executed. The only Irish narrative ballad which can bear a general comparison with it is Mr. Florence MacCarthy's "Foray of Con O'Donnell," a poem as perfect in its historical reality, in the aptness of all its figures, illustrations, and feats of phrase to a purely Celtic ideal, and which even surpasses "The Welshmen" in a certain easy and lissome grace of melody, that falls on the ear like the delicately drawn notes of Carolan's music. But this grace is disdained by the grim and compressed character which animates every line of Mr. Ferguson's ballad. His other works, fine of fancy and ripe of phrase as they are, fall far below it, "The Tain-Quest" does not on the whole enthral the reader, or magnetize the memory. "The Healing of Conall Carnach," and "The Burial of King Cormac" are poems that will hold their place in many future Books of Irish Ballads; they are unusually spirited versifications of passages from the more heroic period of early Irish history; but excepting occasional lines, they only appear to be the versifications of already written legends. The ballad of Grace O'Malley, commonly called Grana Uaile, may be advantageously contrasted with these, and it contains some verses of singular power—as, for example, where the poet denies the imputation of piracy against this lady who loved to roam the high seas under her own commission—

"Aideen's Grave" is a poem of a different kind, full of an exquisite melancholy grace; and where Ossian is supposed to apostrophise his future imitator, it is as if he thought after the manner of the Fenians, but was withal master of every symphony of the English tongue:

There are lines in this poem that a little remind us of Gray, as—

and again in the "Farewell to Deirdre" there is something in the cast and rhythm of the poem, rather than in any individual word or line, that recalls Scott's "Farewell to North Maven." But to say so is not to hit blots. Mr. Ferguson's is beyond question the most thoroughly original vein of poetry that any Irish bard of late days has wrought out; and in laying down this volume we can only regret that the specimens he has thought worthy of collection are so few in comparison not merely with what he might have done, but with what he actually has done. For {474} this modesty, let us hope that the prompt penance of a second and enlarged edition may atone.

We have said that though Mr. Ferguson could hardly be called a Young Irelander in politics, all the elective affinities of his genius tended toward that school of thought. But Lady Wilde, then known if she wrote prose as Mr. John Fanshawe Ellis, and if she wrote verse as Speranza, had an extraordinary influence on all the intellectual and political activities of Young Ireland. It was a favorite phantasy of that time, when Lamartine's book was intoxicating all Young Europe with the idea of a grand coming revolutionary epopoeia, and the atrocities of socialism in France and Mazzinianism in Italy had not yet horrified all Christendom, to find the model men for a modern Plutarch in the ranks of the Girondists. Notably Meagher was supposed to be gifted with all the qualities of Vergniaud, and Speranza to have more than the genius of Madame Roland. But when we come to real comparisons of character, the parallel easily gives way. If Smith O'Brien was like any Frenchman of the first revolution, it was Lafayette. Mitchel had in certain respects a suspicious resemblance to the earlier and milder phases of Robespierre's peculiar intellectual idiosyncrasy. The base of Carnot's character was that faculty for organization which was the mainspring of Gavan Duffy's various and powerful genius. The parallel was, even so far as it went, intrinsically unjust. Lamartine's glowing imagination gave to the Girondists a grandeur largely ideal. It is fair to say that Meagher's oratory was on the whole of a higher order than Vergniaud's; and certainly Madame Roland, great as may have been the influence of her character and her conversation, has left us no example of her talent that will bear comparison with Lady Wilde's poems or prose.

These poems, however, if full justice is to be done to them, ought to be read from first to last with a running commentary in the memory from the history of those few tragic years whose episodes they in a manner mark. One poem is a mournfully passionate appeal to O'Connell against the alliance with the Whigs, which was charged as one of the causes of the secession. Another is a ballad of the famine, with lights as ghastly as ever glowed in the imagination of Euripides or Dante, and founded on horrors such as Greek or Italian never witnessed. There is then a picture of "the young patriot leader"— which an artist would characterize as a decidedly idealized portrait of Meagher—that American general who has since proved his title to be called "of the sword." Again, a gloomy series of images recalls to us the awful state of the country—the corpses that were buried without coffins, and the men and women that walked the roads more like corpses than living creatures, spectres and skeletons at once; the little children out of whose sunken eyes the very tears were dried, and over whose bare little bones the hideous fur of famine had begun to grow; the cholera cart, with its load of helpless huddled humanity, on its way to the hospital; the emigrant ship sending back its woeful wail of farewell from swarming poop to stern in the offing; and, far as the eye could search the land, the blackened potato-fields, filling all the air with the fetid odors of decay. Again and again such pictures are contrasted with passionate lyrics full of rebellious fire, urging the people to die, if die they must, by the sword rather than by hunger—and sometimes, too, with an angry, unreasonable, readily-forgiven reproach to the priesthood, who bore with such noble fortitude and self-immolating charity the very cross of all the crosses of that terrible time.

