Well, they found a long piece of cloth four and a half ells in

length--exactly what had been said should be the proper garment. The

commissioners were startled and amazed, and said, "It is clear that

this is not the relic the people have imagined; perhaps it is all an

imposture." They then cut off a considerable piece and sent it to the

Abbe Barthelemy, author of the "Travels of Anacharsis" and member of

the Institute--a man who had made the customs and usages of antiquity

his study; they did not tell him where it came from, but desired him

to give an opinion of what it might be. He returned this answer: that

it must be about 2,000 years old, and that from the description given

him it appeared to be exactly like what the ladies in the East wear at

this day, and always have worn--that is, a veil which went over the

head, across the chest, and then involved the whole body, being the

first dress worn. I ask, could a verification be more complete than

this? And, recollect, it comes entirely from enemies. It was not the

bishop or clergy that sought it. The relic was in the hands of those

three infidel commissioners, who sent a portion to Paris without

saying or giving any hint of what it was (they {453} wanted to make

out that the whole was an imposture), and the answer was returned

which I have mentioned, and which is contained in the _proces_ in the

archives of the episcopal palace at Chartres. If any one wants to read

the whole history, I refer him to a most interesting book just

published by the cure of St. Sulpice (Abbe Hamon), entitled "Notre

Dame de France, ou Histoire du Culte de la Sainte Vierge en France."

The first volume, the only one out, contains the history of the

dioceses of the province of Paris.

I will proceed to a second popular charge, and it is one the

opportunity of easily verifying which may never occur again. It refers

to the head of St. John the Baptist, or, shall I say, to the three

heads of St. John the Baptist? Because, if you read English travellers

of the old stamp, like Forsyth, you will find that they make coarse

jokes about it. Forsyth, I think, says something about Cerberus; but

more gravely it has been said, that St. John must have had three

heads--one being at Amiens, one at Genoa, and another at Rome; that

at each place they are equally positive in their claims; and that

there is no way of explaining this but by supposing that St. John was

a triceps.

When we speak of a body you can easily imagine that one piece may be

in one place, another in another, a third elsewhere, and so on. That

is the common way in which we say that the bodies of saints are

multiplied; because the Church considers that the place which contains

the head or one of the larger limbs of a saint, or the part in which,

if a martyr, he was killed or received his death-wound, has the right

of keeping his festival and honoring him just as if it had the whole

body. Therefore, in cathedrals and places where festivals are held in

honor of a particular saint, where they have relics, which have

perhaps been sealed up for years, and never examined, they often speak

as if they have the entire body. This is a common practice, and if I

had time I might give you an interesting exemplification of it.

[Footnote 94] Suffice it to say, that according to travellers there

are three heads of St. John. Now as I have said, a body can be

divided, but you can hardly imagine this to be the case with a head.

[Footnote 94: Since published in _The Month_, "Story of a French

Officer." (See CATH. WORLD, No. 1.)]

A very interesting old English traveller--Sir John Mandeville--went

into the East very early, and returned in 1366; soon after which,

almost as soon as any books were published, his travels appeared. He

is a very well-known writer. Of course you must not expect that

accuracy in his works which a person would now exhibit who has books

at his command and all the conveniences for travelling. He was not a

profound scholar: he believes almost whatever is told him, so what we

must do is to let him guide us as well as he can, and endeavor to

judge how far he is right. I will read you an extract, then, from Sir

John Mandeville: [Footnote 95]

[Footnote 95: "Travels," chap, ix., p. 182. Ed. Bohn.]

"From thence we go up to Samaria, which is now called Sebaste; it is

the chief city of that country. There was wont to be the head of St.

John the Baptist inclosed in the wall; but the Emperor Theodosius had

it drawn out, and found it wrapped in a little cloth, all bloody; and

so he carried it to Constantinople; and the hinder part of the head is

still at Constantinople; and the fore part of the head to under the

chin, under the church of St. Silvester, where are nuns; and it is yet

all broiled, as though it were half burnt; for the Emperor Julian

above mentioned, of his wickedness and malice, burned that part with

the other bones, as may still be seen; and this thing hath been proved

both by popes and emperors. And the jaws beneath which hold to the

chin, and a part of the ashes, and the platter on which the head was

laid when it was smitten off, are at Genoa; and the Genoese make a

great feast in honor of it, and so do the Saracens also. And some men

say that the {454} head of St. John is at Amiens in Picardy; and other

men say that it is the head of St. John the bishop. I know not which

is correct, but God knows; but however men worship it, the blessed St.

John is satisfied."

This is a true Catholic sentiment. Right or wrong, all mean to honor

St. John, and there is an end of it. We could not expect a traveller

going through the country like Sir John, not visiting every place, but

hearing one thing from one and another from another, to tell us the

exact full truth. But we have here two very important points gained.

First, we have the singular fact of the division of the head at all.

We occasionally hear of the head of a saint being at a particular

place, but seldom of a part of a head being in one place and a part in

another. Here we have an unprejudiced traveller going into the East;

he comes to the place where the head of St. John used to be kept, and

he finds there the tradition that it was divided into three parts, one

of which was at Constantinople, one at Genoa, and another at Rome.

Then he adds, "Other people say that the head is at Amiens." So much

Sir John Mandeville further informs us: he mentions the places where

it was reported the head was, telling us that it was divided into

three.

This is a statement worthy of being verified. It was made a long time

ago, and yet the tradition remains the same. It was as well believed

in the thirteenth century in the East, at Sebaste, as it is in Europe

at the present moment.

The church of S. Silvestro in Capite, which many of you remember, is a

small church on the east side of the Corso, entered by a sort of

vestibule: it has an atrium or court, with arches round, and dwellings

for the chaplains; the outer gates can be shut at night so as to

prevent completely any access to the church. The rest is an immense

building, belonging to the nuns, running out toward the Propaganda.

When the republicans in the late invasion got hold of Rome, the first

thing, of course, which they did was to turn out the monks and nuns

right and left, to make barracks; and the poor nuns of S. Silvestro

were ordered to move. The head of St. John is in a shrine which looks

very brilliant, but is poor in reality. I think it is exposed high

beyond the altar, and the nuns kept it in jealous custody in their

house. The republicans sent away the nuns in the middle of the night,

at ten or eleven o'clock, just as they were, with what clothes they

could get made into bundles: there were carriages at the door to send

them off to some other convent, without the slightest warning or

notice. The poor creatures were ordered to take up their abode in the

convent of St. Pudentiana. The only thing they thought of was their

relic, and that they carried with them. The good nuns received them

though late at night, and did what they could to give them good cheer;

they gave up one of their dormitories to them, putting themselves to

immense inconvenience.

When the French came to Rome, they found S. Silvestro so useful a

building for public purposes that they continued to hold it, but

permitted the nuns to occupy some rooms near the church. I was in Rome

while they were still at my titular church, and went to visit the nuns

attached to it. Their guests asked, "Would you not like to see our

relic of St. John?" I said, "Certainly I should; perhaps I shall never

have another opportunity." I do not suppose it had been out of their

house for hundreds of years. There is a chapel within the convent

which the nuns of St. Pudentiana consider a sacred oratory, having a

miraculous picture there, to which they are much attached; and in this

they kept the shrine. On examination I found that there was no part of

the head except the back. It is said in the extract I have read to you

that the front part of the head is at Rome; but it is the back of the

skull merely; the rest is filled up with some stuffing {455} and silk

over it. The nuns have but a third of the head; and the assertion that

they pretend to possess the head, which travellers make, is clearly

false. I can say from my own ocular inspection that it is but the

third part--the back part, which is the most interesting, because

there the stroke of martyrdom fell. I was certainly glad of this

fortunate opportunity of verifying the relic.

Some time afterward I was at Amiens. I was very intimate with the late

bishop, and spent some days with him. One day he said to me, "Would

you wish to see our head of St. John?" "Yes," I replied, "I should

much desire it." "Well," he said, "we will wait till the afternoon;

then I will have the gates of the cathedral closed, that we may

examine it at leisure."

We dined early, and went into the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament,

where the relic was exposed, with candles. After saying prayers, it

was brought, and I had it in my hands; it was nothing but the mask,

the middle and back portions being totally wanting. You could almost

trace the expression and character of the countenance in the bony

structure. It was of the same size and color as the portion which I

had seen at St. Pudentiana; but the remarkable thing about it is that

there are stiletto marks in the face. We are told by Fathers, that

Herodias stabbed the head with a bodkin when she got it into her hand,

and here are the marks of such an operation visible. You could almost

say that you had seen him as he was alive. I have not seen the third

fragment, but I can hardly doubt that it is a portion of the same

head, and that it would comprise the parts, the chin and the jaw,

because there is no lower jaw in the front part, which is a mere mask.

The only other claimant is Genoa, and its relic I have not seen. But

this is exactly the portion allotted by Mandeville to that city. I

have, however, had the satisfaction of personally verifying two of the

relics, each of which comprises a third part of the head, leaving for

the other remainder exactly the place which our old traveller allots

to it.

Mr. Cashel Hoey, one of our learned contributors, has kindly

furnished me with a most interesting corroboration of this account.

It is an extract from the _Revue Archeologique_, new series, Jan.

1861, p. 36, in a paper by M. Louis Moland, entitled "Charlemagne a

Constantinople," etc., giving an account of a MS. in the library of

the Arsenal, anterior to the thirteenth century.

The following is the account of the relic which the emperor is

stated to have brought from Constantinople to Aix-la-Chapelle:

"Li empereres prist les saintuaires tot en disant ses orisons, si

les mist en eskerpes (_echarpes_) totes de drap de soie et si les

enporta molt saintement avoec lui trosqu Ais la Capele en l'eglise

Nostre Dame qu'il avoit ediflie. La fu establis par l'apostolie (_Le

Pape_) et par les archevesques et les evesques as pelerins li grans

pardons, qui por Deu i venoient. Oies une partie des reliques, que

li empereres ot aportees: il i fu la moities de la corone dont

Nostre Sires fu corones des poignans espines. Et si i ot des claus

dont Nostre Sires fu atachies en la crois al jor que li Jui le

crucifierent. Et si i ot de la vraie crois une pieche et del suaire

Nostre Segnor, _O le chemise Nostre Dame._"

----

{456}

From The Month.

MADAME SWETCHINE AND HER SALON.

The _salons_ of Paris form a distinctive feature of French society.

Nowhere else is the same thing exactly to be found. Frenchwomen have a

peculiar gift for conversation, due in a great measure to their

graceful language, with its delicate shades of expression. We are

prone to smile at French sentimentality, or to apply their own word

_verbiage_, prefacing it with _unmeaning_. But when the epithet does

truly fit, it is because the real thing has been abused, not because

it does not exist. Conversation in France is cultivated as an art,

just the same as epistolary style: both form an important branch of

female education. When the soil is bad, the attempt at culture only

betrays more clearly native poverty; in other words, a mind of little

thought or taste becomes ridiculous in straining after the expression

of what it can neither conceive nor feel. But when a well-informed and

cultivated intelligence blossoms into keen appreciation of the

beautiful, no language so delicately as French conveys minute shades

of thought and feeling. 'Tis not repetition, then, but variety; and

when such an instrument is handled with feminine tact, perfection in

its kind is achieved.

No wonder that _salons_ are exclusively French from the days of Julie

de Rambouillet down to Madame Recamier. No wonder at the influence

exercised by a woman who really has a _salon_. Few, very few, arrive

at this result. Thousands may receive; hundreds glitter in the gay

world of fashion, renowned for beauty, wit, good dressing, or good

parties; two or three at most in a century are the presiding spirits

of their social circles, and that is what constitutes having a

_salon_. No one quality alone will do it; a combination is required;

not always the same, but one or two together, whichsoever, attracting

sympathy and producing influence. Influence--the effect, not the

quality itself--can never be absent.

