Scorned his passion and his prayers,
Like some cold, insensate demon, one might cling to unawares.
Like to something, 'mid the shipwreck one might cling to
desperately;
But who finds when safe, rejoicing,
'Tis a demon of the sea
Hears its mock while down the depthy deadly waters plunges
he.
Pondering, then his brow grows darker, curses on his lips are
waking.
'Tis her nuptial night; grief, passion,
Pride have kept his heart from breaking;
Sudden comes revenge to trample out his spirit's aching.
Wilder, hotter seethes his hatred when a-sudden he's be-
thought him
Of the dagger, diamond -pointed,
In blue venom thin anointed,
That in the reedy Roman town, from a poor noble he had
bought him.
S3
Toward the ebon cabinet, where the hellish steel is slirin'u J,
Eager and black-browed he hurries
In the ward the key he buries
Lo ! the lank and subtle steel in his fierce hand is shining.
And what is this he drops? a something round that black
sheath tangled ;
'Tis a braid of her rich hair,
That in the sunny morning air
Floated round her stately neck, with nuptial jewels spangled.
And he holds it as it were some tempting demon-sent illusion;
And he cries, amid fierce laughter,
Muttering round each gilded rafter,
" Scarcely need I this, methinks, to sting my soul for retribu-
tion."
Quick as vengeance is resolve ; and thus he wills it, that in
th' morning
Stirring greyly now in habit
Of a hooded monk adorning,
While he shrives her he will deal a slight sharp penance for
her scorning.
Now he dons the gloomy robes; his heart on fire with hate and
rancour
Reckless he of time or future
Still will lurid memory hanker,
In his trampled pride, till vengeance eats away its canker.
Now he's garbed for his dread venture. But, his hooded
forehead bareing
As he glances toward a mirror,
Something strikes his eyes with terror
Stead of his, a face of fiend amid its depths is glaring.
Ha! it is his seething brain that conjures up this fiery phantom
Or the imaged lamp perchance;
No fancy from revenge must daunt him
No face, though 'twere the sovereign fiend s, that yet across
the earth may haunt him.
But why thus ponder, idiot, fool? again he'll look; he is no
shaker;
" God ! this is some hellish error !"
Once again he meets the mirror
Falls upon his feeble knees, and prays in terror to his Maker.
89
UNA.
i.
BESIDE the February coast, o'erblown
And bleak, remote from hamlet and from town,
Arose the aged house of mouldering stone,
Where, day by day, the season's smile and frown,
Insensate to her woes, had flitted by;
For, since she watched through autumn's bronzed light,
Her lover's topsail sink in hazy night;
Beneath the dewy ocean's ruddy dawn,
The swallow flocks 'had drifted up the sky;
The snows grown less along the hills withdrawn,
And April's cloudy arm of dropping rain,
And lights of silent summer on the plain.
II.
In that sad casement, turned to the sea- south,
Where stood one oak, rock-rooted, land-ward bent,
She'd known the heathy moor grow brown with drought,
And heard the sparrow in his crevice-rent
Chirp through the heat; then o'er the evening reef
The billows roll, and the retreating sea
Wane o'er its disk of sand, as, windily
Rose the moon on the plain; and then, once more
Wild winter deepened o'er her brow of grief,
Hopelessly brooding by that desolate shore,
Where comrade she had none in heat and cold,
Saving a woman, deaf, and very old.
in.
" Alas! my heart," she mourned, "moon and moon
Has filled and died throughout the dreary year,
And heavy winter will have vanished soon,
And spring will come, but come without him here ;
Would with that cloud I watched so many hours
Yesterday, moveless in the bitter breeze,
'Twere mine to sink beneath those gloomy seas,
Looking upon them for my lover's barque
Whether the wintry storm released its powers
Or folded them in calm, through day or dark;
Happier should I be searching anywhere,
Than in this lone uncertain home of care. "
IV.