It is a curious fact, and reminds one of the myth of Achilles' heel, that O'Connell, who marched among his myriad foes like one clad in panoply of mail from head to foot, with a sort of inexpugnable vigor and endurance, not to be wounded, not to be stunned, with his buckler ready for every {475} thrust, and a blow for every blow that rained on his casque, was weak as a child under the influence of verse. Any one who may count over the number of times his favorite quotations, such as the lines beginning "Hereditary bondsmen" from "Childe Harold" for example, crop up in the course of his speeches, will be inclined to say that his fondness for poetry was almost preposterous. It was always tempting him, indeed, into dangerous ways—for while his prose preached "the ethereal principles of moral force," and the tenet that "no political amelioration is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood," his favorite quotations were strictly in favor of fighting. The "hereditary bondsmen" were to "strike the blow;" and the Irish are a nation only too well disposed to interpret such a precept literally. Moore's melodies were always at the tip of his tongue; and Moore's "Slave so lowly" is indignantly urged not to pine in his chains, but to raise the green flag forthwith, and do or die. Some verses of O'Connell's own, of which he was at least equally fond, began:

It was not altogether politic, especially when Young Ireland was gaining the ascendant, to use such quotations habitually; but the temptation seems to have been irresistible. So, on the other hand, may be conceived his excessive sensitiveness to anything sounding like a reproach that reached him through the vehicle of verse. When Brougham or Stanley or Peel struck their hardest, they got in return rather more than they gave—when the whole House of Commons tried to stifle his voice, over all the din Mr. Speaker heard himself with horror called upon to stop this "beastly bellowing." But when Moore wrote those lines—so cruelly touching, so terribly caustic—"The dream of those days," which appeared in the last number of the Melodies, the Liberator was, it is said, so deeply affected that he shed tears. So again, these lines of Speranza, which appeared in the Nation at the time of the secession, stung him to the very heart:

It is a curious and, indeed, a very touching trait in O'Connell's character that an imputation conveyed in this form had a power to wound him which all the articles of the morning papers and all the speeches of the evening debates had not. This redoubtable master of every weapon of invective, whose weighty words sometimes fell on his adversary like one of Ossian's Titans hurling boulders, or again burst into a motley cascade of quip, and crank, and chaff, and wild, rampant ridicule, that (sometimes rather coarse and personal) was at its best, to other rhetoric, as the music of an Irish jig is to all other music, nevertheless had his Achilles' tendon. The man who loved to call himself "the best abused man in the universe" was as weak before the enemy who attacked him according to the rules of prosody as if he lived in the age when every Celt in Kerry piously believed that a man, if the metre were only made sufficiently acrid, might be rhymed to death, in the same manner {476} as an ancestor of Lord Derby was, according to the Four Masters. [Footnote 98]

Lady Wilde's verse has not at all the same distinctively Celtic character as Mr. Ferguson's. He aspires to be

and his choice inspirations come from the life of the clans. Speranza's verse, so far as it has a specially Irish character, is of the most ancient type of that character. It is full of oriental figures and illustrations. It is, when it is most Irish, rather cognate to Persian and Hebrew ways of thinking, forms of metaphor, redundance of expression—in its tendency to adjuration, in its habit of apostrophe, in its very peculiar and powerful but monotonous rhythm, which seems to pulsate on the ear with the even, strident stroke of a Hindoo drum. Where this peculiar poetry at all adapts itself to the vogue of the modern muse, it is easy to see that Miss Barrett had very great influence in determining the mere manner of Lady Wilde's genius. When in the midst of one very powerful poem, "The Voice of the Poor," these lines come in—