Strangers settling in Paris have had their _salon_; but we do not know

that they could transport it with them to any other atmosphere. Beside

Madame Recamier--whose rare beauty, joined to her goodness and her

tact, helped to form her _salon_--two other women in our day, or just

before it, have been the leading stars of their circles. Others, no

doubt, there are; but the names of these three have escaped beyond

Paris. Strange to say, two are foreigners, and both of these Russians.

Except, however, as regards country and influence, no comparison can

of course be established between the Princess Lieven and Madame

Swetchine. One sought and gained a political object; the other

accepted circumstances, and found them fame.

Madame Swetchine was already thirty-four years of age when she arrived

in Paris. She had no beauty, and no pretensions to wit; indeed, her

timidity was such that her expressions were always obscure when she

began to speak; and it was only by degrees, as she went on, that she

gathered confidence, and then her language flowed with ease,

betraying, rather than fully revealing, the deep current of thought

beneath. Still her advantages were many. As regards outward

circumstances, she possessed good birth and high position; her manners

were such as the early culture of a polished court bestows; she was

accustomed to wield a large fortune, and to hold a prominent place in

the social world. These were advantages that might be fairly set

against the absence of beauty, wondrous as is that charm: beside, her

person was not unpleasing. Though {457} small, she was graceful in her

motions; despite little blue eyes, rather irregular, and a nose of

Calmuck form, her face wore a soft kindly expression that attracted

sympathy. Her complexion was remarkably fresh and clear.

But Madame Swetchine possessed innate qualities of heart and mind of

the rarest description, that only unfolded themselves gradually the

more closely she could be observed. Unlike mankind in general, the

better she was known, the more was she beloved and admired. Her

intelligence of richly-varied powers had been carefully cultivated;

what she acquired in youth, with the aid of masters, had been since

matured by her own unceasing study, and by reading of the most

widely-discursive character. Not only was she familiar with ancient

and modern literatures, perusing them in their originals, but she also

conversed fluently in all the languages of Europe. Her imagination,

enthusiastic and wild almost, as belongs to the north, successfully

sought for outpourings, both in music and painting. By a strange

combination, no natural quality of mind was more remarkable in Madame

Swetchine than her good sense: the only feature that shone above it

was her eminent gift of piety.

But virtues, and particularly religious virtues, proceed from the

heart quite as much as from the intelligence; often, indeed, far more

especially. Madame Swetchine possessed the warmest feelings, a nature

both loving and expansive. As daughter, wife, and friend she evinced

rare devotion; but the sentiment and thought that most filled heart

and mind was undoubtedly her love for God.

What a rich assemblage of qualities is here! how strange that they

should go to make up a Parisian woman of fashion! Such, however, in

its most usual acceptation, Madame Swetchine never was: she never

mingled in the light brilliant world; but she did form the centre of

attraction to a large circle she had her _salon_.

General Swetchine, deeply wounded by the emperor, who lent too ready

credence to unfounded reports whispered against so faithful a subject,

would not stoop to justify himself, but quitted Russia in disgust,

accompanied by his wife. When they reached Paris, in the spring of

1816, Louis XVIII. was on the throne of France. Madame Swetchine found

now restored to their high positions those friends of her youth whom

as exiles she had known and loved at St. Petersburg. Her place was

naturally amongst them; new intimacies were soon added to the old. The

Duchesse de Duras, authoress of _Ourika_, and friend of Madame de

Stael, gained a strong hold on her affections. Yet it did not seem at

first as if Madame Swetchine were destined to so much influence in

French society. Modesty made her reserved. Madame de Stael had been

invited to meet her at a small dinner-party; and Madame Swetchine,

though seated opposite, was intimidated, and allowed the meal to pass

over without speaking or scarcely raising her eyes. Afterward Madame

de Stael came up and said, "I had been told that you desired my

acquaintance; was I misinformed?" "By no means," was the reply; "but

it is customary for royalty to speak first." Such was the homage she

paid to genius.

At first it had seemed uncertain how long General and Madame Swetchine

might remain absent from Russia; but after the lapse of a few years

they took up their definite residence in Paris. Their hotel, Rue St.

Dominique, was hired on a long lease, and fitted up as a permanent

abode. They sent for their pictures and other articles from St.

Petersburg. The general occupied the ground-floor; Madame Swetchine

took the rooms above. Her apartments consisted of a _salon_ and a

library commanding an extensive view of gardens. Here it was that her

friends used to assemble; not many at a time, but successively. She

never gave _soirees_, and her dinner-parties consisted of a few

intimates round a small table. Her hours for {458} reception were

every day from three till six, and then from nine till midnight.

Debarred by her health from paying visits, she contented herself with

receiving in this manner; and for thirty years a continuous stream of

persons was for ever passing on through her rooms. She had not sought

to form it; but there was her _salon_, and one of a peculiar

character.

Two features distinguished it: the religious tone that prevailed, and

the absence of party spirit. Madame Swetchine herself was eminently

religious, and she had a large way of viewing all things. Her

influence, though partly moral and intellectual, was ever chiefly

religious; and she gave that presiding characteristic to the

atmosphere around. So long as faith and morality were not attacked,

all other points she considered secondary, and admitted the widest

diversity of opinion on them. Her own views on all subjects were

firmly held, and she expressed them with freedom. There could be no

mistake about it. In religion she was a strict Catholic, and in

philosophy Christian; in politics she preferred a liberal monarchy;

but far from seeking to give that color to her salon, she would not

allow any friend holding the same views to try to impose them on

others. This was equally the case in matters of art and taste; she

tolerated nothing exclusive; but the principle is much more difficult

to be followed out when applied to politics, which involve interests

of such magnitude, appealing to all the passions, and especially in

such an excitable atmosphere as that of Paris. Nothing better shows

Madame Swetchine's tact and gentleness of temper than her intimacies

with men of such different stamps, and the way in which she made them

to a certain extent amalgamate. But the above qualities would have

failed to do it, had their spring been a worldly one; hers flowed

truly from the Christian charity with which her whole soul was full.

In this she and her _salon_ were unique.

She lived to see two great revolutions in France: the one of 1830, and

that which substituted the republic for Louis Philippe, ending with

the empire. Members of all these _regimes_ were among her visitors.

Ministers of state under the Restoration, those who embraced the

Orleans cause, men belonging to the republican government, ambassadors

from most of the foreign courts in Europe; all these in turn enjoyed

her conversation, some her esteem or affection, according to the

degrees of intimacy and sympathy. Her own feelings, as well as

convictions, lay with legitimists; but others were no less welcomed,

and some of various parties were highly valued. True, however, to

religion, she never gave her friendship to men not devoted to the

interests of the Church. Her great object was to do good to souls, but

in a quiet, unostentatious, womanly way; gently leading to virtue,

never inculcating it. This of course became more exclusively her

province as she grew older.

She was truly liberal in all her sentiments; not assuredly from

indifference, but through a large philosophy of spirit that allowed

for diversities of opinion in all things not essential. At the same

time her own convictions were unflinchingly avowed, as well as her

ideas and tastes in smaller matters.

The men with whom she was most intimate have all more or less been

known to fame, and are eminent also for their religious spirit. We

might begin a list with Monsieur de Maistre at St. Petersburg, when

she was but twenty-five; then following her to Paris, see her make

acquaintance with his friend Monsieur de Bonald; exercise maternal

influence over MM. de Falloux, de Montalembert, and Lacordaire; and

finally wind up with Donoso Cortes, the Marquis de Valdegamas, Prince

Albert de Broglie, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Each one of the distinguished personages above has figured prominently

on the great stage, more or less renowned in politics and letters, and

{459} always holding a high moral character. It may seem fastidious to

recall their titles to fame. In our day, when all are acquainted with

continental literature, who is not familiar with the witty author of

the _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_, although it be permitted somewhat to

ignore the rather dry philosophical works of his friend de Bonald?

Monsieur de Falloux, with filial love, has raised a monument to Madame

Swetchine that will endure beside his life of Pope Pius V., and

jointly with the remembrance of his political integrity. Who that has

followed the late history of Europe does not know Donoso Cortes, the

great orator, whose famous three discourses in the Spanish chambers

instantaneously reached so far and wide, whose written style is the

very music of that rich Castilian idiom, and whose liberal political

views kept pace with his large Catholic heart? Soeur Rosalie and

Madame Swetchine together soothed his dying hours. The author of _La

Democratic en Amerique_ has been indiscreetly praised, but none can

deny his ability, Prince Albert de Broglie, _doctrinaire_ in his

views, still advocates with talent the cause of religion and of

constitutional monarchy. These two latter were among the latest

acquisitions to Madame Swetchine's salon.

MM. de Montalembert and de Falloux were like her sons; she knew them

from their early manhood, called them by their Christian names, loved

and counselled them as any mother might. But if her influence over

them was so salutary, we cannot help admiring most the unswerving

attachment of these young men to her; Madame Swetchine's letters show

her expostulating with Comte de Montalembert, then little past twenty,

and endeavoring to convince him he is wrong. He will not yield; but

acknowledges afterward the justness of her views, and allows now these

letters to be published. Alfred de Falloux is _the son_ sent for when

danger seems impending; he tends her dying couch in that same _salon_

where he had so often and for so many years _walked_ with her

conversing; to him she confides her papers and last wishes.

The celebrated Pere Lacordaire was very dear to her; and she certainly

acted the part of a mother toward him. Monsieur de Montalembert

presented him to her when Abbe Lacordaire was but twenty-eight, and

quite unknown. His genius--which she immediately discerned--and his

ardent soul interested her wonderfully. Soon after he became

connected, through Abbe de Lamennais, with the journal _L'Avenir;_ by

his own generous and oft-repeated avowal she kept him from any

deviation at this trying moment. "You appeared to me as the angel of

the Lord," writes he, "to a soul floating between life and death,

between earth and heaven."

Nor was this the only time. Her letters show her following him with

breathless interest through his chequered career, and assuring him of

her warm undying friendship, "so long as he remains faithful to God

and his Church."

And this was a beautiful affection, whichever side we view it. For

more than twenty years it lasted; that is, for the rest of her life.

The ardent young man is seen with the erratic impulses of his glowing

intellect, yet docile to the motherly admonitions of his old friend;

and by degrees, as time mellows him somewhat--though it never could

subdue nature altogether--he sinks into a calmer strain, still asking

advice, and taking it, with language more respectful, though not a

whit less tender. Madame Swetchine brought to bear on him a species of

idolatry; she admired his genius to excess, and loved his fine nature

as any doting parent might; but these sentiments never rendered her

blind to his faults; and she constantly blended reproof with

admiration, while strenuously endeavoring to keep him ever in the most

perfect path. She had the satisfaction of seeing him, ere she departed

this life, safely anchored in a religious order, and the Dominicans

fairly re-established in France; one of her pre-occupations on her

death-bed, after bidding him adieu, was to secure {460} that his

letters should be one day given to the public. For thus she knew he

would be better appreciated.

Other names of men well-known in the Parisian world of letters, or for

their deeds of charity, might here be added as having adorned her

_salon_. There was the Vicomte de Melun, connected with every good

work (literary or other) in the French capital; and her two relatives,

Prince Augustin Galitzin and Prince (afterward Pere) Gagarin. The

former still writes; the latter, erst a gay man of fashion and then

metamorphosed into a zealous Jesuit, is now devoting his missionary

labors to Syria.

And lastly may be named one who, though he never mingled in the world

of her _salon_, yet visited Madame Swetchine and esteemed her greatly.

Pere de Ravignan presided at one time in her house over meetings of

charitable ladies, who were afterward united with the Enfants de Marie

at the convent of the Sacre Coeur.

Nor were her friendships exclusively confined to men. Madame Swetchine

had not that foible into which many superior women fall of affecting

to despise their own sex; and which always shows that they innately,

unconsciously often, separate their individual selves from all the

rest of womankind as alone superior to it. Hers was a larger view: she

loved _souls_; and "souls," says one of her aphorisms, "have neither

age nor sex." When shall we in general begin to live here as we are to

do for ever hereafter?

She had had her early friendships in Russia, and most passionate they

were; too girlish in their romantic enthusiasm, too wordily tender in

expression; but time mellowed these affections, without wearing them

out. The two principal women-friends of her youth in Russia, after her

sister, were Roxandre Stourdja, a Greek by birth, afterward Comtesse

Edlinz, and the Comtesse de Nesselrode. Both of these in later years

visited her Paris salon. But she also formed several new French

intimacies. Her grief for the loss of Madame de Duras, when death

deprived her of that friend, was a little softened by her warm

sympathy for the two daughters left, Mesdames de Rauzan and de la

Rochejacquelain. If she saw most of the former, the latter had for

Madame Swetchine a second tie through her early marriage with a

grandson of the Princesse de Tarente, whom Madame Swetchine had so

revered in her girlish days at St. Petersburg. Both the Duchesse de

Rauzan and Comtesse de la Rochejacquelain were very beautiful; and

Madame Swetchine dearly loved beauty, especially when combined, as in

them, with grace and elegance, cleverness and piety. For both the

sisters were remarkable: one had more fascinating softness united with

good sense; the other was more witty and brilliant. The last

country-house visited by Madame Swetchine shortly before her death was

the chateau de Fleury, belonging to Madame de la Rochejacquelain,

where we read that she loved to find still mementos of the Princesse

de Tarente.

Madame Swetchine was very intimate with Madame Recamier, her

fellow-star as leader of a contemporary _salon_. She greatly prized

her worth. Another friend much loved was the Comtesse de Gontant

Biron, in youth eminent for her beauty, and always for her many

virtues. Among younger women distinguished by Madame Swetchine were

Mrs. Craven, nee la Ferronaye; the Princess Wittgenstein, lovely as

clever, a Russian by birth, and a convert to the Catholic Church; and

quite at the last period, the Duchess of Hamilton.

She was always partial to youth, taking a warm interest in anything

that might minister to the welfare or pleasures of that age. Thus she

liked the young women of her acquaintance to be well dressed, and

would admire their taste or try to improve it, even in that respect,

with perfectly motherly solicitude. Those going to balls frequently

stopped on their way to show their toilettes to Madame Swetchine; and

not seldom, too, they would {461} return in the morning to ask advice

on graver matters, or to display the progress of their children. The

good Madame Swetchine did to persons of the world by quiet friendly

counsel is incalculable; she never spared the truth when she thought

it could be of use, and as she had great perspicacity, she was not

often deceived. Beside, her natural penetration became yet keener, not

only by long experience, but also by the numerous confidences she

received from the many souls in a measure laid bare before her. M. de

Falloux has well said that she "possessed the science of souls, as

_savants_ do that of bodies." However one might be pained at what she

said, it was impossible to feel wounded; her manner was so kind, and

her rectitude of intention so evident. And thus did she render her

_salon_ useful: living in public, as it might appear, surrounded

chiefly by the great ones of earth, her thought was yet ever with God,

and she positively worked for him day by day without even quitting

those few rooms. Nay, so completely is Madame Swetchine identified

with her _salon_ for those who knew her through any part of the thirty

years spent in Paris, that it is difficult for our idea to separate

her from it.

Even materially speaking she seldom left it. With a simplicity that

seems strange indeed to our English notions, she caused her little

iron bedstead to be set up every night in one of her reception-rooms;

each morning it was doubled up again and consigned to a closet. During

her last illness it was just the same; she lay in her _salon_, the

only difference being that then the bed remained permanently. Not an

iota else was changed in the aspect of her apartment; no table was

near the sick-couch with glass or cup ready to hand; what she wanted

in this way she signed for to a deaf-and-dumb attendant, Parisse,

whose grateful eyes were ever fixed upon her benefactress, to divine

or anticipate what might be wished. And there, too, she died.

To us with our exclusive family feelings, or indeed to the general

human sentiment that courts the utmost privacy for that solemn closing

scene, there is something which jars in the account of Madame

Swetchine's last days on earth. Doubtless all the consolations of

religion were there to hallow her dying moments; she continued to the

last to devote long hours to prayer; and by an enviable privilege she

possessed a domestic chapel blessed with the perpetual presence of the

Blessed Sacrament; but what strikes us strangely is, that her _salon_

had chanced to remain open while extreme unction was being

administered; and so, as it was her usual reception hour, the few

friends in Paris at that season (September) continued to drop in one

by one, and kneeling, each new-comer behind the other, prayed with and

for her. Those last visitors were Pere Chocarn, prior of the

Dominicans; Pere Gagarin; Mesdames Fredro, de Meyendorf, and Craven;

Messieurs de Broglie, de Falloux, de Melun, and Zermolof. But the

_strange_ feeling we cannot help experiencing must be reasoned with.

Her _salon_ and her friends were to Madame Swetchine home and family.

And now it might seem that nothing more could be said of her; but, in

truth, a very small portion has yet been expressed. Beside the six

hours devoted to reception, the day counted eighteen more. There were

religious duties to be performed, and home duties no less imperative;

there were the poor to be visited, and there were the claims of study,

which Madame Swetchine never neglected up to the latest period of

existence. All these calls upon her time were recognized by

conscience, and therefore duly responded to. Madame Swetchine was, of

course, an early riser; by eight or nine o'clock she had heard mass,

visited her poor, and was ready to commence the business of the day.

After breakfast, an hour or two were devoted to General Swetchine, who

liked her to read to him. During the {462} last fifteen years of his

life, and his death only preceded hers seven years, he had become so

deaf as to enjoy general society but little; but he would not allow

her to give up her receptions on that account, as she wished to do.

The rest of the morning was employed in study with strictly closed

doors, only opened to cases of misfortune, and these Madame Swetchine

never considered as intrusions. Her confidential servant knew it well,

and did not scruple to disturb her when real want or sorrow begged for

admittance. Her persevering love of study is well illustrated by her

own assurance, but a few months before her death, that even then she

never sat down to her writing-table without "feeling her heart beat

with joy." She advised Mrs. Craven always to reserve a few morning

hours for study, saying the quality of time was different at that

period of day.

Several hours in the evening were again spent with the general. At

midnight, when all visitors departed, Madame Swetchine retired to

rest; but her repose never lasted much beyond two in the morning.

Painful infirmities made her suffer all day long, and at night

debarred her from sleep. Motion alone brought comparative ease, and

therefore it was that, with intimate friends, she carried on

conversation walking up and down her rooms. At night, suffocation

increased, as also a nervous kind of excitement. It was at these

hours, during the intervals snatched from pain, that she mostly

composed the writings which M. de Falloux has given to the world. No

wonder that they bear the impress of the cross; nor can we marvel that

she speaks feelingly and scientifically of resignation, for good need

had she to practise that. Such were usually her twenty-four hours in

Paris.

If we look back to the past, religion had not always been the guiding

principle with Madame Swetchine. Her father, M. Soymonof, was a

disciple of Voltaire, and he brought her up without any pious

training. She never even repeated morning or evening prayers; simply

attended the imperial chapel as a matter of course. But Voltaire did

not excite her admiration; his infidelity was too cold, his immorality

too coarse; it was Rousseau who charmed her. His passionate language

pleased her imagination, and the pages of _La Nouvelle Heloise_ were

almost entirely transcribed, to be again and again dwelt on. She could

not detect the sophistry beneath. But the first deep sorrow of her

youth taught her prayer, and brought her to the feet of God, never to

abandon him. M. Soymonof was suddenly snatched from his children by

death, and Madame Swetchine, the anguish of this bereavement, turned

to heaven for help and consolation. Another sorrow, the nature of

which we ignore, overtook her at this period; and, to use her own

expression, she "threw herself then into the arms of God with such

enthusiasm as naught else ever awakened."

The first effect was to render her a fervent adherent of Russian

orthodoxy; but her mind was too philosophic to rest long satisfied

with half conclusions. She was struck with the piety of French

Catholics at St. Petersburg; especially the modest merit of the

Chevalier d'Augard won her highest esteem. Finally, after much

voluminous study, and despite the resistance her rebellious spirit

loved to oppose to what she at first called M. de Maistre's "dogmatic

absolutism," she entered the Catholic Church.

The absurd idea that religion renders the heart cold has been too

often refuted to need any comment here. But it may be said that Madame

Swetchine affords another example of how much devotion, by purifying

human feeling, intensifies it also. God had given her a loving nature;

and as her piety deepens with years, so does her tender affection for

family ties, for friends, country, and finally for all the poor,

suffering, helpless ones of earth. Her first great attachment was for

her father, and so her first great sorrow was at his loss; for thus

intimately {463} are love and pain ever conjoined in this world.

Another deep affection of childhood and early youth, extending through

life, was for her sister. Madame Swetchine was quite a mother to this

child, ten years her junior. When she married, she still kept her with

her; and when the young sister also married, becoming the wife of

Prince Gagarin, Madame Swetchine became a mother also to the five boys

who were successively brought into the world. "They are all my

nephews," would she say; "but the two eldest are especially my

children." And well did they respond to the feelings of their aunt,

scarcely separating her from their own parent. When she shut herself

up for study, it was their amusement to try and get her out to play

with them; if she remained deaf to entreaties, the little boys would

besiege her door, making deafening noises with their playthings, until

she mostly yielded and let them in. A very short time before her

death, when Madame Swetchine could hardly sit or speak, she assembled

a large family party of young nephews and nieces, with their

preceptors and governesses, to dine at her house, and was greatly

diverted with their innocent mirth.

There is something disappointing in Madame Swetchine's marriage. The

favor enjoyed by Monsieur Soymonof at court, her own position as

maid-of-honor to the Empress Marie, her birth, fortune, extreme youth,

and many individual qualifications, all alike rendered her a fitting

match for any man in the empire. She certainly could have chosen.

Several asked her hand. Amongst them was Count Strogonof, young, rich,

noble, and talented. But Monsieur Soymonof preferred his own friend

General Swetchine; and Sophie, we are told, accepted with affectionate

deference her father's choice. The general was twenty-five years her

senior, and though a fine military-looking man, with noble

soldier-like feelings, scrupulously honorable, and with much to win

esteem, yet he does not appear the sort of person suited to her ardent

enthusiastic temperament. He possessed qualities fitted to command the

respect of a young wife; but not exactly those that win her to

admiration and love. Wherever honor was not concerned, he lapsed into

his natural apathy: neither intellect nor imagination were by any

means on a par with hers. And the girl of seventeen who prematurely

linked her fate with his was full of romance: nurtured as she had been

by a fond ill-judging father, with Rousseau to guide her opening

thought, her early dreams probably had fed on some chivalrous St.

Preux with whom to course the stream of life. Perhaps she was dreaming

of wedding some stern military personification of the same. What an

awakening there must have been! Was this the second deep sorrow that

clouded her nineteenth summer? Was there a struggle then? Then did she

"fling herself into the arms of God" victorious.

There is no clue to trace aught of this save that which guides to the

usual windings of the human heart. Madame Swetchine was far too nice

in her sense of duty, and far too delicate in feeling, to allow any

such admissions to escape.

The devotion of a life-time was given unreservedly to General

Swetchine. She never knew the happiness of becoming a mother, the tie

that would of all others have been dearest to her heart. But the

general had bestowed paternal affection on a young girl called Nadine

Staeline, and Madame Swetchine also generously insisted on adopting

her. Nadine, welcomed to their roof, was treated by Madame Swetchine

like her own child.

Her attentions to the general continued unremitting. When he quitted

Russia, she accompanied him to Paris; when he was summoned to return,

though condemned to banishment from St. Petersburg and Moscow, she

profited by the respite gained to go alone in her old age and

infirmity to plead his cause herself with the emperor. Nor did she

complain of the illness in Russia that followed such fatigue, for

{464} her suit was granted. Still less did she regret the yet more

serious malady that overtook her on returning to Paris with the glad

tidings that brought such relief to his declining years. He lived to

the age of ninety-two, and her grief at his loss was intense. Then

indeed it was the long companion of a life-time that was taken from

her; and we all know the tender attachment that strengthens with years

between two persons who pass them together, and mutually esteem each

other.

