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He that brings fulsome objects to my view
(As many old have done and many new),
With nauseous images my fancy fills,
And all goes down like oxymel of squills.

On sure foundations let your fabric rise,
And with attractive majesty surprise,
Not by affected meretricious arts,

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But strict harmonious symmetry of parts; Which through the whole insensibly must pass, With vital heat to animate the mass. . .

Pride (of all others the most dangerous fault)
Proceeds from want of sense or want of thought.
The men who labor and digest things most,
Will be much apter to despond than boast;
For if your author be profoundly good,
'T will cost you dear before he 's understood.
How many ages since has Virgil writ!
How few there are who understand him yet!
Words in one language elegantly used
Will hardly in another be excused,
will

And some that Rome admired in Cæsar's time,
May neither suit our genius nor our clime.
The genuine sense, intelligibly told,
Shows a translator both discreet and bold.
I pity from my soul, unhappy men,
Compelled by want to prostitute their pen;
Who must, like lawyers, either starve or plead,
And follow, right or wrong, where guineas lead!
But you, Pompilian, wealthy, pampered heirs,
Who to your country owe your swords and cares,
Let no vain hope your easy mind seduce,
For rich ill poets are without excuse.

Of many faults rhyme is perhaps the cause;
Too strict to rhyme we slight more useful laws,
For that, in Greece or Rome, was never known,
Till by barbarian deluges o'erflown:
Subdued, undone, they did at last obey,
And change their own for their invaders' way.
. . . Oh may I live to hail the glorious day,
And sing loud pæans through the crowded way,
When in triumphant state the British Muse,
True to herself, shall barbarous aid refuse,
And in the Roman majesty appear,

Which none know better, and none come so near.

J. O'DONOVAN ROSSA.

(1831)

J. O'DONOVAN ROSSA was born in Rosscarbery in County Cork, September, 1831. His real name is O'Donovan, but he took the name of Rossa to distinguish himself from numerous others of the

same name.

He was probably one of the most uncompromising opponents of English rule in Ireland and early associated himself with the National party. He was arrested in 1865 on a charge of treason-felony, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

He was released some time after, and has resided in this country ever since, where he has been connected with literature and journalism. He is the editor of The United Irishman in New York, and has written on prison life, and various poems, Irish and English, in different magazines.

EDWARD DUFFY.1

The world is growing darker to me-darker day by day;
The stars that shone upon life's paths are vanishing away,
Some setting and some shifting, only one that changes never,
'Tis the guiding star of liberty that blazes bright as ever.

Liberty sits mountain high, and slavery hath birth
In the hovels, in the marshes, in the lowest dens of earth;
The tyrants of the world pitfall-pave the path between,
And o'ershadow it with scaffold, prison, block and guillotine.

The gloomy way is brightened when we walk with those we love,

The heavy load is lightened when we bear and they approve;
The path of life grows darker to me as I journey on,
For the truest hearts that traveled it are falling one by one.

The news of death is saddening even in festive hall,

But when 't is heard through prison bars, 't is saddest then of all,

Where there's none to share the sorrow in the solitary cell,
In the prison, within prison-a blacker hell in hell.

That whisper through the grating has thrilled through all my veins,

"Duffy is dead!" a noble soul has slipped the tyrant's chains, 1 Irish patriot and fellow-prisoner, who died in an English prison.

And whatever wounds they gave him, their lying books will show,

How they very kindly treated him, more like a friend than foe.

For these are Christian Pharisees, the hypocrites of creeds,
With the Bible on their lips, and the devil in their deeds,
Too merciful in public gaze to take our lives away,
Too anxious here to plant in us the seed of life's decay.

Those Christians stand between us and the God above our head,
The sun and moon they prison, and withhold the daily bread,
Entomb, enchain, and starve us, that the mind they may con-
trol,

And quench the fire that burns in the ever-living soul.

To lay your head upon the block for faith in Freedom's God,
To fall in fight for Freedom in the land your fathers trod;
For Freedom on the scaffold high to breathe your latest breath,
Or anywhere 'gainst tyranny is dying a noble death.

Still, sad and lone, was yours, Ned, 'mid the jailers of your race,

With none to press the cold white hand, with none to smooth the face;

With none to take the dying wish to homeland friend or brother,

To kindred mind, to promised bride, or to the sorrowing mother.

I tried to get to speak to you before you passed away,
As you were dying so near me, and so far from Castlerea,
But the Bible-mongers spurned me off, when at their office
door

I asked last month to see you-now I'll never see you more.

If spirits once released from earth could visit earth again, You'd come and see me here, Ned, but for these we look in vain;

In the dead-house you are lying, and I'd "wake"

could,

you if I

But they'll wake you in Loughglin, Ned, in that cottage by the wood.

For the mother's instinct tells her that the dearest one is

dead

That the gifted mind, the noble soul, from earth to heaven is

fled,

As the girls rush towards the door and look toward the trees, To catch the sorrow-laden wail, that's borne on the breeze.

Thus the path of life grows darker to me-darker day by day, The stars that flashed their lights on it are vanishing away, Some setting and some shifting, but that one which changes never,

The beacon light of liberty that blazes bright as ever.

MY PRISON CHAMBER.

My prison chamber now is iron lined,
An iron closet and an iron blind.

But bars, and bolts, and chains can never bind
To tyrant's will the freedom-loving mind.

Beneath the tyrant's heel we may be trod,
We may be scourged beneath the tyrant's rod,
But tyranny can never ride rough-shod
O'er the immortal spirit-work of God.

And England's Bible tyrants are, O Lord!
Of any tyrants out the cruelest horde,
Who 'll chain their Scriptures to a fixture board
Before a victim starved, and lashed, and gored..

Without a bed or board on which to lie,
Without a drink of water if I'm dry,
Without a ray of light to strike the eye,
But all one vacant, dreary, dismal sky.

...

The bolts are drawn, the drowsy hinges creak,
The doors are groaning, and the side walls shake,
The light darts in, the day begins to break,

Ho, prisoner! from your dungeon dreams awake. . . .

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Rossa, salute the Governor," cries one,

The Governor cries out-" Come on, come on,"
My tomb is closed, I'm happy they are gone,
Well-as happy as I ever feel alone.

GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A. E.”),

(1867)

Or that remarkable group of Irish writers who have done so much in Ireland in the past fifteen years to create an imaginative literature Irish in spirit and national in its very heart-beat and fiber, two men stand forth as the chief lyric poets writing in the English tongue. One of these is W. B. Yeats, and the other his friend and associate, who writes under the name A. E."

66

A. E." is the pen-name of the poet-dreamer Mr. George W. Russell. He was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, in 1867, and was largely self-educated. For some time he was an art student in Dublin, and he is an artist of rare imagination as well as one of the most gifted of living Irish poets. He has drunk deep of the learning of the East, of the Vedas and the Upanishads, and has been a devoted student of Plato and of the mystical philosophers. Among more modern writers he has, like his friend W. B. Yeats, been an admirer and student of the works of the mystic William Blake and also of Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. But his deepest study and best inspirations are the great epics and legends that make up the bardic history of Ireland. The wonderful deeds of Finn and Cuchulain and Ossian and Oscar and other Irish heroes have absorbed his thoughts and been a revelation to him of the real spirit of Ireland, the typical heroes of his race. For him Ireland, because she has been the mother of such heroes and because he feels as he wanders up and down her haunted hills and enchanting valleys that Tir-na-n'Ogue, the country of immortal youth, is still very near, peopled with the spirits of these mighty dead yet to him ever living ones, and also by forms young and beautiful with a shining and undying beauty-because of his belief in these things, Ireland is a holy land for him and the story of Ireland is the sacred book of his race-the book from which he has drawn his highest inspiration.

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His first volume of poems was 'Homeward Songs by the Way' (1894), a priceless little volume of pure lyric joy, reissued with additional poems in the United States (1896) and republished several times since. His second volume of lyrics, The Earth Breath and Other Poems,' appeared in 1897, and his third and latest volume, 'The Divine Vision and Other Poems,' in January, 1904. A selection from all his lyrics, Nuts of Knowledge,' was published in October, 1903, at the Dun Emer Press, Dundrum, Dublin, and is in form and spirit one of the most beautiful books that ever came out of Ireland.

Not only is he a fine lyric poet, but he is the author of a few of the noblest essays written in Ireland in recent years. He contributed two short essays of great subtlety and imaginative insight 'Literary Ideals in Ireland' and 'Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Literature-to a small volume of essays published in Dublin in 1899, which also contained essays by W. B. Yeats, "John Eglin

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