All through the night the snow had fallen thick,
Blown with the sea-wind on her chamber pane,
\Vhile by the desert hearth she listened, sick
With dread, or dozing, soon awaked again
90
To hear the chimney funneling wind, the roar
Of the hoarse sea remote, beneath its break
Along the wild beach; fancying sounds of wreck,
And voices in the tumult and expanse;
But, when dull morning came she paced the shore
Now silent, after night's tempestuous trance,
Looking along the waves in every cove
For what fear pictured, magnified by love.
v.
Sometimes, all indistinct in cruel haze,
A rock far off would seem a stranded ship,
Until through vapours over distant bays,
A sheaf of beams disclosing it, would slip ;
And, wandering still along the forlorn coast,
From height to height she look'cl along the waves,
Hours many, searching through the sunless caves,
Or, thinking, past some headland too remote
To reach, may chance her lover's pallid ghost
Waited for burial, by some o'erturned boat,
Watching the corse, with face turned to the sand,
And, as sea-struggling still one out-thrown hand,
VI.
At noon the lurid roof of cold cloud clears,
And through the still dead air a flake or two
Flutters of falling frost; and dimly wears
The day toward eve; when from the vacant blue
Illum'd by heaps of horizontal snow,
Whose pinnacles reflect their fading light
Upon the waters spacing toward the night,
And heathy spined hills and isles afar,
A vague and icy wind begins to flow;
And palely glimmers the one western star
Over the silent earth and spacious sea,
Wrapped in cold whiteness and calm purity.
A kind of piteous calmness for a space
Came to her bosom, born of that still scene;
But night was falling, and with quickened pace
She homeward turned beneath the shadowing screen
Of lofty cliff; and threading her dim path
Along the shore, amid the vapours grey,
Taking what seemed the nearest, lost he? way.
And wandering thus confused, the eager tide
Moon-swayed at full, began to roll in wrath,
Through rocky channels from the sands beside,
When wading now through the impetuous wave,
Breathless, she gained the porch of a dark cave.
91
VIII.
And clinging to the inward rocky ledge,
Deemed herself fearfully secure; the arch,
Inward shelved sidelong like a ruined bridge,
Anear her; and her lips began to parch,
Seeing the ever-swelling billow burst
Through the cave mouth, and from the watery gloom,
Regurgitani with hollow awful boom,
Wash o'er her feet; and thus she clasped the cliff
Desperate, heedless of the coming worst,
When the low snowy moon disclosed a skiff
Drifting without, athwart the silver line
Of lustre past the cavern down the brine.
IX.
And she was thinking," as the orb arose,
How soon the tide would ebb, when on its swell,
Something came floating, impassive in repose
Even to her feet and fixed as by a spell,
She gazed upon it, drifting past the rock,
The limbs and then the face upturned in the beam-
The face ah, God ! whence that despairing scream ?
And now her place gleams vacant in the glare
Of the cold moon just rounded and the shock
Alone of sullen surges from the drear
O'ershadowing ocean rises with the roar
Of a great wind along that lifeless shore.
BEFORE THE BATTLE :
THE EVENING.
THROUGHOUT the day the troublous air was dim
And silent, save along the ocean rim
Where the far hum of tempest seemed to brood,
Hymning a cold and surfy murmurous hymn.
At eve the sky cleared bluely overhead;
But o'er the place there seemed to hang a dread
Of some strange trouble, as from out the wood
I paced along the dismal river bed.
Long feathery slips and clouds of windy woe,
Slept faint beyond the inland space a-glow
With dots of straw stack, stubble streaked with sun,
And bosky thickets ridging brown and low.
While bridging o'er the bay, from cape to cape,
A dim grey cloud of vague and ribbed shape,
Like some enormous phantom skeleton
Of pteroclactyle, seemed to stretch and gape
92
For prey unto the void. Seaward, a screen
Of rugged reefs of granite slanting keen,
Rise in grey air, whence, landward earth begins
To flesh its giant rocky bones with green.
Where the long valley fronts the setting day,
A sombre fire touches the river's way
Through furze and moss mound, on until it wins
A glaring, shelved landslip, red with clay;
And following further where its course divides
In sodden marshy patches, sleekily glides
Through matted sedge and rush, until it burns
Upon the sullen pool where it abides
Under a grey old mill whose broken wheel,
Idle, and gapp'd with time, has ceased to reel,
And hangs moss-rusted where the streamlet turns,
Where flaggers in the downward current sweel,
And marrish weed in swirling streaks a-nigh
Floats on the windy ripples drifting by.
Around, the dim-air ruffles shrub and grass;
Far-off is heard the glimmering curlew's cry
O'er shingly ledges and through humid caves,
Where the sleek-swinging billow mounting laves,
Bearing the dim light on its ridge of glass;
And showery ringing of the shoreward waves
Sounds from the beach. Whirring though twilight glooms,
Now o'er th' uneasy grass the beetle booms :
The long crow-lines push through the dusking height:
Monotonous with moan of tempest dooms.
The far grey sea-line sounds, sullen and frore;
The broad wind rising gusts with foamy roar;
Late birds in scattered flocks in the last light
Fly o'er the fields and hedges from the shore.
The last leaves sail the void ; the last pale glow
Beneath the blank ridge of the earth sinks slow;
The hills and fields are blotted out, and night,
With tempest and with darkness, sinks below.
THE NIGHT.
So died the eve; but when from out the panes
I looked at midnight through the clearing rains,
Roused by the call of trumpets lost in wind,
Drear tumults, and the tramp of martial trains,
93
I saw beyond the river's spectral trees
(As one ere tempest or in vision sees
The hills with thunder's dark encampment lined,
Or by the ghostly moon in gloom and breeze,
Squadrons of shadowy, silent horse beneath,
Fudging in phantom lines some dreary heath)
A host in ordered silence muster dark;
War's living cloud and thunderbolt of Death,
Who held in iron silence the dark ground,
Who ere the next noon rolled in fire and sound,
In terrors triumphing, or, cold and stark,
Should pile the earth in many a bloody mound;
For, past the dull hills sloping to the sky,
The glare of fires proclaimed their foemen nigh.
The rains beat; all the dolorous upper air
Seemed moved with presages of eternity;
And where the waves along the night sky roll,
Lo ! the red moon, like a blood-stained soul,
Seemed trembling 'twixt two trembling worlds to hear
The earthquake horologe of Doomsday toll.
THE DEATH STORM.*
FAR beyond the blue skies, in the vast spirit spaces,
In the realm of the Dead, where the earth's vanished races
Are scattered like leaves in the winter of Time,
In the shadow of God mantling o'er them sublime;
The dusk phantom A rmies of many an age
Rest apart in the gloom of their life's heritage;
An innumerate Host, like the clouds that deform
The wild broken north ere the burst of the storm.
Still Spirits of Force, through yon infinite void
Rolls their power when some region is changed or destroyed.
Hark! a sound swoons along, and a shade, such as rolls
On a world in eclipse, blankly drifts o'er their souls!
How now what has roused them ? Some tiding of War
Ringing over the plains of yon red mighty star ?
Lo! it spreads like a meteor gathering light
As it speeds, from the populous tracts of the night
* It is well known that storms of unprecedented severity occurred
during the deaths of Cromwell and Napoleon,
94
To tlie pale distant moons lying low in the gloom
Of a broad orb, like lamps in a desolate tomb.
What shout the long shadowy ranks that are flying ?
" To the Earth, to the Earthour Emperor's dying."
Now are they mustering fiercely and fast,
Squadrons and armies glance gloomily past ;
Others arise in the wastes of the night
Like thunder mists surging in storm-lurid light
From the dim sea and they mingle their cry
' ' 'Tis many an age since we hovered thus nigh
To our old battle-fields. No, not since the hour
Since we marched through the clouds to our spirit of power,
That steel-breasted Chieftain, quaint, holy, and dark,
Who lopped the pale head from the English monarch.