The general, on his part, always showed Madame Swetchine affection

that had gradually become mixed up with a species of veneration.

Though he never thwarted her religious views, he did not himself

embrace them; he liked to see her Catholic friends, even priests, and

especially Pere de Ravignan; but remained satisfied with the Greek

Church. Beside her duties as a wife, we have seen Madame Swetchine

embrace those of a mother toward young Nadine. She never slackened in

them until Nadine by her marriage ceased to require their exercise.

Then she contrived to gratify her maternal instincts by undertaking

the charge of Helene de Nesselrode, the daughter of her friend, just

aged fourteen, and whose health demanded a warmer climate than that of

Russia. Nor did she give her up till Helene married.

Faithful to all the sentiments she experienced, and warm in her

friendships, Madame Swetchine's most enthusiastic attachment appears

to have been for Mademoiselle Stourdja. It dated from her early

married life, and continued through the whole of existence. At first

it well-nigh provokes a smile to see how, scarcely parted for a few

hours from her friend, she rushes to her pen, that it may express the

pangs of separation. But girlhood has not passed over, ere thought,

reason, duty, figure largely in the letters of Madame Swetchine. Her

correspondence was extensive, and portrays herself just as she

appeared in daily life--a wise, gentle, and affectionate friend or

counsellor, as circumstances might dictate. Nowhere does this show her

to greater advantage than in the letters--too few, unfortunately--that

we possess from Madame Swetchine to Pere Lacordaire. The difference

between the two minds is striking. Her good sense and exquisite

judgment contrast with his fiery impetuosity of thought and feeling;

it is evident that her soul moves in the serene atmosphere of near

union with God; while he, the religious of already some years'

standing, is yet battling with strong human torrents. How gently she

calls him up a higher path, never forgetting her womanhood nor his

priestly character. His tone becomes much more religious; with rare

candor and simplicity he sees and owns past imperfections.

Patriotism was one of her ardent sentiments, and she considered the

feeling as a duty incumbent on women no less than men: of course,

conduct was to be in accordance. Like many Russians, love of country

centred for her in devotion to the sovereign; and of this her letters

afford curious exemplification. She calls Alexander "the hero of

humanity," and, after enumerating his many perfections, rejoices that

this young sage is our emperor! When her husband was harshly summoned

back to Russia, that the disgrace of exile from court might be

inflicted, she exclaims: "God knows that I have never uttered a word

of complaint against my sovereigns, nor so much as blamed them in

heart!" Strange loyalty this to our modern western notions!

Her tender charity toward the poor began to show itself at an early

age. At twenty-five in St. Petersburg she was already the soul of all

good works there: nor did she content herself with merely giving alms,

nor even with seeking to promote moral improvement; her ingenious

kindness displayed itself also in endeavouring to procure pleasure or

innocent amusements. She took flowers to those she visited, or tried

to adorn their rooms with pictures. The {465} friendless deaf-and-dumb

girl whom she had adopted became her constant attendant; and Madame

Swetchine bore with her violence of temper until the defect was partly

overcome.

She undertook the charge of a poor boy at Vichy, because his many

maladies and their repulsive nature rendered him an object almost of

disgust. Each summer that she returned there, he was among the first

to greet her, sure of the kindest welcome. For years all his wants

were supplied at her expense; and when he died, she said he had now

become her benefactor.

To know Madame Swetchine thoroughly, her writings must be read. They

were never meant for publication, but are either self-communings, or

thoughts poured out before God. Some of her aphorisms are touchingly

delicate in sentiment.

"Loving hearts are like paupers; they live on what is given them."

"Our alms form our sole riches, and what we withhold constitutes our

real poverty."

Her prayers and meditations may be used with advantage for spiritual

reading. Her unfinished treatise on Old Age is very beautiful; but

more exquisite still is that more complete one on Resignation. Any

passage chosen at random would show elevated thought.

"The first degree of submission produces respectful acquiescence to

God's will; then this sentiment becomes transformed into a pious and

sincere acceptation full of confidence; until confidence itself

gradually acquires a filial character."

"Faith," she says, "makes resignation reasonable, and hope renders it

easy."

"The love of God draws us away from our long love of self."

"Patience is so near to resignation, that it often seems one and the

same thing."

She acknowledges that the hardest trials of resignation are found in

those misfortunes irreparable here on earth. Such are death, old age,

physical infirmity, loss of worldly honor, final impenitence. But the

death of those we love, she says, may be deeply mourned in the midst

of resignation; and our own certain death affords not only a

counterbalance to such affliction, but also to the other evils of

life. Old age is a halt between the world overcome, and eternity about

to begin. Physical infirmities make us live in the atmosphere of the

gospel beatitudes; we are then truly the poor ones of Christ, or

rather poverty itself. The world sometimes forgets, but never pardons;

what matters, provided virtue remain unscathed, or that it be restored

through repentance?

"Suffering teaches us how to suffer; suffering teaches us how to live;

suffering teaches us how to die."

And here we take our leave of this remarkable woman, who offers such a

bright example to our generation.

----

{466}

From The Dublin Review.

RECENT IRISH POETRY.

_Lays of the Western Gael and other Poems_. By SAMUEL FERGUSON.

London: Bell & Daldy. 1865.

_Poems_. By SPERANZA (LADY WILDE). Dublin: Duffy. 1864.

_Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland_. A modern Poem. By WILLIAM ALLINGHAM.

London: Macmillan &Co. 1864.

_Inisfail, a Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland_. By AUBREY DE VERE. Dublin:

Duffy. 1864.

In the palmy days of Young Ireland, its writers and speakers were

particularly prone to the quotation of that strange saying of Fletcher

of Saltoun: "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need

not care who should make the laws of a country." It has been the

destiny of Young Ireland to make and to administer the laws of other

countries than that for which its hot youth hoped to legislate. But it

has certainly left Ireland a legacy of excellent ballads. A glance at

the fortunes of some of the more prominent members of this brilliant

but ill-fated party, as they present themselves to view at this

moment, suggests curious contrasts and strange reflections. Mr. Gavan

Duffy, who was assuredly the source of its noblest and wisest

inspirations, after having within ten years occupied high office in

three Victorian ministries, and laid the impress of his organizing

genius deep on the constitutional foundations of that most rising of

the Australian states, is on his way home from Melbourne for a brief

European vacation. Mr. John Mitchel, [Footnote 96] who represented

the more violent and revolutionary section of Young Ireland, was,

before the American war commenced, editor of the _Richmond Enquirer_,

one of the most extreme organs of secession, and afterward visited

Paris with the hope of inducing the Emperor Napoleon to invade

Ireland; but since the war was declared, he has resumed his post at

Richmond--sometimes writing articles that are supposed more

particularly to forecast President Davis's policy; sometimes serving

in the ranks of General Lee's army as the driver of an ambulance

wagon. His eldest son fired the first shot that struck Fort Sumter,

and afterward was himself struck at the heart in its command by a

northern bullet. Mitchel's favorite lieutenant, Devin Reilly, on the

other hand, died in office at Washington, and his illness was

attributed at the time to over-fatigue in one of the earliest of those

great electioneering contests in which the supremacy of Mr. Lincoln

finally came to be established over Mr. Stephen Douglas, "the little

giant of the west," and the only man, in Mr. Reilly's ardent

conviction, who could have saved the American Union. Mr. D'Arcy McGee,

whose character bore to that of Devin Reilly about the same relation

as Mr. Duffy's did to that of Mr. Mitchel, is at present a leading

member of the executive council of Canada, and (the Duke of Newcastle

was of opinion) the ablest statesman of British America; in proof of

which it may suffice to say, that the project of the Canadian

confederation was in a great degree originated and elaborated by him.

The handsome young orator, whose fiery eloquence surpassed in its

influence on an Irish audience in the Rotunda even the most brilliant

effects of Sheil at the old Catholic Association, is now to be

recognized in a bronzed and war-worn soldier, under {467} the style

and title of Major-General Thomas Francis Meagher, of the United

States army, commanding a division, which, after Sherman commenced his

marvellous march on Savannah, was sent forward to hold the southern

section of Tennessee, and was last heard of in camp at Chattanooga.

One of this orator's favorite disciples, Eugene O'Reilly, holds an

equivalent rank; but his line of service has lain not in America, but

in Asia--his allegiance is not to the President Abraham Lincoln, but

to the Sultan Abdul Aziz; he is known to all true believers under the

style of O'Reilly Bey, one of the earliest of the Christian officers

who took rank under the Hatti Hamayoun; and his sword's avenging

justice was freely felt among the Mohammedan mob who horrified

Christendom five years ago by the massacres of Syria. What region of

the earth is not full of the labors of this party, sect, and school of

all the Irish talents, of whom may well be sung the antique Milesian

elegy, to which their prophet and guide gave words that complain "they

have left but few heirs of their company?" [Footnote 97] The rabid

violence and the underbred vulgarity of style which belong to so many

of the Irish Nationalist party of the present day, are all unlike even

the errors of Young Ireland. That party, though it tragically failed

in fulfilling its hopes at home, has at all events justified its

ambition abroad; and it was always and everywhere singularly true to

its ideas. Scattered as it is, broken, and often apparently divided

against itself, its members have not failed to yield loyal, valiant,

and signal service to whatever cause they espoused or country they

adopted. Its poets have had a principal hand in framing the

constitutions of states manifestly destined to future greatness. Its

orators have led forlorn hopes against fearful odds; and, whether in

the marshes of the Chickahominy or in Syrian defiles, have not known

how to show their backs to the enemy. It would be easy to trace over a

far wider range the fortunes of its members since the great emigration

that scattered them in the years that followed their catastrophe in

'48. It is possible any day to find a Young Irelander, who at a more

or less brief period after Ballingarry _abiit, evasit, erupit_, in the

red baggy breeches of the Zouave, or in judicial crimson and ermine at

the antipodes; in the black robe of a Passionist father or the silk

gown of a queen's counsel; surveying a railroad in Dakotah, or

organizing brigands in Sicily; helping in some subordinate way the

Emperor Maximilian to found the Mexican empire, or on the high road to

make himself a Yellow Button at Peking. As for American generals north

and south, and colonial law-givers east and west, their names are

legion and the legion's name very much begins with Mac or O'. May they

make war and law to good advantage! It was not given to them to make

either for Ireland; but, if Fletcher of Saltoun was a wise man in his

generation, they in theirs have left their country a far more precious

heritage.

[Footnote 96: Our American readers need hardly be reminded that some

of the biographical statements which follow are very wide of the

truth.--Ed. C. W.]

[Footnote 97: _As truagh gan oidir 'n-a bh-farradk_--literally,

"What a pity that there is no heir of their company." See the

"Lament for the Milesians," in "The Poems of Thomas Davis." Dublin:

Duffy.]

Irish poetry certainly existed before Young Ireland, and was even

considered, like oratory, to be a quality naturally and easily

indigenous to the Irish genius. Moore had not unworthily sustained the

reputation of his country in an age of great poets; and it was Moore's

own avowed belief that his "Irish Melodies" were the very flowering of

his inspiration, and were indeed alone warranted to preserve his fame

to future ages. But neither Moore, nor any other poet of Irish birth,

had attempted to give to the Irish that poetry "racy of the soil,"

wherein every image and syllable smacks of their own native

nationality, which Burns and Scott, and a host of minor poets, had

created for the Scotch. This is the work which Young Ireland

deliberately and avowedly attempted, and in which it has assuredly

succeeded. When the effort was first made, it is {468} told that

several of the writers who afterward wrote what, in its order of

ballad poetry, is unexcelled in the language--and notably Mr. Davis--

were quite unaware of any possession of the poetic faculty, and took

to the task as a boy takes to his tale of Latin spondees and dactyls

at college. But the stream was in the rock, and when the rock was

tapped the stream flowed. In the course of less than a year "The

Spirit of the _Nation_" was published, in which, with much undeniable

rubbish, there appeared a number of ballads and songs that won the

admiration of all good critics; and to which the far more important

testimony of their popular acceptance is still given in the form of

continuously recurring and increasing editions. A Scotch publisher--

Mr. Griffin, of Glasgow--ten years ago had heard such accounts of this

curious flood-tide of Irish verse, that he thought it might be a safe

speculation to try whether, despite its politics, it might not make

its way in the British market. The edition was very soon exhausted,

and the book is now, we believe, out of print. These facts are of even

more value than the high opinion which so experienced and accomplished

a critic as Lord Jeffrey expressed about the same time of the poetic

gifts of Davis and Duffy; for by universal consent the test of sale

loses all its vulgarity when applied to that most ethereal compound of

the human intellect, poetry. The poet is born, and not made, according

to Horace; but in so far as he is made anything by man, it is by

process of universal suffrage over the counter. Gradual, growing,

general recognition, testified by many editions, at last, in the

course of thirty years, establishes the irrefragable position of a

Tennyson; against which a Tupper, long struggling, in the end finds

his level, and lines trunks.

