The occasional sketches of Irish scenery are also very vividly outlined. This of Lough Braccan is not perhaps the best, but it is the most easily detached from the text:
Among those mountain skirts a league away,
Lough Braccan spread, with many a silver bay
And islet green; a dark cliff, tall and bold,
Half-muffled in its cloak of ivy old,
Bastioned the southern brink, beside a glen,
Where birch and hazel hid the badger's den,
And through the moist ferns and firm hollies play'd
A rapid rivulet, from light to shade.
Above the glen, and wood, and cliff, was seen,
Majestically simple and serene,
Like some great soul above the various crowd,
A purple mountain-top, at times in cloud
Or mist, as in celestial veils of thought,
Abstracted heavenward.
We may give another specimen of Mr. Allingham's power of delineation, which shows that he has studied Irish country life as well as Irish scenery and Irish physiognomy.
Mud hovels fringe the "fair green" of this town,
A spot misnamed, at every season brown,
O'erspread with countless man and beast to-day,
Which bellow, squeak, and shout, bleat, bray, and neigh.
The "jobbers" there each more or less a rogue,
Noisy or smooth, with each his various brogue,
Cool, wiry Dublin, Connaught's golden mouth,
Blunt northern, plaintive sing-song of the south,
Feel cattle's ribs, or jaws of horses try.
For truth, since men's are very sure to lie,
And shun, with parrying blow and practised heed,
The rushing horns, the wildly prancing steed.
The moistened penny greets with sounding smack
The rugged palm, which smites the greeting back;
Oaths fly, the bargain like a quarrel burns,
And oft the buyer turns, and oft returns:
Now mingle Sassenach and Gaelic tongue;
On either side are slow concessions wrung;
An anxious audience interfere; at last
The sale is closed, and whisky binds it fast,
In case of quilting upon oziers bent,
With many an ancient patch and breezy rent.
This is as true a picture in its way as Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse-fair."
Mr. Aubrey de Vere's "Inisfail" comes last on our list, but certainly not least in our estimation. No poet of Young Ireland has like him seized and breathed the spirit of his country's Catholic nationality, its virginal purity of faith, its invincible patience of hope, and all the gentle sweetness of its charity. Young Ireland rather studied the martial muse, and that with an avowed purpose. "The Irish harp," said Davis, "too much loves to weep. Let us, while our strength is great and our hopes high, cultivate its bolder strains, its raging and rejoicing; or if we weep, let it be like men whose eyes are lifted though their tears fall." Mr. de Vere has tried every mood of the native lyre, and proved himself master of all. His "Inisfail" is a ballad chronicle of Ireland, such as Young Ireland would have thought to be a worthy result of all its talents, and such as, in fact, Mr. Duffy at one time proposed. But it must be said that its heroic ballads are not equal to those of Young Ireland. Some one said of a very finished, but occasionally frigid, Irish speaker, fifteen years ago, that he spoke like "Sheil with the chill on." A few of Mr. de Vere's ballads have the same effect of "Young Ireland with the chill on." They want the verve, the glow, the energy, the resonance, which belong to the best ballads of "The Spirit of the Nation." Of the writers of that time, Mr. D'Arcy McGee is perhaps, on the whole, the most kindred genius to his. Mr. de Vere has an insight into all the periods of Irish history in their most poetical expression which Mr. McGee alone of his comrades seems to have equally possessed. Indeed, if Mr. Me Gee's poems were all collected and chronologically arranged—as it is to be hoped they may be some day soon—it would be found that he had unconsciously and desultorily traversed very nearly the same complete extent of ground that Mr. de Vere has systematically and deliberately gone over. But though no one has written more nobly of the dimly glorious Celtic ages, and many of his battle-ballads are instinct with life, and wonderfully picturesque, it is easy to see that Mr. McGee's best desire was to follow the footsteps of the early saints, and the Via Dolorosa of the period of the penal laws. These, [{479}] too, are the passages over which Mr. de Vere's genius most loves to brood, and his prevailing view of Ireland is the supernatural view of her destiny to carry the cross and spread the faith. Young Ireland wrote its bold, brilliant ballads as a part of the education of the new nationality that it believed was growing up, and destined to take possession