I am glad to remember that through the twelve years of our married
life, 1880-92, my husband and his people were able to keep their liking
and respect for each other. For those were the years of the land war,
tenant struggling to gain a lasting possession for his children,
landlord to keep that which had been given in trust to him for his;
each ready in his anger to turn the heritage of the other to
desolation; while the vision of some went yet farther, through breaking
to the rebuilding of a nation. The passion, the imagination of Ireland
were thrown into the fight. I often thought to find some poem putting
such passion into fiery or memorable lines. But the first I thought
worth the keeping,--I have it yet, was Katherine Tynan's lament for
Parnell, written two years after his death. In tearing it from the
corner of some newspaper I had unwittingly taken note of almost the
moment of a new impulse in literature, in poetry. For with that death,
the loss of that dominant personality, and in the quarrel that
followed, came the disbanding of an army, the unloosing of forces,
the setting free of the imagination of Ireland.