Much of the poetry of this time was, consciously or unconsciously,

mimetic--mainly of Sir Walter Scott and of Lord Macaulay, whose "Lays

of Ancient Rome" had recently been published. Scott, indeed, more

distinctly suggested the elements out of which the Young Ireland

poetry grew. Burns wrote in a peculiar provincial dialect, and with

the exception of a few glorious lyrics, which will occur to every

reader's recollection, he wrote for a district and for a class. But in

Scott's mind all the elements of the Scottish nationality were equally

confluent and homogeneous--the Highlander, the Lowlander, and the

Islander; the Celt, the Saxon, and the Dane; the laird, the presbyter,

and the peasant; and his imagination equally vivified all times--from

those of the Varangians at Constantinople to those of the Jacobites at

Culloden. But in Ireland there was no formed dialect like the Lowland

Scotch, with a settled vocabulary and a concrete form. The language of

the peasantry in many parts of the country was the same sort of base

English that a foreigner speaks--scanty in its range of words,

ill-articulated and aspirated, loose in the use of the liquid letters,

formed according to alien idioms, and flavored with alien expletives.

The language of the best of the ballads of the peasantry was that of a

period in which the people still thought in Irish, and expressed

themselves in broken English, uttered with the deep and somewhat

guttural tones of the Celt, and garnished now and then with the more

racy epithets, or endearments, or shibboleths, of their native speech.

For a time the example of Lord Macaulay's ballad poetry prevailed,

with its long rolling metre, its picturesque nomenclature, its

contrasts rather rhetorical than poetical. It was possible to describe

that decisive charge of the Irish brigade at Fontenoy, which Mr.

Carlyle treats as a mere myth, in strains which instantly suggest

those of the "Battle of Ivry." And so did Davis in a very memorable

ballad; but the likeness was mainly in the measure, and Lord Macaulay

had no copyright in lines of fourteen feet. The poem itself was Irish

to the manor born; and, it might be pleaded, was only as like the

verse of Lord Macaulay as the prose of Lord Macaulay is like the prose

of Edmund Burke. {469} Beyond this task-work, however, which, although

very ingeniously and fluently done, was still as much task-work as

college themes, there arose a difficulty and a hope. Was it possible

to transfuse the peculiar spirit of the Irish native poetry into the

English tongue? The researches of the Archaeological Society were at

this time rapidly disentombing the long-hidden historical and poetical

treasures of the Irish language. Many of these had been translated by

Clarence Mangan, in a style which did not pretend to be literally

faithful, but which so expanded, illustrated, and harmonized the

original that the poem, while losing none of its idiosyncrasy, gained

in every quality of grace, freedom, and force. The rich, the sometimes

redundant array of epithets, the mobile, passionate transitions, the

tender and melancholy spirit of veneration for a vanishing

civilization, for perishing houses, scattering clans, and a persecuted

Church--some even of the more graceful of the idioms and more musical

of the metres--might surely be naturalized in the English language;

and so an Irish poetical dialect be absolutely invented in the middle

of the nineteenth century. It was known how an Irish peasant spoke

broken English, and put it into rhyme that did not want a strange wild

melody, that was to more finished and scholarly verse as the flavor of

_poteen_ is to the flavor of Burgundy. But how would an Irish bard,

drawing his inspiration from the primeval Ossianic sources, and

thinking in the true ecstatic spirit of the Irish muse, speak, if he

were condemned to speak, in the speech of the Saxon? This was the bold

conception; and no one who is familiar with the poetry of Ireland

during the last twenty years, will deny that it has been in great part

fulfilled.

The poet to whom its execution is especially due can hardly be called

a Young Irelander in the political sense of the word. But Young

Ireland was a literary school as well as a political sect; and any one

who remembers, or may read, Mr. Ferguson's wonderful "Lament for

Thomas Davis," which it is to be greatly regretted he has not included

in the present edition of his poems, will recognize the strong

elective affinities which attached him to their action and influence.

As it is, this volume is by far the most remarkable recent

contribution of the Irish poetical genius to English literature. Mr.

Ferguson has accomplished the problem of conveying the absolute spirit

of Irish poetry into English verse, and he has done so under the most

difficult conceivable conditions--for he prefers a certain simple and

unluxuriant structure in the plan of his poems, and he uses in their

composition the most strictly Saxon words he can find. But all the

accessories and figures, and still more a certain weird melody in the

rhythm that reminds the ear of the wild grace of the native music,

indicate at every turn what Mr. Froude has half-reproachfully called

"the subtle spell of the Irish mind." It is not surprising to find

even careful and accomplished English critics unable to reach to the

essential meaning of this poetry, which, to many, evidently appears as

bald as the style of Burns first seemed to southron eyes when he

became the fashion at Edinburgh eighty years ago. And yet to master

the dialect of Burns is at least as difficult as to master the dialect

of Chaucer, while Mr. Ferguson rarely uses a word that would not be

passed by Swift or Defoe. Before one of the most beautiful, simple,

and graceful of his later poems a recent critic paused, evidently

dismayed by the introduction, of which, however, not willing to

dispute the beauty, he quoted a few lines. It was an old Irish legend,

versified with surpassing grace and spirit, of which this is the

argument. Fergus MacRoy, king of Ulster in the old pagan times, was a

very good king of his kind. He loved his people and they loved him. He

was handsome, and strong, and tall. He bore himself well in war and in

the chase. He drank with discretion. {470} Nevertheless his life had

two troubles. He did not love the law; and he did love a widow. To

listen as chief justiciary to the causes, of which a constant crop

sprang up at Emania, tares and corn thickly set together, troubled him

sorely. To make verses to the widow, on the other hand, came as easy

as sipping usquebaugh or metheglin. He proposed, and though a king was

refused; but not discouraged, pressed his suit again and again. And at

last Nessa the fair yielded, but she made a condition that her son

Conor should sit on the judgment-seat daily by his stepfather's side..

This easily agreed, Nessa became queen, while, as Fergus tells the

tale:

While in council and debate

Conor daily by me sate;

Modest was his mien in sooth,

Beautiful the studious youth,

Questioning with eager gaze,

All the reasons and the ways

In the which, and why because,

Kings administer the laws.

In this wise a year passed, the youth diligently observant, with

faculties ripening and brightening as his majesty's grew more

consciously rusty and slow; and then a crisis came, which Mr. Ferguson

describes in verses of which it is hard to say whether they best

deserve the coif or the laurel, for in every line there is the sharp

wit of the lawyer as well as the vivid fancy of the poet:

Till upon a day in court

Rose a plea of weightier sort,

Tangled as a briery thicket

Were the rights and wrongs intricate

Which the litigants disputed,

Challenged, mooted, and confuted,

Till when all the plea was ended

Naught at all I comprehended.

Scorning an affected show

Of the thing I did not know,

Yet my own defect to hide,

I said, "Boy judge, thou decide."

Conor with unalter'd mien,

In a clear sweet voice serene,

Took in hand the tangled skein,

And began to make it plain.

As a sheep-dog sorts his cattle,

As a king arrays his battle,

So the facts on either side

He did marshal and divide.

Every branching side-dispute

Traced he downward to the root

Of the strife's main stem, and there

Laid the ground of difference bare.

Then to scope of either cause,

Set the compass of the laws,

This adopting, that rejecting,--

Reasons to a head collecting,--

As a charging cohort goes

Through and over scatter'd foes,

So, from point to point he brought

Onward still the weight of thought

Through all error and confusion,

Till he set the clear conclusion,

Standing like a king alone,

All things adverse overthrown,

And gave judgment clear and sound:--

Praises filled the hall around;

Yea, the man that lost the cause

Hardly could withhold applause.

In these exquisite verses, the language is as strict to the point as

if it were taken from Mr. Smith's "Action at Law;" but the reader will

remark how every figure reminds him, and yet not in any mere mimetic

fashion, of the spirit and illustrations of the Ossianic poetry.

Nevertheless each word taken by itself is simple Saxon. Its Celtic

character only runs like a vein through the poem, but it colors and

saturates it through and through.

The greatest of Mr. Ferguson's poems, however, is undoubtedly "The

Welshmen of Tirawley," a ballad which, we do not fear to say, is

unsurpassed in the English language, or perhaps in even the Spanish.

Its epic proportion and integrity, the vivid picturesqueness of its

phraseology, its wild and original metre, its extraordinary

realization of the laws and customs of an Irish clan's daily life, the

stern brevity of its general narrative, and the richness of its

figures, though all barbaric pearl and gold, give it a pre-eminent

place among ballads. Scott would have devoted three volumes to the

story, were it not for the difficulty of telling some of its

incidents. Mr. Ferguson exhibits no little skill in the way that he

hurries his readers past what he could not altogether omit. For the

facts upon which the ballad is founded are simply horrible, and they

are historically true.

After the time of Strongbow, several Welsh families who had followed

his flag settled in Connaught. Among {471} these "kindly Britons" of

Tirawley, were the Walshes or Wallises, the Heils (_a quibus_ MacHale,

and, possibly, that most perfect instance of the _Hibernis ipsis

Hibemior_, the archbishop of Tuam); also the Lynotts and the Barretts,

with whom we are at present more particularly concerned. These last

claimed descent from the high steward of the manor of Camelot, and

their end is a story fit for the Round Table. The great toparch of the

territory was the MacWilliam Burke, as the Irish called the head of

the de Burgos, descended from William FitzAdelm de Burgo, conqueror of

Connaught, and therein commonly called William Conquer--of whom the

Marquis of Clanricarde is the present lineal representative; being to

Connaught even still somewhat as the MacCallummore is to Argyle, more

especially when he happens to be in the cabinet, and to have the

patronage of the post-office. Now the Lynotts were subject to the

Barretts, and the Barretts were subject to the Burkes. But when the

Barretts' bailiff, Scorna Boy, came to collect the Lynotts' taxes, he

so demeaned himself that the whole clan rose as one man, even as Jack

Cade, and slew him. Whereupon the vengeful Barretts gave to all

mankind among the Lynott clan a terrible choice--of which one

alternative was blindness; and the bearded men were all of their own

preference blinded, and led to the river Duvowen, and told to walk

over the stepping stones of Clochan-na-n'all; and they all stumbled

into the flood and were drowned, except old Emon Lynott, of

Garranard--whom accordingly the Barretts brought back and blinded

over again, by running needles through his eyeballs.

But with prompt-projected footsteps, sure as ever,

Emon Lynott again crossed the river,

Though Duvowen was rising fast,

And the shaking stones o'ercast,

By cold floods boiling past;

Yet you never,

Emon Lynott,

Faltered once before your foemen of Tirawley.

But turning on Ballintubber bank, you stood

And the Barretts thus bespoke o'er the flood--

"Oh, ye foolish sons of Wattin,

Small amends are these you've gotten,

For, while Scorna Boy lies rotten,

I am good

For vengeance!"

Sing the vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley.

For 'tis neither in eye nor eyesight that a man.

Bears the fortunes of himself and his clan,

But in the manly mind

These darken'd orbs behind,

That your needles could never find,

Though they ran

Through my heartstrings.

Sing the vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley.

But little your women's needles do I reck,

For the night from heaven never fell so black,

But Tirawley and abroad

From the Moy to Cuan-an-fod,

I could walk it, every sod,

Path and track,

Ford and togher,

Seeking vengeance on you, Barretts of Tirawley!

And so leaving "loud-shriek-echoing Garranard," the Lynott, with his

wife and seven children, abandons his home, and takes refuge in Glen

Nephin, where, in the course of a year, a son is born to him, whom he

dedicates from the first breath to his vengeance. He trains this boy

with assiduous care to all the accomplishments of a Celtic cavalier;

And, as ever the bright boy grew in strength and size,

Made him perfect in each manly exercise,

The salmon in the flood,

The dun deer in the wood,

The eagle in the cloud,

To surprise,

On Ben Nephin,

Far above the foggy fields of Tirawley.

With the yellow-knotted spear-shaft, with the bow,

With the steel, prompt to deal shot and blow,

He taught him from year to year,

And trained him, without a peer,

For a perfect cavalier,

Hoping so--

Far his forethought--

For vengeance on the Barretts of Tirawley.

And when mounted on his proud-bounding steed,

Emon Oge sat a cavalier indeed;

Like the ear upon the wheat,

When the winds in autumn beat

On the bending stems his seat;

And the speed

Of his courser

Was the wind from Barna-na-gee o'er Tirawley!

Fifteen years have passed and the youth is perfected in all the

accomplishments of sport and war, and the Lynott thinks it is time to

return to the world and work out the scheme of his vengeance. So the

father and son quit their mountain solitude, and journey southward to

the bailey of Castlebar; and in a few fine touches the picture of Mac

William's grandeur, as it strikes {472} the boy's wondering eyes,

rises before us; the stone house, strong and great, and the horse-host

at the gate and their captain in armor, and the beautiful _Bantierna_

by his side with her little pearl of a daughter. Who should this be

but the mighty MacWilliam! Into his presence ride the Lynotts; and,

after salutations, the old man declares his business. He has come to

claim, as gossip-law allows, the fosterage of MacWilliam's son. Ever

since William Conquer's time, his race were wont to place a MacWilliam

Oge in the charge of a Briton of Tirawley; and the young Lynott was a

pledge for his father's capacity in such tutelage. When MacWilliam saw

the young Lynott ride, run, and shoot, he said he would give the spoil

of a county to have his son so accomplished. When Lady MacWilliam

heard him speak, and scanned his fresh and hardy air, she said she

would give a purse of red gold that her Tibbot had such a nurse as had

reared the young Briton. The custom was allowed. The young MacWilliam

was sent under the guidance of old Lynott into Tirawley, and Emon Oge

remained as a hostage in Castlebar. So back to Garranard, no longer

the "loud-shriek-echoing," old Lynott returns--

So back to strong-throng-gathering Garranard,

Like a lord of the country with his guard,

Came the Lynott before them all,

Once again o'er Clochan-ua-n'all,

Steady-striding, erect, and tall,

And his ward

On his shoulders;

To the wonder of the Welshmen of Tirawley.

And then the young Tibbot was taught all manner of feats of body, to

swim, to shoot, to gallop, to wrestle, to fence, and to run, until he

grew up as deft and as tough as Emon Oge. But he was taught other

lessons as well, which were not in the bond of his foster-father.

The lesson of hell he taught him in heart and mind;

For to what desire soever he inclined,

Of anger, lust, or pride,

He had it gratified,

Till he ranged the circle wide

Of a blind

Self-indulgence,

Ere he came to youthful manhood in Tirawley.

Shame and rage track his passage, till one night the young Barretts of

the Bac fell upon him at Cornassack and slew him. His body was borne

to Castlebar. The Brehons were summoned to judgment; and over the bier

of MacWilliam Oge began the plea for an eric to be imposed upon the

Barretts for their crime; and the Brehons decreed the mulct, and

Lynott's share of it was nine ploughlands and nine score of cattle.

And now the ultimate hour of the blind old man's vengeance had come,

not to be sated with land and kine. "Rejoice," he cried, "in your

ploughlands and your cattle, which I renounce throughout Tirawley."

But, expert in all the rules and customs of the clans, he asks the

Brehons, Is it not the law that the foster-father may, if he please,

applot the short eric? And they say it is so. Whereupon, formally

rejecting his own share of the mulct, he makes his award--that the land

of the Barretts shall be equally divided on every side with the

Burkes, and that MacWilliam shall have a seat in every Barrett's hall,

a stall in every Barrett's stable, and needful grooming from every

hosteler for every Burke who shall ride throughout Tirawley for ever.

And then, in a speech full of barbaric sublimity and tragic

concentration of passion, he confesses "the patient search and vigil

long" of his vengeance. It is almost unjust to break the

closely-wrought chain of this speech by a single quotation, and we

have been already unduly tempted to extract from this extraordinary

poem; but, perhaps, this one verse may be separated from the rest as

containing the very culmination of the old man's hideous rage.

I take not your eyesight from you as you took

Mine and ours: I would have you daily look

On one another's eyes,

When the strangers tyrannize

By your hearths, and blushes rise

That ye brook

Without vengeance

The insults of troops of Tibbots throughout Tirawley.

Another moment and he has done. "Father and son," says MacWilliam,

{473} "hang them high!" and old Lynott they hanged forthwith; but

young Lynott had eloped with MacWilliam's daughter to Scotland, and

there changed his name to Edmund Lindsay. The judgment of the short

eric was, however, held good; and the Burkes rode rough-shod over the

Barretts, until, as Mr. Ferguson, almost verbally versifying the

Chronicle of Duald Mac Firbis, says:

Till the Saxon Oliver Cromwell,

And his valiant Bible-guided

Free heretics of Clan London

Coming in, in their succession,

Rooted out both Burke and Barrett;

a process of eviction which Mr. Ferguson, not merely for the sake of

poetical justice, but out of the invincible ignorance of pure

puritanical Protestantism, appears on the whole very highly to

approve.

This ballad is indeed unique in its order: no Irish ballad approaches

its wild sublimity and the thoroughness of detail with which it is

conceived and executed. The only Irish narrative ballad which can bear

a general comparison with it is Mr. Florence MacCarthy's "Foray of Con

O'Donnell," a poem as perfect in its historical reality, in the

aptness of all its figures, illustrations, and feats of phrase to a

purely Celtic ideal, and which even surpasses "The Welshmen" in a

certain easy and lissome grace of melody, that falls on the ear like

the delicately drawn notes of Carolan's music. But this grace is

disdained by the grim and compressed character which animates every

line of Mr. Ferguson's ballad. His other works, fine of fancy and ripe

of phrase as they are, fall far below it, "The Tain-Quest" does not on

the whole enthral the reader, or magnetize the memory. "The Healing of

Conall Carnach," and "The Burial of King Cormac" are poems that will

hold their place in many future Books of Irish Ballads; they are

unusually spirited versifications of passages from the more heroic

period of early Irish history; but excepting occasional lines, they

only appear to be the versifications of already written legends. The

ballad of Grace O'Malley, commonly called _Grana Uaile_, may be

advantageously contrasted with these, and it contains some verses of

singular power--as, for example, where the poet denies the imputation

of piracy against this lady who loved to roam the high seas under her

own commission--

But no: 'twas not for sordid spoil

Of barque or sea-board borough,

She plough'd with unfatiguing toil

The fluent-rolling furrow;

Delighting on the broad-back'd deep

To feel the quivering galley and sweep

Strain up the opposing hill, and sweep

Down the withdrawing valley.

"Aideen's Grave" is a poem of a different kind, full of an exquisite

melancholy grace; and where Ossian is supposed to apostrophise his

future imitator, it is as if he thought after the manner of the

Fenians, but was withal master of every symphony of the English

tongue:

Imperfect in an alien speech

When wandering here some child of chance,

Through pangs of keen delight shall reach.

The gift of utterance,--

To speak the air, the sky to speak,

The freshness of the hill to tell,

Who roaming bare Ben Edar's peak,

And Aideen's briery dell,

And gazing on the Cromlech vast,

And on the mountain and the sea,

Shall catch communion with the past,

And mix himself with me.

There are lines in this poem that a little remind us of Gray, as--

At Gavra, when by Oscar's side

She rode _the ridge of war;_

and again in the "Farewell to Deirdre" there is something in the cast

and rhythm of the poem, rather than in any individual word or line,

that recalls Scott's "Farewell to North Maven." But to say so is not

to hit blots. Mr. Ferguson's is beyond question the most thoroughly

original vein of poetry that any Irish bard of late days has wrought

out; and in laying down this volume we can only regret that the

specimens he has thought worthy of collection are so few in comparison

not merely with what he might have done, but with what he actually has

done. For {474} this modesty, let us hope that the prompt penance of a

second and enlarged edition may atone.

We have said that though Mr. Ferguson could hardly be called a Young

Irelander in politics, all the elective affinities of his genius

tended toward that school of thought. But Lady Wilde, then known if

she wrote prose as Mr. John Fanshawe Ellis, and if she wrote verse as

Speranza, had an extraordinary influence on all the intellectual and

political activities of Young Ireland. It was a favorite phantasy of

that time, when Lamartine's book was intoxicating all Young Europe

with the idea of a grand coming revolutionary epopoeia, and the

atrocities of socialism in France and Mazzinianism in Italy had not

yet horrified all Christendom, to find the model men for a modern

Plutarch in the ranks of the Girondists. Notably Meagher was supposed

to be gifted with all the qualities of Vergniaud, and Speranza to have

more than the genius of Madame Roland. But when we come to real

comparisons of character, the parallel easily gives way. If Smith

O'Brien was like any Frenchman of the first revolution, it was

Lafayette. Mitchel had in certain respects a suspicious resemblance to

the earlier and milder phases of Robespierre's peculiar intellectual

idiosyncrasy. The base of Carnot's character was that faculty for

organization which was the mainspring of Gavan Duffy's various and

powerful genius. The parallel was, even so far as it went,

intrinsically unjust. Lamartine's glowing imagination gave to the

Girondists a grandeur largely ideal. It is fair to say that Meagher's

oratory was on the whole of a higher order than Vergniaud's; and

certainly Madame Roland, great as may have been the influence of her

character and her conversation, has left us no example of her talent

that will bear comparison with Lady Wilde's poems or prose.

These poems, however, if full justice is to be done to them, ought to

be read from first to last with a running commentary in the memory

from the history of those few tragic years whose episodes they in a

manner mark. One poem is a mournfully passionate appeal to O'Connell

against the alliance with the Whigs, which was charged as one of the

causes of the secession. Another is a ballad of the famine, with

lights as ghastly as ever glowed in the imagination of Euripides or

Dante, and founded on horrors such as Greek or Italian never

witnessed. There is then a picture of "the young patriot leader"--

which an artist would characterize as a decidedly idealized portrait

of Meagher--that American general who has since proved his title to be

called "of the sword." Again, a gloomy series of images recalls to us

the awful state of the country--the corpses that were buried without

coffins, and the men and women that walked the roads more like corpses

than living creatures, spectres and skeletons at once; the little

children out of whose sunken eyes the very tears were dried, and over

whose bare little bones the hideous fur of famine had begun to grow;

the cholera cart, with its load of helpless huddled humanity, on its

way to the hospital; the emigrant ship sending back its woeful wail of

farewell from swarming poop to stern in the offing; and, far as the

eye could search the land, the blackened potato-fields, filling all

the air with the fetid odors of decay. Again and again such pictures

are contrasted with passionate lyrics full of rebellious fire, urging

the people to die, if die they must, by the sword rather than by

hunger--and sometimes, too, with an angry, unreasonable,

readily-forgiven reproach to the priesthood, who bore with such noble

fortitude and self-immolating charity the very cross of all the

crosses of that terrible time.