of the island—"a nationality that," to use Davis's words again, "must contain and represent all the races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic; it must not be Saxon; it must be Irish. The Brehon law and the maxims of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning genius of the Gael, the placid strength of the Saxon, the marshalling insight of the Norman; a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind, in its romantic, its religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies. Finally, a native government, which shall know and rule by the might and right of all, yet yield to the arrogance of none;—these are the components of such a nationality." And such was the dream that seemed an easy eventuality twenty years ago. But Mr. de Vere writes after the famine and in view of the exodus. His mind goes from the present to the past by ages of sorrow—of sorrow, nevertheless, illumined, nurtured, and sustained by divine faith and the living presence of the Church. So in the most beautiful poem of this volume, he sees the whole Irish race carrying an inner spiritual life through all their tribulation in the guise of a great religious order of which England is the foundress, and the rules are written in the statute-book. We cannot select a better specimen of the thorough Catholic tone of Mr. de Vere's genius, and of the vivid power and finished grace of his poetry, than this:
There is an order by a northern sea
Far in the west, of rule and life more strict
Than that which Basil rear'd in Galilee,
In Egypt Paul, in Umbria Benedict.
Discalced it walks; a stony land of tombs,
A strange Petraea of late days, it treads!
Within its court no high-tossed censer fumes;
The night-rain beats its cells, the wind its beds.
Before its eyes no brass-bound, blazon'd tome
Reflects the splendor of a lamp high hung:
Knowledge is banish'd from her earliest home
Like wealth: it whispers psalms that once it sung.
It is not bound by the vow celibate,
Lest, through its ceasing, anguish too might cease;
In sorrow it brings forth; and death and fate
Watch at life's gate, and tithe the unripe increase.
It wears not the Franciscan's sheltering gown;
The cord that binds it is the strangers chain;
Scarce seen for scorn, in fields of old renown
It breaks the clod; another reaps the grain.
Year after year it fasts; each third or fourth
So fasts that common fasts to it are feast;
Then of its brethren many in the earth
Are laid unrequiem'd like the mountain beast.
Where are its cloisters? Where the felon sleeps!
Where its novitiate? Where the last wolf died!
From sea to sea its vigil long it keeps—
Stern foundress! is its rule not mortified?
Thou that hast laid so many an order waste,
A nation is thine order! It was thine
Wide as a realm that order's seed to cast,
And undispensed sustain its discipline!
It is another curious illustration of the Hibernis ipsis Hibernior that a de Vere, who is, moreover, "of the caste of Vere de Vere," should have so intimate a comprehension of the Celtic spirit as is often shown in these poems, especially in the use of those allegories which are so characteristic of the period of persecution, and in some of his metres that appear to be instinct with the very melody of the oldest Irish music. Here, indeed, we seem to taste, in a certain vague and dreamy sensation, which the mere murmur of such verses even without strict reference to the words produces, all the charm of which that ancient poetry might have been capable, if it were still cultivated in a language of living civilization. Several of these poems, if translated into Irish verse, would probably pass back without the change of an idiom—so completely Celtic is the whole conception of the language. The dirges, for example, appear on a first reading to be only English versions of Irish poems belonging to the time of the Jacobites and the Brigade—until, as we examine more carefully, we observe that the allegory is [{480}] wrought out with all the finish of more modern art, and that the metaphors are brought into a more just inter-dependence than the native bard usually thought necessary.
The tenderness that approaches to a sort of worship of Ireland under the poetical personification of a mother wailing for her children, again and again breaks out in Mr. de Vere's verse; and in all the range of Irish poetry it is nowhere more exquisitely expressed. The solemn beauty of the following verses is like that of some of those earliest of the melodies, whose long lines, with their curious rippling rhythm, were evidently meant for recitation as well as for musical effect: