In the night, in the night, O my country, the stream calls out from afar;
So swells thy voice through the ages, sonorous and vast;
In the night, in the night, O my country, clear flashes the star:
So flashes on me thy face through the gloom of the past.
I sleep not; I watch: in blows the wind ice-wing'd and ice-fingered:
My forehead it cools and slakes the fire in my breast;
Though it sighs o'er the plains where oft thine exiles look'd back, and long lingered,
And the graves where thy famish'd lie dumb and thine outcasts find rest.
Hardly less sad, but in so different a spirit as to afford a contrast that brings us to a fair measure of the variety of Mr. de Vere's powers, is a poem of the days of the brigade. The wife of one of the soldiers who followed Sarsfield to France after the capitulation of Limerick, and entered the Irish brigade of Louis XIV., is supposed, sitting by the banks of the Shannon, to speak:
River that through this purple plain
Toilest (once redder) to the main,
Go, kiss for me the banks of Seine!
Tell him I loved, and love for aye,
That his I am though far away—
More his than on the marriage-day.
Tell him thy flowers for him I twine
When first the slow sad mornings shine
In thy dim glass; for he is mine.
Tell him when evening's tearful light
Bathes those dark towers on Aughrim's height,
There where he fought, in heart, I fight.
A freeman's banner o'er him waves!
So be it! I but tend the graves
Where freemen sleep whose sons are slaves.
Tell him I nurse his noble race,
Nor weep save o'er one sleeping face
Wherein those looks of his I trace.
For him my beads I count when falls
Moonbeam or shower at intervals
Upon our burn'd and blacken'd walls:
And bless him! bless the bold brigade—
May God go with them, horse and blade,
For faith's defense, and Ireland's aid!
Here the abrupt transition of tone in the last verse from the subdued melancholy of those which precede it is very fine and very Irish. One can fancy the widowed wife, in all her desolation, starting, even from her beads, as she thinks of Lord Clare's dragoons coming down on the enemy with their "Viva la for Ireland's wrong!"
Twenty years have now passed since "The Spirit of the Nation" gave some glimpses of the mine of poetry then latent in the Irish mind. In 1845 Mr. Gavan Duffy published his "Ballad Poetry of Ireland"—a book which had the largest sale of any published in Ireland since the union and probably the widest influence. Upon this common and neutral ground Orange-man and Ribbon-man, Tory, and Nationalist, were perforce brought into harmonious contact; and "The Boyne Water" lost half its virus as a political psalm when it was embalmed side by side with the "Wild Geese" or "Willy Reilly." Behind the produce of his own immediate period, Mr. Duffy, in arranging his materials, could only find a few ballads by Moore, a few by Gerald Griffin, a few by Banim, Callanan, Furlong, and Drennan, that could be accounted legitimate ballad poetry. The rest was fast cropping up while he was actually compiling his collection, under the hot breath of the National movement, in a lavish and luxuriant growth. This impulse seems to have spent itself some years ago. Anything of real merit in the way of Irish poetry does not now appear in periodical literature more than once or twice in a year; and Mr. Thomas Irwin is the only recent writer whose verse may fairly be named in the same breath with that which we have now noticed. A rich grace and finish of [{481}] expression, a most quaint and delicate humor, and a fine-poised aptness of phrase, distinguish his poetry, which is more according to the taste that Mr. Tennyson has established in England than that of any Irish writer of the day.
Irish poetry seems now, therefore, to have passed into a new and more advanced stage of development. Here are four volumes, by four separate writers, of poems, old and new—all published within a year; and all, we believe, decidedly successful, and in satisfactory course of sale. Mr. Florence MacCarthy's poems had previously gone through several editions, and won enduring fame—perhaps more widely spread in America than even at home, on account of a quality somewhat kindred to the peculiar genius of the best American poets, and especially Longfellow, Poe, and Irving, that the reader will readily recognize in his finely-finished and most melodious verse. Nor should we omit to mention, in cataloguing the library of recent Irish poets, "The Monks of Kilcrea," a long romantic poem in the style of "The Lady of the Lake," which contains many a passage that Scott might own, but of which the writer remains unknown. Thus Irish national poetry is accumulating, as it were, in strata. Mr. Duffy set on the title-page of his "Ballad Poetry" the Irish motto, Bolg an dana, which not all his readers clearly understood; but which, to all who did, seemed extremely appropriate at the time. "This man," say the Four Masters, speaking of a great bard of the fifteenth century, "was called the Bolg an dana, which signifies that he was a common budget of poetry." And this was all that Mr. Duffy's Ballad Poetry professed to be. But what was only a budget of desultory jetsam and flotsam in 1845 is taking the shape of a solid literature in 1865; and those twenty golden years have at all events been well filled with ranks of rhyme.
From The Month.
CONSTANCE SHERWOOD.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.
CHAPTER VIII.
After I had been musing a little while, Mistress Bess ran into the room, and cried to some one behind her: