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this before we close. The following exquisite piece will be understood in contrast with one of the previous extracts.

"The little Black Rose shall be red at last :-
What made it black but the March wind dry,
And the tear of the widow that fell on it fast?-
It shall redden the hills when June is nigh!

"The Silk of the Kine shall rest at last;-
What drave her forth but the dragon fly?
In the golden vale she shall feed full fast
With her mild gold horn, and her slow, dark eye.
"The wounded wood-dove lies dead at last!
The pine long-bleeding, it shall not die!
-This song is secret. Mine near it pass'd

In a wind o'er the stone plain of Athenry."-p. 293.

But the most beautiful and, in our judgment, the most magnificent piece in the entire Third Part is what may be regarded as a poetic resumé of the past religious history of Ireland, with a half dreaming, half prophetic forecasting of her future destiny, entitled, "All Hallows; or the Monk's Dream.' The introduction is highly poetical.

"I trod once more the place of tombs:
Death-rooted elder, full in flower,
Oppress'd me with its sad perfumes,
Pathetic breath of arch and tower.
The ivy on the cloister wall

Waved, gusty, with a silver gleam:
The moon sank low: the billows' fall
In moulds of music shaped my dream.
"In sleep a funeral chaunt I heard,
A de profundis' far below;
On the long grass the rain-drops stirr'd
As when the distant tempests blow.
Then slowly, like a heaving sea,

The graves were troubled all around;
And two by two, and three by three,

The monks ascended from the ground."

In this vision, which rises before the eye of the seer, is shadowed forth the entire story of his country's long ages of suffering and humiliation.

"From sin absolved, redeem'd from tears,

There stood they, beautiful and calm,

The brethren of a thousand years,

With lifted brows and palm to palm!

On heaven they gazed in holy trance;
Low stream'd their aged tresses hoar:
And each transfigured countenance
The Benedictine impress bore.

"By angels borne the Holy Rood

Encircled thrice the church-yard bound:
They paced behind it, paced in blood,

With bleeding feet but foreheads crown'd;
And thrice they sang that hymn benign

Which angels sang when Christ was born,
And thrice I wept ere yet the brine

Shook with the first white flakes of morn.

"Down on the earth my brows I laid;
In these, His saints, I worshipp'd God:
And then return'd that grief which made
My heart since youth a frozen clod.
'O ye,' I wept, whose woes are past,

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Behold these prostrate shrines and stones!
To these can Life return at last?

'Can Spirit lift once more these bones?''

But his doubting faint-heartedness is speedily rebuked.
"The smile of him the end who knows
Went luminous o'er them as I spake ;
Their white locks shone like mountain snows
O'er which the orient mornings break.
They stood they pointed to the west:
And lol where darkness late had lain
Rose many a kingdom's citied crest
Heaven-girt, and imaged in the main!
"Not only these, the fanes o'erthrown.
'Shall rise,' they said, 'but myriads more
The seed-far hence by tempests blown-

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Still sleeps on yon expectant shore.

Send forth, sad Isle, thy reaper bands!
'Assert and pass thine old renown:
'Not here alone-in farthest lands

For thee thy sons shall weave the crown.'

"They spake; and like a cloud down sank
The just and filial grief of years;

And I that peace celestial drank

Which shines but o'er the seas of tears.

Thy mission flash'd before me plain,

O thou by many woes anneal'd!

And I discern'd how axe and chain

Had thy great destinies sign'd and seal'd!

"That seed which grows must seem to die:-
In thee when earthly hope was none,
The heaven-born faith of days gone by,
By martyrdom matured, lived on;
Conceal'd like limbs of royal mould
'Neath some Egyptian pyramid,
Or statued shapes in cities old

Beneath Vesuvian ashes hid."

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And even the miseries of his country-her baffled hopes and ineffectual struggles-are shown in their true significance;-historical evidences that it is only from God the redemption is to come.

"For this cause by a power divine

Each temporal aid was frustrated:
Tirone, Tirconnell, Geraldine—

In vain they fought in vain they bled,
Successive, 'neath th' usurping hand

Sank ill-starr'd Mary, erring James:-
Nor Spain nor France might wield the brand
Which for her own Religion claims.

"Arise, long stricken! mightier far

Are they that fight for God and thee
Than those who head the adverse war!
Sad prophet! raise thy face and see!
Behold, with eyes no longer wrong'd,

By mists the sense exterior breeds,
The hills of heaven all round thee throng'd
With fiery chariots and with steeds!
"The years baptized in blood are thine;
The exile's prayer from many a strand;
The wrongs of those this hour who pine
Poor outcasts on their native land:
Angels and saints from heaven down-bent
Watch thy long conflict without pause;
And the most Holy Sacrament

From all thine altars pleads thy cause!
"O great through Suffering, rise at last
Through kindred Action tenfold great!
Thy future calls on thee thy past
(Its soul survives) to consummate.
Let women weep; let children moan:
Rise, men and brethren, to the fight:
One cause hath Earth, and one aloue:
For it, the cause of God, unite!

"Hope of my country! House of God!
All-Hallows! Blessed feet are those
By which thy courts shall yet be trod
Once more as ere the spoiler rose !
Blessed the winds that waft them forth
To victory o'er the rough sea foam;
That race to God which conquers earth-

Can God forget that race at home?"-p. 295-9.

We cannot help thinking that this is the very ideal of genuine religious poetry. It would be indeed difficult to condense more happily into a few stanzas the world of thoughts which must crowd upon any religious mind in contemplating this truly wonderful Institution, which has grown up, silently and almost by miracle, in the midst of us; which seems to realize, in a generation of worldliness and intellectual pride, all the marvels of the ages of Faith, and whose holy emissaries have already spread themselves over almost every region of earth, carrying to the most distant countries that sacred symbol which their fathers" the brethren of a thousand years"—had followed through ages of persecution,

"With bleeding feet but foreheads crowned."

How wonderfully does this new growth of faith in Ireland realize Mr. de Vere's beautiful illustration:

"The seed which grows must seem to die."

To human eye it was indeed dead in Ireland; and, as far as depended on earthly influences, so it must have remained. But, to follow out Mr. de Vere's illustration, "the seed but slept on the expectant shore," and the tempests which, to man's eye, had seemed to lay the shore waste and desolate, only served in God's wise and holy designs to carry that seed to other lands-to renew in our country the mission of mercy which had once been her highest prerogative. And, while Ireland seems destined, in the new generation of" sowers going out to sow their seed," to "assert and pass her old renown," she may also cherish the humble hope that the blessing of which she is thus made the instrument to others will return tenfold to her own sorrow-stricken bosom.

"Blessed the winds that waft them forth
To victory, o'er the rough sea foam;
That race, to God which conquers earth-
Can God forget that race at home ?"

ART. X.-Lectures on the MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History, delivered at the Catholic University of Ireland, during the Sessions of 1855 and 1856, by Eugene O'Curry, M.R.I.A., Professor of Irish History and Archæology, in the Catholic University of Ireland. Dublin and London: James Duffy. 1861.

THE

HE publication of a reliable analytical account of the manuscripts extant in the Irish language, has long been anxiously desired by students of history and philology, on the Continent as well as in Great Britain and Ireland. The only work hitherto published on this subject was Edward O'Reilly's "Account of Irish Writers," printed in 1820, and professing to give a chronological catalogue of all the productions in the Gaelic language, with which its compiler was acquainted, or relative to which he possessed or could acquire any information.

O'Reilly deserved very high merit for the manner in which he executed this work, when we take into consideration the difficulties which he had to encounter, and the low state of native Irish learning in his day; but it is now admitted that, although skilled in modern Gaelic, he was comparatively unacquainted with the language of the Irish documents of the more remote times. The knowledge requisite for the complete and satisfactory elucidation of these obscure monuments may be said to have been in abeyance since the close of the seventeenth century, when the last hereditary professors of Gaelic learning passed away, and its recovery in our own time, is to be ascribed to the labours of the present accurate and practical school of Irish Archæology, the foundation of which was laid by the establishment of the Antiquarian section of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The first movement of this department was to engage the most competent Gaelic scholars to examine the various accessible Irish manuscripts and documents with the object of compiling an historic topography of Ireland, and the value of the materials existing in the old language of the country, for such a work was displayed in the Ordnance Memoir of the parish of Templemore, in the county of Derry, published in 1837.

After the abandonment of the projected Government publication of the County Memoirs, the historical value of

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