—we are tempted to note an unconscious homage to the author of "Aurora Leigh." But the character of Lady Wilde's verse is far more colored by the range of her studies than by the influence of any special style. The general reader, who may not breathe at ease the political atmosphere of the earlier part of this volume, will pause with pleasure to observe the spirit, grace, and fidelity of the translations which succeed. They are from almost every language in Europe, whether of Latin or Teutonic origin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish, and Russian. Among these may be mentioned in particular two hymns of Savonarola, which are rendered so exquisitely that one is tempted to suggest that the "Carmina Sedulii," with much more of the ancient Irish hymnology, are as yet untranslated into the tongue now used in Ireland. It is a work peculiarly adapted to her genius. The first quality of Lady Wilde's poetry is that lyrical power of which the hymn is the finest development; and her most striking poems are those which assume the character of the older and more regular form of ode.

The readers of Mr. William Allingham's early writings were in general gratefully surprised when it was announced that he was the author of a very remarkable poem, of the order of eclogue, which appeared by parts in Fraser's Magazine in 1863. His earlier poems, chiefly songs and verse of society, were pleasing from a certain airy grace and lightness; but on the whole their style was thin and jejune. Of late, his faculties have evidently mellowed very rapidly, and his language has become more animated, more concentrated, and more sustained. "Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland" has had, as it were, a triple success—the success of a pamphlet, the success of a novel of Irish life, and its own more proper and legitimate success, as a regular pastoral, skilfully conceived, carefully executed, in which the flow of thought is sustained at a very even, if not a very lofty level throughout, {477} and whose language is on the whole admirably harmonized, full of happy allusional effects, of quaint, minute, picturesque delineation, and of a certain graceful and easy energy. Mr. Gladstone has quoted some of its lines in a speech on the budget as an excuse for maintaining the duty on whisky; and he is not the only Englishman who has derived from its perusal an unexpected insight into some of the more perplexing problems of Irish life. Certainly, Mr. Allingham's views of Irish society, when he touches on questions of religion and politics, are not our views. He is an Ulster Protestant by religion, and an advanced liberal (we take it) in politics. But making those allowances, it must be admitted that he shows the poet's many-sided sympathetic mind in every page of this very remarkable poem. "It is," as he fairly says, "free from personalities, and neither of an orange nor a green complexion; but it is Irish in phraseology, character, and local color—with as little use as might be of a corrupt dialect, and with no deference at all to the stage traditions of Paddyism." It is divided into twelve chapters, and it is written in pleasantly modulated pentameters.

The story is of the life of a young squire, who was on the point of declaring himself a Young Irelander in his youth. His guardian, to cut the folly short, sent him incontinently to Cambridge, thence to the continent. He returns to Ireland in his twenty-sixth year, and finds the population decimated by the famine, and agitated by agrarian conspiracy. The neighboring gentry are bent, as conacre has ceased to pay, on supplanting the population by cattle. The population suppurates into secret societies. Laurence Bloomfield, long revolving the difficulties of his lot, and abhorring pretty equally the crimes of each class against the other—determined, moreover, to be neither exterminator, demagogue, nor absentee—resolves to live among the people of his estate like a modern patriarch, and see what patience, kindness, a good understanding, and enlightened management may be able to effect. He extinguishes the Ribbon lodge, fastens his tenantry by equitable leases to the glebe, and gradually finds in the management of his estate a career of easy, pleasant, and even prosperous power. In the course of ten years, Lisnamoy has become an Irish Arcadia, and Mr. Allingham's honest muse rises accordingly to sing a hero even more memorable in his way than the Man of Ross.

Bloomfield first promulgates his peculiar views of territorial administration at a dinner of his landlord neighbors in Lisnamoy House, where the wholesale eviction of the tenantry of a large neighboring district is proposed on the plea that—

It is from the ill-concealed contempt of his class for such thoughts as these, that Bloomfield's resolution to remain in Ireland and administer his own estate arises.

The story, as it is evolved, presents some charming sketches of character. Hardly even Carleton has delineated so admirably the nature and habits of the Irish peasant family as Mr. Allingham has done in his picture of the Dorans. How easy and natural, for example, is the portrait of Bridget Doran:

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The occasional sketches of Irish scenery are also very vividly outlined. This of Lough Braccan is not perhaps the best, but it is the most easily detached from the text:

We may give another specimen of Mr. Allingham's power of delineation, which shows that he has studied Irish country life as well as Irish scenery and Irish physiognomy.

This is as true a picture in its way as Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse-fair."

Mr. Aubrey de Vere's "Inisfail" comes last on our list, but certainly not least in our estimation. No poet of Young Ireland has like him seized and breathed the spirit of his country's Catholic nationality, its virginal purity of faith, its invincible patience of hope, and all the gentle sweetness of its charity. Young Ireland rather studied the martial muse, and that with an avowed purpose. "The Irish harp," said Davis, "too much loves to weep. Let us, while our strength is great and our hopes high, cultivate its bolder strains, its raging and rejoicing; or if we weep, let it be like men whose eyes are lifted though their tears fall." Mr. de Vere has tried every mood of the native lyre, and proved himself master of all. His "Inisfail" is a ballad chronicle of Ireland, such as Young Ireland would have thought to be a worthy result of all its talents, and such as, in fact, Mr. Duffy at one time proposed. But it must be said that its heroic ballads are not equal to those of Young Ireland. Some one said of a very finished, but occasionally frigid, Irish speaker, fifteen years ago, that he spoke like "Sheil with the chill on." A few of Mr. de Vere's ballads have the same effect of "Young Ireland with the chill on." They want the verve, the glow, the energy, the resonance, which belong to the best ballads of "The Spirit of the Nation." Of the writers of that time, Mr. D'Arcy McGee is perhaps, on the whole, the most kindred genius to his. Mr. de Vere has an insight into all the periods of Irish history in their most poetical expression which Mr. McGee alone of his comrades seems to have equally possessed. Indeed, if Mr. Me Gee's poems were all collected and chronologically arranged—as it is to be hoped they may be some day soon—it would be found that he had unconsciously and desultorily traversed very nearly the same complete extent of ground that Mr. de Vere has systematically and deliberately gone over. But though no one has written more nobly of the dimly glorious Celtic ages, and many of his battle-ballads are instinct with life, and wonderfully picturesque, it is easy to see that Mr. McGee's best desire was to follow the footsteps of the early saints, and the Via Dolorosa of the period of the penal laws. These, {479} too, are the passages over which Mr. de Vere's genius most loves to brood, and his prevailing view of Ireland is the supernatural view of her destiny to carry the cross and spread the faith. Young Ireland wrote its bold, brilliant ballads as a part of the education of the new nationality that it believed was growing up, and destined to take possession of the island—"a nationality that," to use Davis's words again, "must contain and represent all the races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic; it must not be Saxon; it must be Irish. The Brehon law and the maxims of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning genius of the Gael, the placid strength of the Saxon, the marshalling insight of the Norman; a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind, in its romantic, its religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies. Finally, a native government, which shall know and rule by the might and right of all, yet yield to the arrogance of none;—these are the components of such a nationality." And such was the dream that seemed an easy eventuality twenty years ago. But Mr. de Vere writes after the famine and in view of the exodus. His mind goes from the present to the past by ages of sorrow—of sorrow, nevertheless, illumined, nurtured, and sustained by divine faith and the living presence of the Church. So in the most beautiful poem of this volume, he sees the whole Irish race carrying an inner spiritual life through all their tribulation in the guise of a great religious order of which England is the foundress, and the rules are written in the statute-book. We cannot select a better specimen of the thorough Catholic tone of Mr. de Vere's genius, and of the vivid power and finished grace of his poetry, than this:

It is another curious illustration of the Hibernis ipsis Hibernior that a de Vere, who is, moreover, "of the caste of Vere de Vere," should have so intimate a comprehension of the Celtic spirit as is often shown in these poems, especially in the use of those allegories which are so characteristic of the period of persecution, and in some of his metres that appear to be instinct with the very melody of the oldest Irish music. Here, indeed, we seem to taste, in a certain vague and dreamy sensation, which the mere murmur of such verses even without strict reference to the words produces, all the charm of which that ancient poetry might have been capable, if it were still cultivated in a language of living civilization. Several of these poems, if translated into Irish verse, would probably pass back without the change of an idiom—so completely Celtic is the whole conception of the language. The dirges, for example, appear on a first reading to be only English versions of Irish poems belonging to the time of the Jacobites and the Brigade—until, as we examine more carefully, we observe that the allegory is {480} wrought out with all the finish of more modern art, and that the metaphors are brought into a more just inter-dependence than the native bard usually thought necessary.

