IRELAND IN 1878.

I.

A history of Ireland still remains to be written; nor has there been even an attempt to collect some of the chief materials for such a work. Ten centuries of almost continuous conflict since the Danish incursions, or seven since the Anglo-Norman settlement and the destruction or dispersion of the national archives, are sufficient to account for the absence of any full, authentic, or valuable Irish history. From Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century to Froude in our day, there have never been wanting subsidized, and even able, writers to defame and revile the native population and laud the English rule in Ireland. Nor, on the other hand, has there been any lack of enthusiasts whose patriotism, more ardent than their erudition is profound or exact, is ever ready to excuse or defend the natives and execrate the Anglo-Norman and Saxon tyrants and despoilers. Even in Ireland it is difficult to obtain reliable information regarding the country; while outside of it such aim is impossible of attainment. The dispersion of the Irish race during the last thirty years has been greater in extent and over a larger area of the globe than any exodus of humanity known to history. These millions have carried the traditions of their country’s wrongs, and the dismal tales of the misgovernment of Ireland, to the uttermost ends of the earth, exaggerating, perhaps, the oppression of their persecutors, and depicting in touching sympathy the glowing virtues of the victims. The largest contingent of this Irish emigration has enriched the United States of America, where partiality has culminated in alternate praise and censure of the Irish race. The circumstances under which most of these people reached the American shores were truly tragic and appalling, and are well-nigh forgotten by the older portion of the generation now passing away.

The estimated population of Ireland in 1845 was 8,295,061, which made it then one of the most densely peopled countries in Europe. In the autumn of that year the potato crop, one of the chief products of the country and the staple food of three-fifths of the people, failed, involving a loss estimated by Mr. Labouchere, the British minister, of eighty million dollars, or sixteen millions sterling. This failure in 1845 was followed by successive blights of the potato-crop in 1846 and subsequent years, causing what is called the Irish famine, and with it the great emigration, which brought an increase of millions of citizens to the United States. There had been an Irish immigration in America from the earliest days of the colony—to Maryland, for example, in the seventeenth century; but the Irish famine of 1845–49 marks the opening of the great influx of Irish into the United States and Canada.

We propose to consider the social and industrial condition and the political and religious prospects of Ireland in 1878, making the eve of the famine, in 1845, the basis of comparison. We write from Ireland, with the amplest knowledge of our subject, and, as we hope, having no object in view save a full and clear statement of the main facts necessary for its elucidation. We have travelled over every province, every county, every parish, every locality of its soil; are intimate with every phase of its history and every section of its population, and feel every throb of its national life. Yet we invite the fullest criticism of our attempt to discuss the present condition of Ireland from a scientific, a truthful, and an impartial stand-point. Nowhere out of Ireland is such discussion more desirable or more difficult than in the United States. The republic contains about the same number of Irish, by birth or by descent, that remain in the old country. The emigrants of the famine period left under dire pressure, the origin of which is not fully understood abroad. In the forty-four years 1801–1845 the population of Ireland increased from 5,216,329 to 8,295,061, or by 3,078,732 persons—an increase of fifty-nine per cent. Emigration was throughout that period inconsiderable; in the decade 1831–41 it was only 403,459, or about 40,000 a year; in the next four years it fell to little over half that average; while in the year 1843, when O’Connell led the great agitation for repeal of the Union, only 13,026 persons left the country, being the lowest on record. Although the potato blight appeared in 1845, it was not until 1847 that the horrors of the famine and of emigration assumed their most awful aspect. In the single year 1847, that of O’Connell’s death, there was a loss of population of 262,574, or three per cent., by the conjoint action of emigration and the excess of deaths over births; while in the next four years the aggregate decrease reached 1,510,801 persons—little short of nineteen per cent. of the whole population. The following table exhibits the estimated population at the middle of the year relating to our inquiry:

DECREASE
YEARPOPULATIONPERSONSPER CENT.
18458,295,061————
18468,287,8487,2130.09
18478,025,274262,5743.1
18487,639,800385,4744.3
18497,256,314383,4865.0
18506,877,549378,7655.1
18516,514,473363,0765.1
18615,778,415736,05811.3
18715,395,007383,4086.6
18755,309,49465,5131.0
18765,321,618————
18775,338,906————

Over the whole period from 1845 to 1875 population decreased, but the rate of decline diminished after 1851. In the thirty years there was a loss of 2,973,443—nearly 100,000 annually, or thirty-six per cent. of the inhabitants. The year 1876 is memorable as the starting-point of reactionary improvement. For the first time during a generation emigration has so diminished that the natural increase of births over deaths added 10,352 to the population in 1876, and 17,288 in 1877. Increase must henceforth be the normal law of population, but it is never again likely to reach the rate it attained in the thirty years 1801–31, when it expanded about fourteen per cent. each decade, or an increase of nearly one in seven every ten years.

