III.
Oh! give me the nature that shows
Its emotions of mirth or of pain,
As the water that glides, and the corn that grows,
Show shadow and sunlight again.
Oh! give me the brow that can bend,
Oh! give me the eyes that can weep,
And give me a heart like Lough Neagh,
As full of emotions and deep.
To Gavan Duffy, the warmest of his friends among the Young Ireland group, he wrote lines that expressed a yearning for an old companionship amid old scenes:
Oh! for one week amid the emerald fields,
Where the Avoca sings the song of Moore;
Oh! for the odor the brown heather yields,
To glad the pilgrim's heart on Glenmalur!
Yet is there still what meeting could not give,
A joy most suited of all joys to last;
For, ever in fair memory there must live
The bright, unclouded picture of the past.
Old friend! the years wear on, and many cares
And many sorrows both of us have known;
Time for us both a quiet couch prepares—
A couch like Jacob's, pillow'd with a stone.
And oh! when thus we sleep may we behold
The angelic ladder of the Patriarch's dream;
And may my feet upon its rungs of gold
Yours follow, as of old, by hill and stream!
Of his Canadian ballads one of the best known is The Arctic Indian's Faith:
I.
We worship the spirit that walks unseen
Through our land of ice and snow:
We know not His face, we know not His place,
But His presence and power we know.