Now greetings are mingled with hollow strange laughter,
Now war-chants are echoed by lines hurrying after,
Now old battle memories, such as were dwelling
In souls for long a^ons the heroes are telling;
Crying their tempest tales bloodful and many,
Of fierce grey Pharsalia and noble-strewn Cannae
Bosworth and Blenheim. ; while at the disaster
Of red Waterloo the van ranks hurry faster;
But each one is vaunting his glory and labour,
And birth to the sky- world by cannon and sabre.
v.
In a steep island wild, waste, and rocked-serried
'Mid the sea's loneliness, weak and life wearied,
Lies the great Chieftain. Within the low room
Stand a few in the silence and shadow of doom.
The death-clews are chill on that high brow of power,
Like clamp on the wall of a moon-lighted tower,
And faint is the sword flashing hand that was lifted
Star-like, where victory wavering drifted.
Earth rolls from beneath, and the vague space before him,
More cold than the white Russian winter, comes o'er him.
Shriiikingly fades the slow day from the Isle;
Thickly the night -lamp is burning the while :
O'er the dim tract of the rock-scattered hill
Scant tree and herbage lie withered and still.
95
Death hangs in the numb clouds that skirfc the grey lea,
And hushed as that chamber's the waste of the sea.
Mutters the Chief in his strange fearless trance;
His words are of battle, and glory, and France
While the few, statue still, bending o'er his pale form
Sudden start into life and cry, " Hark to the storm ! "
VII.
O'er them it rolls the gaunt mountain top rings,
With the hurry of wild multitudinous wings ;
Comes a deep roar from the surf y- sea stars
Like the lost echo of earth's tempest wars ;
Lo ! They're aloft in the lightning scarred sky,
And Death knows the old ranks that hover on hi^h.
Round the wide air the great squadrons are burning,
While the Chief in the tempest blaze, haughtily turning.
Mutters low ; but they catch the last sounds in their birth,
" Again am I king of my armies of Earth."
Over the seas through the infinite blind,
Storm they along like a dusk desert wind;
Round the great spirit they marshal! and throng,
Chanting through night their imperial song;
War tuned and earnest the clash of their words,
And their eyes glitter keen as the flashing of swords.
Over the lands where they battled and fell
Pausing a space like a solemn death knell
Then past the cloud Alps of the cold midnight fly
Away to the warrior realms of the sky.
SONGS AND POEMS.
THE POTATO DIGGER'S SONG.
i.
COME, Connal, acushla, turn the clay,
And show the lumpers the light, gosoon,
For we must toil this autumn day,
With Heaven's help till rise of the moon.
Our corn is stacked, our hay secure,
Thank God ! and nothing, my boy, remains,
But to pile the potatoes safe on the flure,
Before the coming November rains.
The peasant's mine is his harvest still;
So now my lad, let's dig with a will;
Work hand and foot,
Work spade and hand,
Work spade and hand,
Through the crumbly mould;
The blessed fruit
That grows at the root
Is the real gold
Of Ireland!
Och ! I wish that Maurice and Mary dear
Were singing beside us this soft day!
Of course they'r far better off than here;
But whether they'r happier who can say!
I've heard, when it's morn with us, 'tis night
With them on the far Australian shore;
Well, heaven be about them wid visions bright,
And send them childer and money gallore.
With us there's many a mouth to fill,
And so my boy, let's work with a will:
Work hand and foot,
Work spade and hand,
Work spade and hand
Through the brown dry mould;
The blessed fruit
That grows at the root
Is the real gold
Of Ireland!
07
in.
All, tlun, Paddy O'Reardan, you thundering Turk,
Is it coorting you are in the blessed noon ?
< 'omc over here, Katty, and mind your work,
Or I'll see if your mother can't change your tune.
Well youth will be youth, as you know, IVIike,
Sixteen and twenty for eacli were meant;
But, Pat, in the name of the fairies, avic
Defer your proposals till after Lent;
And as love in this country lives mostly still
On potatoes dig, boy, dig with a will :
Work hand and foot,
Work spade and hand,
Work spade and hand
Through the harvest mould;
The blessed fruit
That grows at the root
Is the real gold
Of Ireland!
IV.
Down the bridle road the neighbours ride,
Through the light ash shade, by the wheaten sheaves :
And the children sing on the mountain side,
In the sweet blue smoke of the burning leaves.
As the great Sun sets in glory furled,
Faith, it's grand to think as I watch his face
If he never sets on the English World,
He never, lad, sets on the Irish Kace,
In the West, in the South, New Irelands still
Grow up in his light; come, work with a will:
Work hand and foot,
Work spade and hand,
Work spade and hand
Through the native mould;
The blessed fruit
That grows at the root
Is the real gold
Of Ireland!
But look! the round Moon, yellow as corn,
Comes up from the sea in the deep blue calm;
It scarcely seems a day since morn;
Well the heel of the evening to you ma'in.
God bless the moon; for many a night,
As 1 restless lay 011 a troubled bed,
When rent was due her quieting light
G
OS
lias flattered with dreams my poor old head:
But see the baskets remain to fill
Come, girls, be alive boys, dig with a will:
Work hand and foot,
Work spade and hand,
Work spade and hand
Through the moonlit mould;
The blessed fruit
That grows at the root
Is the real gold
Of Ireland!
THE EMIGRANT'S VOYAGE.
THE white sails are filled, and the wind from the shore
Blows sad from the hills we shall visit no more;
And the ship slowly moves o'er the ocean at rest,
From the land of our hearts, in the light of the West.
Though few are the friends on the land's sinking rim,
Yet our eyes, straining into the sunset, grow dim;
We are leaving for ever the walks where we strayed,
And the graves where the dust of our dearest is Jaid.
Now twilight has covered the isle in its gloom;
Dark the village, and lost the old place of the tomb ;
And we see but yon dusk mountain line in the light,
We have watched from our cottage doors many a night.
Ah, the stars on the ocean are glimmering nigh,
Like the eyes of the dead looking up at the sky;
And our ship speeds along as heart -wearied we sleep,
'Mid the waters of God, and the clouds of the deep.
MORNING*
Full stretched are the sails, dim and dewy the spars;
On the spray-wetted deck falls the light of the stars;
And the blue lonely morning breaks coldly, as we,
In the wind, cleave the hurrying heaps of the sea.
All alone in the world, without riches below,
We have memories that wander wherever we go;
And wild sorrow reasons, 'mid tears falling fast,
That the present may still draw its light from the past.
Oft of mornings to come, from our windows we'll bend,
And look on the sun that bright following friend;
Still fondly remembering his glory has shone
On the land that we love, and the friends who are gone.
99
Oft, at even, when labour is o'er for a while,
Will our hearts travel back to our own blessed Isle;
Across the great sea we have traversed in gloom,
And hover in prayer by the old lonely tomb.
Yes, spirits beloved, though your home were as far
From our world-wearied hearts as the loneliest star,
Our prayers shall arise for ye from the far clime,
Oh many, and many, and many a tima.
We will hear the sweet voice, that on earth sounds no
more,
Still murmuring for us from the Heaven's happy shore ;
We will hear those dim footsteps, at grey silent morn,
That paced our lost home, long before we were born.
Old scenes, where we wandered together, will rise
The fair window landscape the soft, rainy skies ;
The old green-patched hill, where the dewy light plays
Where your shadows oft passed, on the old summer days.
Not alone, not alone, will we labour and roam;
Where your memories linger we still have a home.
And shall still tread, in fancy, the paths ye have trot?