We are now to inquire into the main causes of these terrible calamities, strange and conflicting explanations of which are advanced by public writers in the United States and other countries. One flippant, fertile, and accepted theory is the peculiar proneness of the Irish to contention and disunion—a theory generally credited as sound by those ignorant of history or those prejudiced against the Irish race. We shall adduce a few broad and suggestive facts in disproof of this theory. Can any nation exhibit a nobler proof of unity than the Brehon laws, or Seanchus Mor, which prevailed universally in Ireland for centuries before the Christian era, until revised by St. Patrick and the Christian kings, and which continued in force throughout the country, save the small patch called the Pale, until the seventeenth century, while the traditions and principles of that code yet influence the people after a lapse of twenty to five-and-twenty centuries? And so as regards the tenacity with which, for ages, the people have adhered to the use of the Gaelic or native tongue, still spoken by little short of a million of the inhabitants, after the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the Spaniards, the Britons, and the Scotch have mainly abandoned the primitive tongues of their ancestors. All pagan Ireland was converted to Christianity by one man—an example of unity and docility without parallel in the history of the human race. Ireland, like France, England, and other countries, was ravaged by the Danish and Norse invaders, yet the Irish defeated and expelled them in 1014, long before the Gauls or the Saxons had banished or crushed them in Normandy or in England. Towards the close of the twelfth century the Anglo-Normans found partial footing in Ireland, yet for seven hundred years the native race have opposed their rule, and oppose it to-day—an example of unity and persistency unsurpassed in the world. The English, the Scotch, and most of the nations in the north and northwest of Europe abandoned their ancient faith and accepted the Protestant Reformation, at the bidding of their sovereigns, in the sixteenth century; while Catholic Ireland, in defiance of penal laws that plundered property, denied education, reduced the people almost to barbarism, and sent them to the scaffold for adherence to their church, has remained, through centuries of suffering, loyal to conscience, and by unity, fidelity, and perseverance has effected the overthrow of the Protestant Church Establishment of the Tudors. Proud and great memories these for the Irish nation—memories sufficient to disprove the shallow and unfounded charge that to disunion, peculiar to their race, must be attributed the sad and chequered history of the country. While if we turn to all other kingdoms at corresponding periods, even to the present time, we find analogous internal strife and domestic political factions as numerous and as intense as any in Ireland. England, Scotland, the several British colonies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, and the United States were quite as much torn by internal dissension as Ireland, and are so at the present day; so that this hypothesis is wholly unfounded and quite inadequate to account for the disastrous decadence, or at least want of progress, of Ireland, compared in many respects with other countries.

The causes of Irish discontent and comparative social backwardness are remote, chronic, and cumulative. From the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1169 to the defeat of the Irish in the Williamite war, near the close of the seventeenth century, one clear purpose was kept in view by the aliens—the extirpation of the natives from ownership and even occupancy of the soil. Attainders, escheatments, plantations, transplantations, and settlements—all had the same purpose. Penal Laws, the Court of Wards, and dire persecution had driven the Catholic natives from proprietorship, and almost from occupancy, of the soil. Cupidity led many Cromwellian and planter landlords to baffle the Penal Laws and pocket the higher rents offered by popish recusants. Protestants of the humbler classes complained that the protection promised and due to them as of right in the English interest was denied and defeated by the planter and palatine landlords in preferring popish tenants whose lower standard of living and degraded social caste enabled them to pay a higher rent than Protestant tenants, who claimed, by right of class, a better mode of living. Thus robbed and deprived of their estates, denied leases, and rackrented by middlemen and others, the mass of the Irish people before the famine were mere squatters on the soil, neither owners nor, in any true sense, occupiers.