The tenderness that approaches to a sort of worship of Ireland under the poetical personification of a mother wailing for her children, again and again breaks out in Mr. de Vere's verse; and in all the range of Irish poetry it is nowhere more exquisitely expressed. The solemn beauty of the following verses is like that of some of those earliest of the melodies, whose long lines, with their curious rippling rhythm, were evidently meant for recitation as well as for musical effect:

Hardly less sad, but in so different a spirit as to afford a contrast that brings us to a fair measure of the variety of Mr. de Vere's powers, is a poem of the days of the brigade. The wife of one of the soldiers who followed Sarsfield to France after the capitulation of Limerick, and entered the Irish brigade of Louis XIV., is supposed, sitting by the banks of the Shannon, to speak:

Here the abrupt transition of tone in the last verse from the subdued melancholy of those which precede it is very fine and very Irish. One can fancy the widowed wife, in all her desolation, starting, even from her beads, as she thinks of Lord Clare's dragoons coming down on the enemy with their "Viva la for Ireland's wrong!"

Twenty years have now passed since "The Spirit of the Nation" gave some glimpses of the mine of poetry then latent in the Irish mind. In 1845 Mr. Gavan Duffy published his "Ballad Poetry of Ireland"—a book which had the largest sale of any published in Ireland since the union and probably the widest influence. Upon this common and neutral ground Orange-man and Ribbon-man, Tory, and Nationalist, were perforce brought into harmonious contact; and "The Boyne Water" lost half its virus as a political psalm when it was embalmed side by side with the "Wild Geese" or "Willy Reilly." Behind the produce of his own immediate period, Mr. Duffy, in arranging his materials, could only find a few ballads by Moore, a few by Gerald Griffin, a few by Banim, Callanan, Furlong, and Drennan, that could be accounted legitimate ballad poetry. The rest was fast cropping up while he was actually compiling his collection, under the hot breath of the National movement, in a lavish and luxuriant growth. This impulse seems to have spent itself some years ago. Anything of real merit in the way of Irish poetry does not now appear in periodical literature more than once or twice in a year; and Mr. Thomas Irwin is the only recent writer whose verse may fairly be named in the same breath with that which we have now noticed. A rich grace and finish of {481} expression, a most quaint and delicate humor, and a fine-poised aptness of phrase, distinguish his poetry, which is more according to the taste that Mr. Tennyson has established in England than that of any Irish writer of the day.

Irish poetry seems now, therefore, to have passed into a new and more advanced stage of development. Here are four volumes, by four separate writers, of poems, old and new—all published within a year; and all, we believe, decidedly successful, and in satisfactory course of sale. Mr. Florence MacCarthy's poems had previously gone through several editions, and won enduring fame—perhaps more widely spread in America than even at home, on account of a quality somewhat kindred to the peculiar genius of the best American poets, and especially Longfellow, Poe, and Irving, that the reader will readily recognize in his finely-finished and most melodious verse. Nor should we omit to mention, in cataloguing the library of recent Irish poets, "The Monks of Kilcrea," a long romantic poem in the style of "The Lady of the Lake," which contains many a passage that Scott might own, but of which the writer remains unknown. Thus Irish national poetry is accumulating, as it were, in strata. Mr. Duffy set on the title-page of his "Ballad Poetry" the Irish motto, Bolg an dana, which not all his readers clearly understood; but which, to all who did, seemed extremely appropriate at the time. "This man," say the Four Masters, speaking of a great bard of the fifteenth century, "was called the Bolg an dana, which signifies that he was a common budget of poetry." And this was all that Mr. Duffy's Ballad Poetry professed to be. But what was only a budget of desultory jetsam and flotsam in 1845 is taking the shape of a solid literature in 1865; and those twenty golden years have at all events been well filled with ranks of rhyme.

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