These hordes, like an avalanche, broke from the eternal brow of the mountains, and shook the vallies of northern Europe. How pleasant here to recognize the beginnings of literary distinction—the ardent love of letters that have ever distinguished the Irish nation! illustrious refugees scattered the seeds of literary inquiry, and became themselves incorporated with a people who were soon called to meet the wave of Norman conquest that had rolled over England and Scotland. The Danish yoke, once imposed on these spirit breathing men, sat heavily, and was indignantly thrown off in the deadly tug of war. Ireland then had her kings of noble deeds; she had her BRIAN, who, one thousand years after the birth of Christ, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, strewed Clontarf's bloody field with Danes, and poured out his life in the arms of victory. Then-then, oh, my native country; invited by intestine broils, the cross of St. George emerged from the waters, and the English threw their pale around thy Dublin ! I will no longer follow the thread of history. I will suppress my sighs. I will lean over Erin's broken harp in sad, heart-burdened silence. I will not call up feelings that should inflame a continent. I will not uncover bloody scenes. A minister of the religion of the blessed Prince of Peace, I will stoop over the wounded, the broken, the flying; and to him whose life-blood is fast ebbing, I will say-forgive the heart that conceived thy death, and curse not the hand that the blow. gave could I but say to him who dies in a distant land of exile Oh, -thine own Emerald Isle is blooming for thy children, and thy children's children, and no hand of the oppressor is there! There shines the star of freedom purified from the disastrous eclipse of six hundred years—there Mowers are springing freshly on the graves of thy country's martyrs!-A minister of peace, I shall not detail the history of the fifty thousand Irish volunteers who declared the holy intention of giving liberty to their country-nor the strong league of United Irishmen who rose up at the voice of the sweetest eloquence that ever thrilled in the forum or the field. Every cord of this league was sundered by the sword and the bayonet, and 'the smoking flax' gave a frightful splendor to the flames of civil war. I would not call up the names of FITZGERALD, O'CONNOR, the pale, lovely ghost of EMMET, dear to the heart of female fondness-nor yet, the warlike TONE, or the SHEARES, to sigh in this blessed evening zephyr, and accuse the strong arm of power with violence. No, no. As dearly as I love my country, let the shades of her patriots appeal for justice to the high court of eternity where they now inhabit-and oh that some gentle hand might avert the storm that shall arise, rending, outbreaking and charged with retribution, should the day of reckoning come ! Should the cold hearted, with disdainful calmness, ask the questions-What right has Ireland to all this sympathy? What redeeming qualities has she to shed a beautiful lustre over the story of her sufferings? What gifted sons of song have ever swept her lyre?—with a reproving silence, I would point them to the world's history. But should the student of human nature, with a sincere desire to learn the truth, ask questions of similar import should the young patriot, whose heart is just swelling with the proud events of past ages and the splendid movements of the present, inquire why this dismantled country sustains such a place in the affections of her children wherever thrown on the world's wide bosom-or why the name of Ireland is dear to the friends of freedom in every nation under heaven, I would say, there is a soul in the country which disdains the shackles of its body politic-there is a heart there, around which flow the generous impulses and life blood of freedom. An Irishman in chains, standing on the very verge of an untimely grave, has had the spirit and the voice to make the tyrant of his doom tremble on the rotten seat of justice. Untitled, unaided as he was, with the death of a traitor impending over his youthful head, one uttered the voice of his country full dreadful to the minions of power. Hear him. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.' Oh, I would dwell on his loved name, and this hall should resound with an epitaph for him that would outlive the storied urn'—but I will not call up an association of thought to awaken your bursting sorrows; for your own American EMMET sleeps in death. If we look for the laurels of Ireland's military renown, we shall not find them blooming on her beautiful landscape only. We must untwine the garlands of other lands and tear from them the proudest evergreens; we shall diminish the banners of the Island Queen; we shall wither the lilies of France, and weaken the strong Eagle's pinion. But why all these exotic plants of renown? This question hurls an accusation against thrones, and is the voice of outcry against the arm of the oppressor.The senates of the Emerald Isle-her fields-her cabinets, her forum, bar and altar, should have gathered up her choicest sons, and the light of their genius would have shown like a new day, doubling the effulgence of years gone by. These plants of genius were torn away from their native soil in the disruption of storms and in the deep agony of separation; the parent stock, the exuberant root, they left behind them, and bore with them wherever they roamed the bleeding fibres of affection. The same hand that hath been laid cold and heavy and excruciating on the sensitive population of Ireland has indeed struck the mountain wastes of Scotland; but the hills felt it not, nor did her hardy sons fall under the concussion like the delicate plants of the green isle. Scotland has been rescued in a great degree by her literati, who have, in the absence of physical power, after losing the balance of empire, substituted a moral power, before which the nations of the earth have bowed down in idolatry; yet even this noble expedient of exchanging the trappings of royality for a despotism over the heart, could not have succeeded in Ireland where the voice of her patriots and the songs of her poets were, like the fabled strains of the swan, the premonitions of death. But there are no figures of rhetoric that may reach the heart of Ireland's sorrows; she mourns her loveliest sons in exile, and even the glory they bind around their brows in a stranger land, awakens sorrow at home-for there should the sun of their glory rise-and there should they rest after life's brief triumphs were over. The sorrow stricken seer of Israel, had Ireland been his country, would have poured out the melancholy words: 'Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, where is corn and wine? When they swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul was poured out into their mother's bosom.' SONNET-CONSTANTINOPLE. The Cresent spans thy gate, Byzantium ! |