GOOD-HEARTED.
"The young lord betrayed an orphan maid—
The young lord soft-natured and easy:
The man was 'good-hearted,' the neighbors said;
Flung meat to his dogs; to the poor flung bread.
His father stood laughing when Drogheda bled;
He hated a conscience queasy!
II.
"A widow met him, dark trees o'erhead,
Her child and the man just parted—
When home she walked her knife it was red;
Swiftly she walked, and muttered, and said,
'The blood rushed fast from a fount full-fed!
Ay, the young lord was right "good-hearted!"'
III.
"When morning wan its first beam shed.
It fell on a corpse yet wanner;
The great-hearted dogs the young lord had fed
Watched, one at the feet and one at the head—
But their months with a blood-pool hard by were red;
They loved—in the young lord's manner."
There is something about the fierce bitterness here that strongly reminds one of Tennyson's poem of The Sisters, with its weird line—
"Oh! the Earl was fair to see!"
From several of very nearly the same purport, we select the following, influenced to choose it, as we own, by the wonderful flow of its measure, as well as its truly Irish beauty. There is a kind of peculiar richness of diction that no other nation on earth ever attains. Every reader of Tom Moore will know what we mean, and recognize a kindred spirit in
SEMPER RADEM
"The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean,
Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright;
And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotion
Swells up as to meet it, and clings to its light.
The orb, unabiding, grows whiter, mounts higher;
The pathos of darkness descends on the brine—
O Erin! the North drew its light from thy pyre;
Thy light woke the nations; the embers were thine.
II.
"'Tis sunrise! The mountains flash forth, and, new-reddened,
The billows grow lustrous so lately forlorn;
From the orient with vapors long darkened and deadened.
The trumpets of Godhead are pealing the morn: He rises, the sun, in his might reascending;
Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea! O Erin! who proved thee returns to thee, blending
The future and past in one garland for thee!"
But what we regard as really the finest poem in Inisfail is an apparent, perhaps a real, exception to our rule above stated, that whatever of this poetry pleases us would please as well if divested of its Gaelic form. The charm of this lies in its being so essentially Irish in conception. It is just such an original, bold, wild inspiration as no other body than an Irish clan could without incongruity be made to feel. There is more intense Irishness (what other word will express it?) in it than in all the poems—ay, and half the poets—of this century. We give it with the author's own explanation prefixed:
THE PHANTOM FUNERAL.
"James Fitz-Garret, son of the great Earl of Desmond, had been sent to England, when a child, as a hostage, and was for seventeen years kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in the Queen's religion. James Fitz-Thomas, the 'Sugane Earl,' having meantime assumed the title and prerogatives of Earl of Desmond, the Queen sent her captive to Ireland, attended by persons devoted to her, and provided with a conditional patent for his restoration .... As the young earl walked to church, it was with difficulty that a guard of English soldiers could keep a path open for him. From street and window and housetop every voice urged him to fidelity to his ancestral faith. The youth, who did not even understand the language in which he was adjured, went on to the Queen's church, as it was called; and with loud cries his clan rushed away and abandoned his standard for ever. Shortly afterward he returned to England, where, within a few months, he died.
Strew the bed and strew the bier
(Who rests upon it was never man)
With all that a little child holds dear,
With violets blue and violets wan.
Strew the bed and strew the bier
With the berries that redden thy shores, Corann;
His lip was the berry, his skin was clear
As the waxen blossom—he ne'er was man.
Far off he sleeps, yet we mourn him here;
Their tale was a falsehood; he ne'er was man!
'Tis a phantom funeral! Strew the bier
With white lilies brushed by the floating swan.
They lie who say that the false queen caught him
A child asleep on the mountains wide;
A captive reared him, a strange faith taught him;—
'Twas for no strange faith that his father died!
They lie who say that the child returned
A man unmanned to his towers of pride;
That his people with curses the false Earl spurned:
Woe, woe, Kilmallock! they lie, and lied!
The clan was wroth at an ill report.
But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears.
The child that was motherless played. "'Twas sport."
A child must sport in his childish years!
Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!
The women of Desmond loved well that child!
Our lamb was lost in the winter snow;
Long years we sought him in wood and wild.
How many a babe of Fitzgerald's blood
In hut was fostered though born in hall!
The old stock burgeoned the fair new bud,
The old land welcomed them, each and all!