Others of these poems, indeed the best of them, had no antetypes in our ancient music. New music was, therefore, to be sought for them. Not on their account only was it to be sought. We hoped they would be the means of calling out and making known a contemporary music fresh with the spirit of the time, and rooted in the country.
Since Carolan's death there had been no addition to the store. Not that we were without composers, but those we have do not compose Irish-like music, nor for Ireland. Their rewards are from a foreign public—their fame, we fear, will suffer from alienage. Balfe is very sweet, and Rooke very emphatic, but not one passion or association in Ireland's heart would answer to their songs.
Fortunately there was one among us (perchance his example may light us to others) who can smite upon our harp like a master, and make it sigh with Irish memories, and speak sternly with Ireland's resolve. To him, to his patriotism, to his genius, and, we may selfishly add, to his friendship, we owe our ability now to give to Ireland music fit for "The Memory of the Dead" and the "Hymn of Freedom," and whatever else was marked out by popularity for such care as his.
In former editions of the Spirit[45] ] we had thrown in carelessly several inferior verses and some positive trash, and neither paper nor printing was any great honour to the Dublin press. Every improvement in the power of the most enterprising publisher in Ireland has been made, and every fault, within our reach or his, cured—and whether as the first publication of original airs, as a selection of ancient music, or as a specimen of what the Dublin press can do, in printing, paper, or cheapness, we urge the public to support this work of Mr. James Duffy's—and, in a pecuniary way, it is his altogether.
We had hoped to have added a recommendation to the first number of this work, besides whatever attraction may lie in its music, its ballads, or its mechanical beauty.
An artist, whom we shall not describe or he would be known,[46] ] sketched a cover and title for it. The idea, composition, and drawing of that design were such as Flaxman might have been proud of. It is a monument to bardic power, to patriotism, to our music and our history. There is at least as much poetry in it as in the best verses in the work it illustrates. If it do nothing else, it will show our Irish artists that refinement and strength, passion and dignity, are as practicable in Irish as in German painting; and the lesson was needed sorely. But if it lead him who drew it to see that our history and hopes present fit forms to embody the highest feelings of beauty, wisdom, truth, and glory in, irrespective of party politics, then, indeed, we shall have served our country when we induced our gifted friend to condescend to sketching a title-page. We need not describe that design now, as it will appear on the cover of the second number, and on the title-page of the finished volume.
BALLAD POETRY OF IRELAND.
How slow we have all been in coming to understand the meaning of Irish Nationality!
Some, dazzled by visions of pagan splendour, and the pretensions of pedigree, and won by the passions and romance of the olden races, continued to speak in the nineteenth century of an Irish nation as they might have done in the tenth. They forgot the English Pale, the Ulster Settlement, and the filtered colonisation of men and ideas. A Celtic kingdom with the old names and the old language, without the old quarrels, was their hope; and though they would not repeat O'Neill's comment as he passed Barrett's castle on his march to Kinsale, and heard it belonged to a Strongbownian, that "he hated the Norman churl as if he came yesterday"; yet they quietly assumed that the Norman and Saxon elements would disappear under the Gaelic genius like the tracks of cavalry under a fresh crop.