Until death leads us up to our dear ones and God,
THE OLD SWORD OF IRELAND,
i.
IN the gloom of the temple, all lonely and lorn,
Great brand thou hast glimmered through ages of woe-
With the grasp of our heroes thy hilt has been worn,
And thy rust is the blood of the heritaged foe.
Like that talisman hid in the emerald cave,
Where the Angel of Liberty paused on his way,
The mightiest heart to direct or to save,
Shall still find thy fierce treasure and bare it to-day.
IT.
Oft clenched in the grasp of some chieftain of yore,
Thou hast lighted the old Celtic chivalry on,
Where the dun Danish barques swarmed the surf of the shore,
Or the casques of the Saxon men sullenly shone.
Oft clasped in carouse with the sabres of Spain,
Thy blade has re-mirrored old Victory's light,
While afar the tall towers, in the dusk of the plain,
Flamed to welcome the warriors home through the nights
100
The exile has borne thee afar from the Power,
He scorned to defend, and was sworn to destroy;
The Ally has wreathed with the white lily's flower
The shamrock that girt thee on wild Fontenoi.
Yet still to the foes of thy country the same,
Thy lustre has blazed like a meteor of war,
On the edge of the onset, for Louis and fame,
In the dusty French fields of battalia afar.
Aye, they fondled thy fierceness through fear of thy blow,
And blanched when thy blade was unsheathed to the light,
Could they dare, would have broken for well did they know
Thee un sympathised, save in the cause of the Right.
And long o'er the Past where the ghosts of our dead
Immortal in vengeance their terrors unfold,
Thou hungst like the weapon that shook by a thread
O'er the brow of Sicilia's tyrant of old.
Yet dim was thy splendour when under the yoke
Of the despots of Europe who chartered thee there i
Of the cause of the contest all careless, thy stroke
Opened victory up through the clouds of despair;
But, of late in the West have those glories returned
To thy blade, which great libertjr only can wreathe;
Long a slave, for the rights of the slave, thou hast turned,
Nor, till Freedom's trump sounded, once slept in a sheathe.
Ah, where till a hope shall dissever the gloom,
Shall we shrine for the future this memoried blade !
Where our mightiest man lies at rest in the tomb,
'Mid the laurels that cover him, let it be laid.
Secure shall it lie o'er the dignified dust,
Unseen as the ray of a long- vanished star,
Till some morning of battle it flames from its rust,
When a land's resurrection is sounded in war.
THE IRISH GIRL TO HER DEAD MOTHER.
ALL, all has changed since you are gone the world is bright
no more:
Even the blue hills seem darker now, seen from the cottage
door;
New faces come, new accents fill the ears, and so depart,
But the noise of life will never drown one voice that haunts
my heart.
101
Your dear, your well-known garments, preserved with
gentlest care,
More faded seem each time I look, 'mid tears that tremble
there;
But in this many-memoried breast, beyond the dust's decay,
Your image lives where time rusts not, nor death can take
away.
The memory of the happy days when you were on the earth,
Which make my clearest comfort now your voice of love
and mirth,
Are lost each noon in the noisy life in which T mix with pain;
But at clear morn and quiet eve, God brings them back again.
Oft, oft the past returns; our evening vv-xlks along 'the
stream,
Until we came unto the turn tha.,o 'takes the nir,'3 last ber-m ;
When from the green spring hedges ;, came trJe/ i\st girdle
lonely cry,
And ploughman's whistle through the mist of furrowed
fields anigh.
When by the busy bridge we stood, and saw beyond it shiver,
The marge of sereing rush along the blue drift of the river;
Heard the weary sound of waggons, and the drover's lazy
tune,
And the mellow dreamy crowing of some drowsy cock at
noon.
Here by the sycamore, oft we heard the soft midsummer
rain
Here, oft of February nights, the faint snow sift the pane
Here, when the sickness of the time, came in thick autumn
noons,
I watched in awe till evening chimed beneath the clouded