‘It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,’
has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.
The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote, some two hundred years ago, that Sorrowful Lament for Ireland, Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose—
‘I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,