It is a curious fact, and reminds one of the myth of Achilles' heel,

that O'Connell, who marched among his myriad foes like one clad in

panoply of mail from head to foot, with a sort of inexpugnable vigor

and endurance, not to be wounded, not to be stunned, with his buckler

ready for every {475} thrust, and a blow for every blow that rained on

his casque, was weak as a child under the influence of verse. Any one

who may count over the number of times his favorite quotations, such

as the lines beginning "Hereditary bondsmen" from "Childe Harold" for

example, crop up in the course of his speeches, will be inclined to

say that his fondness for poetry was almost preposterous. It was

always tempting him, indeed, into dangerous ways--for while his prose

preached "the ethereal principles of moral force," and the tenet that

"no political amelioration is worth the shedding of a single drop of

human blood," his favorite quotations were strictly in favor of

fighting. The "hereditary bondsmen" were to "strike the blow;" and the

Irish are a nation only too well disposed to interpret such a precept

literally. Moore's melodies were always at the tip of his tongue; and

Moore's "Slave so lowly" is indignantly urged not to pine in his

chains, but to raise the green flag forthwith, and do or die. Some

verses of O'Connell's own, of which he was at least equally fond,

began:

Oh Erin! shall it e'er be mine

To see thy sons in battle line?

It was not altogether politic, especially when Young Ireland was

gaining the ascendant, to use such quotations habitually; but the

temptation seems to have been irresistible. So, on the other hand, may

be conceived his excessive sensitiveness to anything sounding like a

reproach that reached him through the vehicle of verse. When Brougham

or Stanley or Peel struck their hardest, they got in return rather

more than they gave--when the whole House of Commons tried to stifle

his voice, over all the din Mr. Speaker heard himself with horror

called upon to stop this "beastly bellowing." But when Moore wrote

those lines--so cruelly touching, so terribly caustic--"The dream of

those days," which appeared in the last number of the Melodies, the

Liberator was, it is said, so deeply affected that he shed tears. So

again, these lines of Speranza, which appeared in the _Nation_ at the

time of the secession, stung him to the very heart:

Gone from us--dead to us--he whom we worshipped so!

Low lies the altar we raised to his name;

Madly his own hand hath shattered and laid it low--

Madly his own breath hath blasted his fame.

He whose proud bosom once raged with humanity.

He whose broad forehead was circled with might;

Sunk to a time-serving, driveling inanity--

God! why not spare our loved country the sight?

Was it the gold of the stranger that tempted him?

Ah! we'd have pledged to him body and soul--

Toiled for him--fought for him--starved for him--died for him--

Smiled though our graves were the steps to hi s goal.

Breathed he one word in his deep, earnest whispering?

Wealth, crown, and kingdom were laid at his feet;

Raised he his right hand, the millions would round him cling--

Hush! 'tis the Sassenach ally you greet.

It is a curious and, indeed, a very touching trait in O'Connell's

character that an imputation conveyed in this form had a power to

wound him which all the articles of the morning papers and all the

speeches of the evening debates had not. This redoubtable master of

every weapon of invective, whose weighty words sometimes fell on his

adversary like one of Ossian's Titans hurling boulders, or again burst

into a motley cascade of quip, and crank, and chaff, and wild, rampant

ridicule, that (sometimes rather coarse and personal) was at its best,

to other rhetoric, as the music of an Irish jig is to all other music,

nevertheless had his Achilles' tendon. The man who loved to call

himself "the best abused man in the universe" was as weak before the

enemy who attacked him according to the rules of prosody as if he

lived in the age when every Celt in Kerry piously believed that a man,

if the metre were only made sufficiently acrid, might be rhymed to

death, in the same manner {476} as an ancestor of Lord Derby was,

according to the Four Masters. [Footnote 98]

[Footnote 98: "John Stanley came to Ireland as the king of England's

viceroy--a man who gave neither toleration nor sanctuary to

ecclesiastics, laymen, or literary men; but all with whom he came in

contact he subjected to cold, hardship, and famine; and he it was

who plundered Niall, the son of Hugh O'Higgin, at Uisneach of Meath;

but Henry D'Alton plundered James Tuite and the king's people, and

gave to the O'Higgins a cow in lieu of each cow of which they had

been plundered, and afterward escorted them into Connaught. The

O'Higgins, on account of Niall, then satirized John Stanley, who

only lived live weeks after the satirizing, having died from the

venom of their satires. This was the second instance of the poetical

influence of Niall O'Higgin's satires, the first having been the

Clan Conway turning gray the night they plundered Niall at Clodoin,

and the second the death of John Stanley."--_Annals of the Four

Masters._ A.D. 1414.]

Lady Wilde's verse has not at all the same distinctively Celtic

character as Mr. Ferguson's. He aspires to be

Kindly Irish of the Irish,

Neither Saxon nor Italian;

and his choice inspirations come from the life of the clans.

Speranza's verse, so far as it has a specially Irish character, is of

the most ancient type of that character. It is full of oriental

figures and illustrations. It is, when it is most Irish, rather

cognate to Persian and Hebrew ways of thinking, forms of metaphor,

redundance of expression--in its tendency to adjuration, in its habit

of apostrophe, in its very peculiar and powerful but monotonous

rhythm, which seems to pulsate on the ear with the even, strident

stroke of a Hindoo drum. Where this peculiar poetry at all adapts

itself to the vogue of the modern muse, it is easy to see that Miss

Barrett had very great influence in determining the mere manner of

Lady Wilde's genius. When in the midst of one very powerful poem, "The

Voice of the Poor," these lines come in--

When the human rests upon the human,

All grief is light;

But who lends one kind glance to illumine

Our life-long night?

The air around is ringing with their laughter--

God has only made the rich to smile,

But we--in our rags, and want, and woe--we follow after,

Weeping the while.

--we are tempted to note an unconscious homage to the author of

"Aurora Leigh." But the character of Lady Wilde's verse is far more

colored by the range of her studies than by the influence of any

special style. The general reader, who may not breathe at ease the

political atmosphere of the earlier part of this volume, will pause

with pleasure to observe the spirit, grace, and fidelity of the

translations which succeed. They are from almost every language in

Europe, whether of Latin or Teutonic origin, French, Spanish,

Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish, and Russian. Among these

may be mentioned in particular two hymns of Savonarola, which are

rendered so exquisitely that one is tempted to suggest that the

_"Carmina Sedulii,"_ with much more of the ancient Irish hymnology,

are as yet untranslated into the tongue now used in Ireland. It is a

work peculiarly adapted to her genius. The first quality of Lady

Wilde's poetry is that lyrical power of which the hymn is the finest

development; and her most striking poems are those which assume the

character of the older and more regular form of ode.

The readers of Mr. William Allingham's early writings were in general

gratefully surprised when it was announced that he was the author of a

very remarkable poem, of the order of eclogue, which appeared by parts

in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1863. His earlier poems, chiefly songs and

verse of society, were pleasing from a certain airy grace and

lightness; but on the whole their style was thin and jejune. Of late,

his faculties have evidently mellowed very rapidly, and his language

has become more animated, more concentrated, and more sustained.

"Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland" has had, as it were, a triple

success--the success of a pamphlet, the success of a novel of Irish

life, and its own more proper and legitimate success, as a regular

pastoral, skilfully conceived, carefully executed, in which the flow

of thought is sustained at a very even, if not a very lofty level

throughout, {477} and whose language is on the whole admirably

harmonized, full of happy allusional effects, of quaint, minute,

picturesque delineation, and of a certain graceful and easy energy.

Mr. Gladstone has quoted some of its lines in a speech on the budget

as an excuse for maintaining the duty on whisky; and he is not the

only Englishman who has derived from its perusal an unexpected insight

into some of the more perplexing problems of Irish life. Certainly,

Mr. Allingham's views of Irish society, when he touches on questions

of religion and politics, are not our views. He is an Ulster

Protestant by religion, and an advanced liberal (we take it) in

politics. But making those allowances, it must be admitted that he

shows the poet's many-sided sympathetic mind in every page of this

very remarkable poem. "It is," as he fairly says, "free from

personalities, and neither of an orange nor a green complexion; but it

is Irish in phraseology, character, and local color--with as little

use as might be of a corrupt dialect, and with no deference at all to

the stage traditions of Paddyism." It is divided into twelve chapters,

and it is written in pleasantly modulated pentameters.

The story is of the life of a young squire, who was on the point of

declaring himself a Young Irelander in his youth. His guardian, to cut

the folly short, sent him incontinently to Cambridge, thence to the

continent. He returns to Ireland in his twenty-sixth year, and finds

the population decimated by the famine, and agitated by agrarian

conspiracy. The neighboring gentry are bent, as conacre has ceased to

pay, on supplanting the population by cattle. The population

suppurates into secret societies. Laurence Bloomfield, long revolving

the difficulties of his lot, and abhorring pretty equally the crimes

of each class against the other--determined, moreover, to be neither

exterminator, demagogue, nor absentee--resolves to live among the

people of his estate like a modern patriarch, and see what patience,

kindness, a good understanding, and enlightened management may be able

to effect. He extinguishes the Ribbon lodge, fastens his tenantry by

equitable leases to the glebe, and gradually finds in the management

of his estate a career of easy, pleasant, and even prosperous power.

In the course of ten years, Lisnamoy has become an Irish Arcadia, and

Mr. Allingham's honest muse rises accordingly to sing a hero even more

memorable in his way than the Man of Ross.

Bloomfield first promulgates his peculiar views of territorial

administration at a dinner of his landlord neighbors in Lisnamoy

House, where the wholesale eviction of the tenantry of a large

neighboring district is proposed on the plea that--

"This country sorely needs

A quicker clearance of its human weeds;

But still the proper system is begun,

And forty holdings we shall change to one."

Bloomfield his inexperience much confessed,

Doubts if the large dispeopled farms be best,--

Best in a wide sense, best for all the world

(At this expression sundry lips were curl'd),--

"I wish but know not how each peasant's hand

Might work, nay, hope to win, a share of land;

For ownership, however small it be,

Breeds diligence, content, and loyalty,

And tirelessly compels the rudest field,

Inch after inch, its very most to yield.

Wealth might its true prerogatives retain;

And no man lose, and all men greatly gain."

It is from the ill-concealed contempt of his class for such thoughts

as these, that Bloomfield's resolution to remain in Ireland and

administer his own estate arises.

The story, as it is evolved, presents some charming sketches of

character. Hardly even Carleton has delineated so admirably the nature

and habits of the Irish peasant family as Mr. Allingham has done in

his picture of the Dorans. How easy and natural, for example, is the

portrait of Bridget Doran:

Mild oval face, a freckle here and there,

Clear eyes, broad forehead, dark abundant hair,

Pure placid look that show'd a gentle nature,

Firm, unperplex'd, were hers; the maiden's stature

Graceful arose, and strong, to middle height,

With fair round arms, and footstep free and light;

She was not showy, she was always neat

In every gesture, native and complete,

Disliking noise, yet neither dull nor slack,

Could throw a rustic banter briskly back,

Reserved but ready, innocently shrewd,--

In brief, a charming flower of womanhood.

{478}

The occasional sketches of Irish scenery are also very vividly

outlined. This of Lough Braccan is not perhaps the best, but it is the

most easily detached from the text:

Among those mountain skirts a league away,

Lough Braccan spread, with many a silver bay

And islet green; a dark cliff, tall and bold,

Half-muffled in its cloak of ivy old,

Bastioned the southern brink, beside a glen,

Where birch and hazel hid the badger's den,

And through the moist ferns and firm hollies play'd

A rapid rivulet, from light to shade.

Above the glen, and wood, and cliff, was seen,

Majestically simple and serene,

Like some great soul above the various crowd,

A purple mountain-top, at times in cloud

Or mist, as in celestial veils of thought,

Abstracted heavenward.

We may give another specimen of Mr. Allingham's power of delineation,

which shows that he has studied Irish country life as well as Irish

scenery and Irish physiognomy.

Mud hovels fringe the "fair green" of this town,

A spot misnamed, at every season brown,

O'erspread with countless man and beast to-day,

Which bellow, squeak, and shout, bleat, bray, and neigh.

