Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,
First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea,
I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow,
But, oh, could I love thee more deeply than now?
No! thy chains, as they rankle, thy blood, as it runs,
But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons,
Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird’s nest,
Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast.”
It would be cruel to ask for the evidence of all this tyranny—a link of the chains that rankle on the limbs of Ireland, or a drop of the blood that so perpetually oozes from her wounds. But poetry is privileged to be as “unhappy” as it pleases—to weep over sorrows unfelt by the world—and to fabricate wrongs, only to have the triumph of sweeping them away. We would tolerate half the harangues of the Irish disturbers for one poet like Moore.
Some of the most finished of those verses were devoted to the memory of Emmett, and they could not have been devoted to a subject more unworthy of his poetry. In Ireland, for the last five hundred years, every fault, folly, and failure of the nation is laid to the charge of England. The man who invents a “grievance” is sure to be popular; but if he is to achieve the supreme triumph of popularity, he must fasten his grievance on the back of England; and if he pushes his charge into practice, and is ultimately banished or hanged, he is canonised in the popular calendar of patriotism. This absurdity, equally unaccountable and incurable, actually places Emmett in the rank of the Wallaces and Kosciuskos;—thus degrading men of conduct and courage, encountering great hazards for great principles, with a selfish simpleton, a trifler with conspiracy, and a runaway from the first sight of the danger which he himself had created. Moore’s hero was a feeble romancer; his national regenerator a street rioter; and his patriotic statesman merely a giddy gambler, who staked his pittance on a silly and solitary throw for supremacy, and saw his stake swept away by the policeman! Totally foolish as Ireland has ever been in her politics, she ought to be most ashamed of this display before the world—of inaugurating this stripling-revolutionist, this fugitive champion, this milk-and-water Jacobin, among her claims to the homage of posterity. Yet this was the personage on whose death Moore wrote these touching lines:—