“Lamentis, gemituque et fæmineo ululatu Tecta fremunt.”
Nor was this great grief simulated, as by hired keeners at a wake, the mulieres proficae of the Irish Feralia, but came gushing with its waters of bitterness from the full fountain of those loving hearts. There were faces there no actor could assume—faces which would have immortalised the painter who could have traced them truly, but were beyond the compass of art. Two, especially, I shall never forget. A youth of eighteen or nineteen, who had a cheerful word and pleasant smile for all, though you could see the while, in his white cheek and quivering lip, how grief was gnawing his brave Spartan heart (Ah,
“What a noble thing it is To suffer and be strong!”)
and the other, an elderly man, who stood somewhat aloof from the rest, with his arms folded, and his head bent, motionless, speechless, with a face on which despair had written, I shall smile no more until I welcome death!
I thought of those beautiful lines which begin,
“Thank God, bless God, all ye who suffer not
More grief than ye can weep for. That is well;” 1
1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
and I thought, also, what great hearts beat under coats of frieze, and how bounden we are, with all our might, to avert from them these overwhelming sorrows, or, at the least, and if fall they must, to prove our sympathy as best we can.
Many of the emigrants had bunches of wild flowers and heather, and one of them a shamrock in a broken flowerpot, as memorials of dear ould Ireland. Nor does this fond love of home and kindred decline in a distant land; no less a sum than 7,520,000 L. having been sent from America to Ireland, in the years 1848 to 1854, inclusive, according to the statement of the Emigration Commissioners.
It was a strange recollection during this scene of sorrow, (and how strangely our thoughts will sometimes set themselves at variance with what is passing before us!) that, all the while, the Great Jig was going on at Leenane, and the fiddlers fiddling, and the hundred and fifty couple footing it, right merrily! Well,
“Let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must laugh,
And some must weep—
So runs the world away!”