The "jobbers" there each more or less a rogue,

Noisy or smooth, with each his various brogue,

Cool, wiry Dublin, Connaught's golden mouth,

Blunt northern, plaintive sing-song of the south,

Feel cattle's ribs, or jaws of horses try.

For truth, since men's are very sure to lie,

And shun, with parrying blow and practised heed,

The rushing horns, the wildly prancing steed.

The moistened penny greets with sounding smack

The rugged palm, which smites the greeting back;

Oaths fly, the bargain like a quarrel burns,

And oft the buyer turns, and oft returns:

Now mingle Sassenach and Gaelic tongue;

On either side are slow concessions wrung;

An anxious audience interfere; at last

The sale is closed, and whisky binds it fast,

In case of quilting upon oziers bent,

With many an ancient patch and breezy rent.

This is as true a picture in its way as Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur's

"Horse-fair."

Mr. Aubrey de Vere's "Inisfail" comes last on our list, but certainly

not least in our estimation. No poet of Young Ireland has like him

seized and breathed the spirit of his country's Catholic nationality,

its virginal purity of faith, its invincible patience of hope, and all

the gentle sweetness of its charity. Young Ireland rather studied the

martial muse, and that with an avowed purpose. "The Irish harp," said

Davis, "too much loves to weep. Let us, while our strength is great

and our hopes high, cultivate its bolder strains, its raging and

rejoicing; or if we weep, let it be like men whose eyes are lifted

though their tears fall." Mr. de Vere has tried every mood of the

native lyre, and proved himself master of all. His "Inisfail" is a

ballad chronicle of Ireland, such as Young Ireland would have thought

to be a worthy result of all its talents, and such as, in fact, Mr.

Duffy at one time proposed. But it must be said that its heroic

ballads are not equal to those of Young Ireland. Some one said of a

very finished, but occasionally frigid, Irish speaker, fifteen years

ago, that he spoke like "Sheil with the chill on." A few of Mr. de

Vere's ballads have the same effect of "Young Ireland with the chill

on." They want the verve, the glow, the energy, the resonance, which

belong to the best ballads of "The Spirit of the _Nation_." Of the

writers of that time, Mr. D'Arcy McGee is perhaps, on the whole, the

most kindred genius to his. Mr. de Vere has an insight into all the

periods of Irish history in their most poetical expression which Mr.

McGee alone of his comrades seems to have equally possessed. Indeed,

if Mr. Me Gee's poems were all collected and chronologically

arranged--as it is to be hoped they may be some day soon--it would be

found that he had unconsciously and desultorily traversed very nearly

the same complete extent of ground that Mr. de Vere has systematically

and deliberately gone over. But though no one has written more nobly

of the dimly glorious Celtic ages, and many of his battle-ballads are

instinct with life, and wonderfully picturesque, it is easy to see

that Mr. McGee's best desire was to follow the footsteps of the early

saints, and the _Via Dolorosa_ of the period of the penal laws. These,

{479} too, are the passages over which Mr. de Vere's genius most loves

to brood, and his prevailing view of Ireland is the supernatural view

of her destiny to carry the cross and spread the faith. Young Ireland

wrote its bold, brilliant ballads as a part of the education of the

new nationality that it believed was growing up, and destined to take

possession of the island--"a nationality that," to use Davis's words

again, "must contain and represent all the races of Ireland. It must

not be Celtic; it must not be Saxon; it must be Irish. The Brehon law

and the maxims of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning genius of the

Gael, the placid strength of the Saxon, the marshalling insight of the

Norman; a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions

and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind, in its

romantic, its religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies.

Finally, a native government, which shall know and rule by the might

and right of all, yet yield to the arrogance of none;--these are the

components of such a nationality." And such was the dream that seemed

an easy eventuality twenty years ago. But Mr. de Vere writes after the

famine and in view of the exodus. His mind goes from the present to

the past by ages of sorrow--of sorrow, nevertheless, illumined,

nurtured, and sustained by divine faith and the living presence of the

Church. So in the most beautiful poem of this volume, he sees the

whole Irish race carrying an inner spiritual life through all their

tribulation in the guise of a great religious order of which England

is the foundress, and the rules are written in the statute-book. We

cannot select a better specimen of the thorough Catholic tone of Mr.

de Vere's genius, and of the vivid power and finished grace of his

poetry, than this:

There is an order by a northern sea

Far in the west, of rule and life more strict

Than that which Basil rear'd in Galilee,

In Egypt Paul, in Umbria Benedict.

Discalced it walks; a stony land of tombs,

A strange Petraea of late days, it treads!

Within its court no high-tossed censer fumes;

The night-rain beats its cells, the wind its beds.

Before its eyes no brass-bound, blazon'd tome

Reflects the splendor of a lamp high hung:

Knowledge is banish'd from her earliest home

Like wealth: it whispers psalms that once it sung.

It is not bound by the vow celibate,

Lest, through its ceasing, anguish too might cease;

In sorrow it brings forth; and death and fate

Watch at life's gate, and tithe the unripe increase.

It wears not the Franciscan's sheltering gown;

The cord that binds it is the strangers chain;

Scarce seen for scorn, in fields of old renown

It breaks the clod; another reaps the grain.

Year after year it fasts; each third or fourth

So fasts that common fasts to it are feast;

Then of its brethren many in the earth

Are laid unrequiem'd like the mountain beast.

Where are its cloisters? Where the felon sleeps!

Where its novitiate? Where the last wolf died!

From sea to sea its vigil long it keeps--

Stern foundress! is its rule not mortified?

Thou that hast laid so many an order waste,

A nation is thine order! It was thine

Wide as a realm that order's seed to cast,

And undispensed sustain its discipline!

It is another curious illustration of the _Hibernis ipsis Hibernior_

that a de Vere, who is, moreover, "of the caste of Vere de Vere,"

should have so intimate a comprehension of the Celtic spirit as is

often shown in these poems, especially in the use of those allegories

which are so characteristic of the period of persecution, and in some

of his metres that appear to be instinct with the very melody of the

oldest Irish music. Here, indeed, we seem to taste, in a certain vague

and dreamy sensation, which the mere murmur of such verses even

without strict reference to the words produces, all the charm of which

that ancient poetry might have been capable, if it were still

cultivated in a language of living civilization. Several of these

poems, if translated into Irish verse, would probably pass back

without the change of an idiom--so completely Celtic is the whole

conception of the language. The dirges, for example, appear on a first

reading to be only English versions of Irish poems belonging to the

time of the Jacobites and the Brigade--until, as we examine more

carefully, we observe that the allegory is {480} wrought out with all

the finish of more modern art, and that the metaphors are brought into

a more just inter-dependence than the native bard usually thought

necessary.

The tenderness that approaches to a sort of worship of Ireland under

the poetical personification of a mother wailing for her children,

again and again breaks out in Mr. de Vere's verse; and in all the

range of Irish poetry it is nowhere more exquisitely expressed. The

solemn beauty of the following verses is like that of some of those

earliest of the melodies, whose long lines, with their curious

rippling rhythm, were evidently meant for recitation as well as for

musical effect:

In the night, in the night, O my country, the stream calls out from afar;

So swells thy voice through the ages, sonorous and vast;

In the night, in the night, O my country, clear flashes the star:

So flashes on me thy face through the gloom of the past.

I sleep not; I watch: in blows the wind ice-wing'd and ice-fingered:

My forehead it cools and slakes the fire in my breast;

Though it sighs o'er the plains where oft thine exiles look'd back, and long lingered,

And the graves where thy famish'd lie dumb and thine outcasts find rest.

Hardly less sad, but in so different a spirit as to afford a contrast

that brings us to a fair measure of the variety of Mr. de Vere's

powers, is a poem of the days of the brigade. The wife of one of the

soldiers who followed Sarsfield to France after the capitulation of

Limerick, and entered the Irish brigade of Louis XIV., is supposed,

sitting by the banks of the Shannon, to speak:

River that through this purple plain

Toilest (once redder) to the main,

Go, kiss for me the banks of Seine!

Tell him I loved, and love for aye,

That his I am though far away--

More his than on the marriage-day.

Tell him thy flowers for him I twine

When first the slow sad mornings shine

In thy dim glass; for he is mine.

Tell him when evening's tearful light

Bathes those dark towers on Aughrim's height,

There where he fought, in heart, I fight.

A freeman's banner o'er him waves!

So be it! I but tend the graves

Where freemen sleep whose sons are slaves.

Tell him I nurse his noble race,

Nor weep save o'er one sleeping face

Wherein those looks of his I trace.

For him my beads I count when falls

Moonbeam or shower at intervals

Upon our burn'd and blacken'd walls:

And bless him! bless the bold brigade--

May God go with them, horse and blade,

For faith's defense, and Ireland's aid!

Here the abrupt transition of tone in the last verse from the subdued

melancholy of those which precede it is very fine and very Irish. One

can fancy the widowed wife, in all her desolation, starting, even from

her beads, as she thinks of Lord Clare's dragoons coming down on the

enemy with their "_Viva la_ for Ireland's wrong!"

Twenty years have now passed since "The Spirit of the _Nation_" gave

some glimpses of the mine of poetry then latent in the Irish mind. In

1845 Mr. Gavan Duffy published his "Ballad Poetry of Ireland"--a book

which had the largest sale of any published in Ireland since the union

and probably the widest influence. Upon this common and neutral ground

Orange-man and Ribbon-man, Tory, and Nationalist, were perforce

brought into harmonious contact; and "The Boyne Water" lost half its

virus as a political psalm when it was embalmed side by side with the

"Wild Geese" or "Willy Reilly." Behind the produce of his own

immediate period, Mr. Duffy, in arranging his materials, could only

find a few ballads by Moore, a few by Gerald Griffin, a few by Banim,

Callanan, Furlong, and Drennan, that could be accounted legitimate

ballad poetry. The rest was fast cropping up while he was actually

compiling his collection, under the hot breath of the National

movement, in a lavish and luxuriant growth. This impulse seems to have

spent itself some years ago. Anything of real merit in the way of

Irish poetry does not now appear in periodical literature more than

once or twice in a year; and Mr. Thomas Irwin is the only recent

writer whose verse may fairly be named in the same breath with that

which we have now noticed. A rich grace and finish of {481}

expression, a most quaint and delicate humor, and a fine-poised

aptness of phrase, distinguish his poetry, which is more according to

the taste that Mr. Tennyson has established in England than that of

any Irish writer of the day.

Irish poetry seems now, therefore, to have passed into a new and more

advanced stage of development. Here are four volumes, by four separate

writers, of poems, old and new--all published within a year; and all,

we believe, decidedly successful, and in satisfactory course of sale.

Mr. Florence MacCarthy's poems had previously gone through several

editions, and won enduring fame--perhaps more widely spread in America

than even at home, on account of a quality somewhat kindred to the

peculiar genius of the best American poets, and especially Longfellow,

Poe, and Irving, that the reader will readily recognize in his

finely-finished and most melodious verse. Nor should we omit to

mention, in cataloguing the library of recent Irish poets, "The Monks

of Kilcrea," a long romantic poem in the style of "The Lady of the

Lake," which contains many a passage that Scott might own, but of

which the writer remains unknown. Thus Irish national poetry is

accumulating, as it were, in strata. Mr. Duffy set on the title-page

of his "Ballad Poetry" the Irish motto, _Bolg an dana_, which not all

his readers clearly understood; but which, to all who did, seemed

extremely appropriate at the time. "This man," say the Four Masters,

speaking of a great bard of the fifteenth century, "was called the

_Bolg an dana_, which signifies that he was a common budget of poetry."

And this was all that Mr. Duffy's Ballad Poetry professed to be. But

what was only a budget of desultory jetsam and flotsam in 1845 is

taking the shape of a solid literature in 1865; and those twenty

golden years have at all events been well filled with ranks of rhyme.

----

{482}

From The Month.

CONSTANCE SHERWOOD.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.