Catholics were emancipated in 1829 and rendered admissible to almost all the offices in the state; they obtained an instalment of educational concession in 1831, and a modification of the grinding oppression of the tithe system and the Protestant Church Establishment a few years afterwards; a Poor Law, directed by a London board, was passed in 1838, and corporate reform was granted in 1840; but these and other remedial measures, in operation for a few years, could effect little towards the elevation of a people impoverished and degraded by centuries of foreign and crushing legislation.

From an economic and industrial stand-point the condition of Catholics, in relation to land, was the chief cause of the wretchedness of the country. The agricultural laborers were in the lowest social state in Europe, scarcely excepting the Russian serfs. Employment was precarious and rarely secured a higher average wages than sixpence to eightpence a day, or scarcely a dollar a week. From Connaught a large number went to England for some weeks at the hay, corn, and potato harvests, where they earned what paid the rent of the cabin and the potato-plot; while many of the cotters and small farmers were little better in position. A few facts from the census of 1841 and 1851 will suffice to illustrate the large number and the terrible fate of these classes, as indicated by the grades of house accommodation before and after the famine:

1841.1851.
HOUSE ACCOMMODATION.
HOUSES		PER
CENT.
HOUSES		PER
CENT.
First class31,3332.139,3703.3
Second class241,66416.4292,28024.3
Third class574,38639.0588,44048.9
Fourth (cabin) class625,35642.5284,22923.5
Total1,472,739100.01,204,319100.0

Here we see that, seemingly in ten but really in five years, no less than 341,127 fourth-class houses—mud, sod, or stone, thatched cabins with only a single apartment—were swept away, inhabited by that number of families, which included about 1,800,000 persons; while the table of population above given shows that in these years the estimated decrease was 1,780,588—a striking concurrence between both. Another proof as regards the class swept away is found in the following table of agricultural holdings, grouped by extent, in 1841 and 1851:

HOLDINGS.1841.1851.
Not exceeding one acreNot known.37,728
One to five acres310,43688,083
Five to fifteen acres252,799191,854
Fifteen to thirty acres79,342141,311
Above thirty acres48,625149,090
Total691,202608,066

Excluding the very large number of holdings under an acre not ascertained in 1841, we find the disappearance in that decade, or rather in half of it, of 222,353 tenements between one and five acres, which represents a diminished population of 1,200,000 persons. The decrease of 60,945, in the tenements from five to fifteen acres, representing about 320,000 people, is portion of this same subject. If we now turn to another head of evidence we find that the population was thinned from the least educated classes. The census of 1841 returned fifty-three per cent. of the whole population, aged five years and upwards, as illiterate, being unable to read or write, while the return for 1851 showed a decrease to forty-seven per cent.; and turning to the great decrease in the percentage of the Irish-speaking population between 1841 and 1851, we find similar results. Lastly, the creed census demands attention.

The first taken in Ireland was that by the Royal Commission of Public Instruction in 1834, when, of a population of 7,954,100, it was found there were 6,436,000, or 80.9 per cent., Catholics; while the followers of the intruded Anglican Church, established for three centuries, numbered only 853,160, or 10.7 per cent. The adherents of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, endowed by the state, though not established, 643,058, or 8.1 per cent.; and all other Protestant dissenters mustered only 21,822 or 0.3 per cent. Between 1834 and 1845, when the potato blight first appeared, the population had increased from 7,954,100 to 8,295,061, during which period of eleven years there are ample evidences to prove that the Catholic element underwent a larger increase than the Protestant, so that we may fairly assume the whole population in 1845 to have been thus composed:

PER CENT.
Catholics6,760,47581.5
Protestants1,534,58618.5
——————
Total8,295,061100.

These millions of Catholics, emancipated only sixteen years, were the descendants of the natives who for over six centuries had battled against English domination; whose estates and lands had been wrested from them and given to soldiers and adventurers from England and Scotland—“the scum of both nations”; whose ancient church had been despoiled of her property; to whom education was denied and the profession of their faith made penal; whose manufacturing industries were suppressed by English laws; who were excluded from all offices, civil and military, and from all social rank and distinction, and denied not alone a seat in Parliament for 137 years, 1692 to 1829, but from 1727 to 1793, a period of 66 years, the right to vote.

Such is a broad outline of the main facts concerning the population of Ireland in 1845, as to quantity and quality. We must, however, supplement these by a few particulars.

From one-third to one-half the rental of the kingdom went to absentee and alien landlords, who spent it in England or on the Continent. The imperial taxes borne by Ireland were in excess of her capacity and in violation of the articles of the Act of Union. All the state departments had their headquarters in London, while Ireland had slender share either in the appropriating or the enjoyment of those taxes. The local taxation, through grand jury and other cess, was enormous, but levied and appropriated by the country gentry, all predominantly Protestant. The county officers, the grand jury, the jail, the lunatic asylum, infirmary, and poor-law union boards were almost exclusively Protestant. The corporations, reformed by statute in 1840, were still Protestant. One or two Catholic judges had reached the bench, as O’Loghlen, and many Catholics were pressing to the front at the bar and in medicine, while in all the professions, in trade, and in commerce Catholic influence was beginning to be felt. Catholics had, it is true, only trifling share in the administration of the government and the laws. They had little representation in the magistracy or on the grand juries; while jury-packing was the normal condition of the administration of justice. The Orange system, stimulated by the triumph of Catholic emancipation, was rampant and aggressive at the prospect of social equality.

Yet, amidst such disadvantages, Ireland, in the two or three years before the famine, presented a moral and political spectacle such as the modern world had never witnessed. O’Connell, the greatest political leader of this century, led the millions of Irish people in their demand for justice to Ireland. He claimed the restoration of the legislative independence of Ireland as it existed from 1782 to 1801, or a repeal of the Act of Union. His efforts towards that object, the millions who rose to support him, and the moral, intellectual, and national sympathy that his demand elicited, are perfectly well known. The famine appeared in 1845 and blasted the whole agitation, while O’Connell died at Genoa, May 15, 1847, when the country that he wildly, passionately loved was in the throes of the famine, the horrors of which O’Connell vainly endeavored to avert by appeals for substantial relief to the British government. The present prime minister of England, the Earl of Beaconsfield, declared in the House of Commons, in reference to Ireland, on the opening of the famine, that for a country with an absentee proprietary, an alien established church, and a population starving or fleeing the country, most Englishmen can see but one remedy, and that revolution.

The great Irish famine, contrary to popular opinion, was exceeded by many visitations of the kind in India and elsewhere, and perhaps equalled by some that had occurred even in Ireland, so far as extent of mortality is concerned; but, measured by the aggregate of its social and economic effects, no such disaster is recorded in history. The mortality was considerably less than was supposed—that is, of deaths caused directly by starvation, suffering, and sickness arising out of the famine. Dysentery, diarrhœa, fever, cholera—all supervened. Workhouse accommodation failed, notwithstanding the utilization, as auxiliary houses, of nearly all the idle and abandoned stores in cities and towns, and of large numbers of rural mansions deserted by the country gentry. All the habits, feelings, and traditions of the Irish nation were opposed to a poor-law. Passed in 1838, although a poor-law had been in operation in England from 1601, it was only in 1847, the third year of the famine, that the last of the 131 Irish workhouses was opened, in Clifden, Connemara, and then by mandamus of the Queen’s Bench. In 1844, the year before the appearance of the potato blight, there were only 113 workhouses open, with an aggregate of 105,358 paupers relieved that year at an expense of $1,085,336. In 1847 the number relieved in the workhouses, auxiliaries included, was 417,139, or nearly fourfold, while the expenditure was $3,214,744, or threefold. The entire Poor-Law Act and the workhouse system utterly broke down under pressure of the mass of destitution. That act was administered from Somerset House, London, under an English commission, from 1838 to 1847. All the leading officers, assistant commissioners, and others were sent from England to carry out a law amongst a people of whose feelings and social circumstances they were thoroughly ignorant, and to their race and faith were totally opposed. That act expressly denied out-door relief, in any form or towards any destitution, how acute soever, in Ireland; while out-door relief was the general and normal form of poor relief in England for centuries, and continues so at present. The law was framed so as to throw the whole influence of its administration into the hands of the landlords and magistracy, or their agents, the vast majority of whom were planters and Cromwellians, hostile in faith and feeling to the destitute classes. A temporary Poor Relief Extension Act, passed June 8, 1847, was necessitated, or the destitute classes must have seized in self-defence the cattle, corn, and other edibles abounding in the country to prevent starvation. Out-door relief was permitted, but should be administered solely in food; while the able-bodied recipients were subjected to severe tests of stone-breaking or other unproductive labor. The tenth section of this act was the infamous quarter-acre clause, which declared that,

“If any person so occupying more than the quarter of a statute acre (less than thirty-five yards square) shall apply for relief, or if any person on his behalf shall apply for relief, it shall not be lawful for any Board of Guardians to grant such relief, within or without the workhouse, to any such person.”

This horrible clause gave the alternative of death or the surrender of their cabins, cottages, and small farms to the tens, the hundreds of thousands who occupied the humbler allotments and homesteads in Ireland. If they refused to surrender possession to the landlord, they perished, relief being denied them; while if they yielded, the crowded workhouse, with a weekly mortality of twenty-five in every one thousand inmates, precipitated them from the trap-coffin, often unshrived and always unshrouded, into the common fosse without a semblance of Christian burial. As an adjunct to the quarter-acre clause, and further to effect the clearance of the mass of the laboring and industrious classes, urban as well as rural, occupiers rated at under twenty-five dollars who surrendered their holdings, whether held on lease or otherwise, to their landlords, were, with their families, assisted to emigrate, two-thirds of the expenses of the same to be borne on the rates of the electoral division, the other third by the landlord. And to complete and give effect to these provisions for the death or the extermination of the population, the landlords were secured, by a radical change in the act of 1838, a monopoly in the whole administration of relief. Under that act each Board of Guardians consisted of three-fourths elected members and one-fourth ex-officio members, being magistrates resident in the union; whereas, by an amendment introduced into the act of 1847 the proportion of ex-officio members is doubled, being increased from one-fourth to one-half the whole strength of the board. With a full moiety of the members of the landlord class, the territorial influence through the multiple vote, which gives rated property from one to six votes, and also voting by proxy, the land magnates are always able to command, if not a majority, at least a large number, of seats amongst the elected guardians, and thus secure dominance in the administration of the whole poor-law.

Under the original act of 1838 the incidence of the poor’s rate was divided equally between the occupier and the owner, while occupiers whose tenements were below twenty-five dollars annual valuation were exempt, the rate being charged to the landlord; and, moreover, a clause declared that any contract made between owner and occupier which would release the former from liability to a moiety of the poor’s rate was null and void. The landlord added, of course, the rates to the rent, save in the case of the small number of tenants holding under lease, so that the whole cost of relief fell on the occupier; while a clause in the Poor-Law Amendment Act passed in 1849 repealed the annulling provision of the act of 1838, and legalized the enabling power of the tenant to contract himself, under compulsion, out of the protection secured to him that property should bear a moiety of the cost of poor relief. We may mention that the savage quarter-acre clause continued in operation from 1847 until partially repealed in 1862, a period of fifteen years, during which it quenched many a hearth, dismantled thousands of roof-trees, and sent more than a million of the Irish race to the grave or as scattered exiles over the face of the globe. In 1862, its fell purpose fulfilled, it was partially repealed, to the extent that destitute persons, although occupiers of a quarter of an acre of land, may be relieved, but in the workhouse only; so that still a cotter with forty perches of a garden, or a small farmer, suffering under temporary distress from failure of crop, sickness, or accident, must either surrender his little holding and enter the workhouse, or starve under the scheme of legal charity devised to extirpate the Irish from the soil of which their ancestors had been robbed through ages.

We write fact and law, and repudiate all but sober statement in our attempt to illustrate the present position of the Irish people. In the most acute throes of the famine, July 22, 1847, an act was passed for the punishment of vagrants and persons offending against the laws in force for the relief of the poor in Ireland—an act worthy of the worst days of Nero or Diocletian. Let us inquire what was the condition of the country when this act was passed. At the end of February that year there were 116,321 inmates in receipt of relief in the workhouses, and in July there were 10,000 cases of fever, apart from other terrible diseases, in those institutions, the mortality being enormous. Under the Temporary Relief Act there were issued, July 3, rations equal to the support of 3,020,712 persons. Yet the Vagrant Act inflicted imprisonment in a common jail and hard labor for a month upon any person “placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage to beg or gather alms,” with the same punishment for removing from one poor-law union, or even one electoral division, to another for the purpose of relief. More than half the population were then in receipt of relief, a vast portion of them being engaged upon relief works, which necessitated the migration to considerable distances of the male heads of families. Yet a clause in this act imposed imprisonment for three months, with hard labor, for desertion or wilful neglect of a family by its head—desertion that might have arisen from removal for some miles to another union or electoral division, in order to provide food for them.

Ireland was one uncovered lazar-house in 1847. We write from vivid and painful remembrance of personal travel of 5,000 to 10,000 miles yearly, in an official capacity, over the most afflicted of the famine-stricken districts, from Waterford round to Sligo, during that and subsequent years up to 1858. We visited every workhouse, every auxiliary, every fever hospital, every relief depot, every soup-kitchen, every centre of public works, by way of relief, every missionary station for proselytizing purposes, every ragged-school, every jail, and made a minute personal survey of the most distressed localities in the south and west of Ireland in 1847 and throughout the famine. Holding an important commission from the government, we had access to and command of sources of reliable information open to few, while we had personal communication with the chief officers of several public departments that enabled us to understand thoroughly the precise condition of the suffering classes throughout the whole period of acute distress in Ireland. Charged, unsolicited, by the government with a special inquiry connected with the condition of the destitute and criminal classes which embraced the whole kingdom, owing to experience acquired during the famine period, we visited officially every county, every diocese, every poor-law union, every parish in Ireland, and willingly place the results of that experience before the readers of The Catholic World. The history of the famine is yet to be written, and, if not soon prepared, the records of personal experience will be lost, and a reliable account of it rendered impossible. When political factions in the United States traduce the Irish race, and when factions in the several British colonies do likewise, as regards Irish immigrants, they do so ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the precise circumstances under which these immigrants reached those countries during pressure of the famine. We have treated the amount of decline of population in Ireland, and the social quality of that decline, in this article. The decrease of population directly through the famine is, as we have said, exaggerated. The census commissioners of 1851 set down the deaths from extraordinary causes, between 1841 and 1851, or rather from 1845, as follows:

Deaths from fever222,029
Deaths from dissentery and diarrhœa134,355
Deaths from cholera35,989
Deaths from starvation21,770
———
Total414,143

These figures, sad and enormous as they are, we are prepared to show are an entire understatement of the true facts of the case. The whole condition of society below the middle classes was disorganized and demoralized. Panic and paralysis seized the entire population. The dependent perished at home or in the workhouses, while those with means to emigrate fled the country. Flying from famine, fever, and pestilence, these reluctant emigrants, numbers of whom perished before settlement, have helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the United States and of the British colonies. The author of the Record of the O’Connell Centenary, describing the character of the early Irish emigrants, says, with great truth and force:

“Snatched from rough rural labor, little skilled in handicraft, a very large number wholly illiterate, and many unable to speak any tongue save the native Gaelic; nearly half of them females, without that cultured training in domestic service required by other countries; a heavy, helpless juvenile element hanging on them; intensely clannish, yet removed from those tribal and religious standards of morality and social life which powerfully influence the Irish at home; memory saddened with the recollection of the roofless cabin and the loved little ancestral farm lost for ever, the dead who had been starved at home or fell in fever, the dear relatives who sought the shelter of the workhouse, but through whose trap-coffin they were precipitated into the famine fosse without shroud or requiem; and the uncertainty of despair as to the living remnant of the family left behind—agonized by such feelings, the millions were hastily deported on the shores of America, Australia, and New Zealand, objects of sympathy and affection to the generous, of pity to the benevolent, of alarm and horror to the timid, of contempt to the misanthropic, and of scorn and hatred to the enemies of the race and faith of the Irish nation. Never before was spectacle so sad, so gigantic, so appalling submitted to the contemplation of humanity; the history of Ireland was dramatized throughout Christendom, and its tragic story personated on every hospitable shore on both hemispheres, when Moore’s prediction was literally and amply fulfilled:

“‘The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plain;

The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o’er the deep.’”

We have given an outline sketch of the condition of Ireland just before and in the early stages of the famine; in our next we shall endeavor to trace what progress she has made from that sad period to her present improved position in 1878.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1878.

THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

Like chants which fade yet linger still to bless,

While float their formless notes of joy or dole,

So thought doth grieve for words beyond control,

That to itself it may thy charms confess,

And tell each grace with joyous eagerness,

As did the morning stars their anthems roll,

Or as the angels greet a ransom’d soul.

Such tongues alone could paint the loveliness

Which o’er thy face in sad, sweet beauty smiled;

As though in unseen wingings, ever near,

The Dove had coo’d a legend in thine ear

Of some rare tenderness to grief beguiled—

Perchance of love which bought redemption dear,

With all its cost of sorrow to thy Child.