O'er which we hang as the bright bow of foam
Above the never-filled receptacle
Hangs seven-hued, where the endless cataract leaps.
Oh! now I guess why you have summoned me,
Headlands and heights, to your companionship.
Confess that I this day am needful to you!
The heavens were loaded with great light, the winds
Brought you calm summer from a hundred fields,
All night the stars had pricked you to desire,
The imminent joy at its full season flowered,
There was a consummation, the broad wave
Toppled and fell. And had ye voice for this?
Sufficient song to unburden the urged breast?
A pastoral pipe to play? a lyre to touch?
The brightening glory of the heath and gorse
Could not appease your passion, nor the cry
Of this wild bird that flits from bush to bush.
Me therefore you required, a voice for song,
A pastoral pipe to play, a lyre to touch.
I recognise your bliss to find me here;
The sky at morning, when the sun upleaps,
Demands her atom of intense melody,
Her point of quivering passion and delight,
And will not let the lark's heart be at ease.
Take me, the brain with various subtile fold,
The breast that knows swift joy, the vocal lips ;
I yield you here the cunning instrument
Between your knees; now let the plectrum fall !
ABOARD THE 'SEA-SWALLOW'
THE gloom of the sea-fronting cliffs
Lay on the water, violet-dark;
The pennon drooped, the sail fell in,
And slowly moved our bark.
A golden day; the summer dreamed
In heaven and on the whispering sea,
Within our hearts the summer dreamed ;
The hours had ceased to be.
Then rose the girls with bonnets loosed,
And shining tresses lightly blown,
Alice and Adela, and sang
A song of Mendelssohn.
Oh! sweet and sad and wildly clear,
Through summer air it sinks and swells,
Wild with a measureless desire
And sad with all farewells.
LET them go by-the heats, the doubts, the strife;
I can sit here and care not for them now,
Dreaming beside the glimmering wave of life
Once more I know not how.
There is a murmur in my heart; I hear
Faint-oh! so faint-some air I used to sing;
It stirs my sense; and odours dim and dear
The meadow-breezes bring.
Just this way did the quiet twilights fade
Over the fields and happy homes of men,
While one bird sang as now, piercing the shade,
Long since I know not when.
EDMUND JOHN ARMSTRONG
THE elder brother of George Francis Savage-Armstrong (q.v.) by whom the story of his short life has been written and his literary remains collected (1877). His fine character and brilliant intellect appear to have made a deep impression on his contemporaries, and his death at the age of twenty-three was accompanied with a widespread regret and sense of loss such as rarely attend the passing-away of so young a writer. Armstrong was born in Dublin in 1841, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1859. Though apparently of strong physique, and, like his
brother, a great lover of outdoor life, he was attacked by consumption and died in 1865.
Mr. E. J. Armstrong's POEMS have been posthumously published.
ON Euripides' plays we debated,
In College, one chill winter night;
A student rose up, while we waited
For more intellectual light.
As he stood, pale and anxious, before us,
Three words, like a soft summer wind,
Went past us and through us and o'er us-
A whisper low-breathed: He is blind!'
And in many a face there was pity,
In many an eye there were tears;
For his words were not buoyant or witty,
As fitted his fresh summer years.
And he spoke once or twice, as none other
Could speak, of a woman's pure ways—
He remembered the face of his mother
Ere darkness had blighted his days.
I HEAR a distant clarion blare
The smouldering battle flames anew ;
A noise of onset shakes the air
Dear woods and quiet vales, adieu !
Weird crag, where I was wont to gaze
On the far sea's aërial hue,
Below a veil of glimmering haze
At morning's breezy prime-adieu !
Clear runnel, bubbling under boughs
Of odorous lime and darkling yew,
Where I have lain on banks of flowers
And dreamed the livelong noon-adieu !
And, ah ye lights and shades that ray
Those orbs of brightest summer blue,
That haunted me by night and day
For happy moons-adieu! adieu !
WITH heaving breast the fair-haired Eileen sang
The mystic, sweet, low-vowelled Celtic rhyme
Of Fionnuala and her phantom lover,
Who wooed her in the fairy days of yore
Beneath the sighing pines that gloom the waves
Of Luggalà and warbling Anamoe—
And how he whispered softly vows of love,
While the pale moonbeam glimmered down and lit
The cataract's flashing foam, and elves and fays
Played o'er the dewy harebells, wheeling round
The dappled foxglove in a flickering maze
Of faint aërial flame; and the wild sprites
Of the rough storm were bound in charmèd sleep- -
And how the lovely phantom lowly knelt,
And pleaded with such sweet-tongued eloquence,
Such heavenly radiance on his lips and eyes,
That Fionnuala, blushing, all in tears,
Breaking the sacred spell that held her soul,
Fell on his bosom and confessed her love-
And how the demon changed, and flashed upon her
In all his hideous beauty, and she sank
In fearful slumbers, and, awaking, found
Her form borne upward in the yielding air;
And, floating o'er a dark blue lake, beheld
The reflex of a swan, white as the clouds
That fringe the noonday sun, and heard a voice,
As from a far world, shivering through the air :
'Thou shalt resume thy maiden form once more
When yon great Temples, piled upon the hills
With rugged slabs and pillars, shall be whelmed
In ruin, and their builders' names forgot!'-
And how she knew her phantom lover spoke,
And how she floated over lake and fell
A hundred years, and sighed her mournful plaint
Day after day, till the first mass-bell pealed
Its silvery laughter amid Erin's hills,
And a young warrior found her, with the dew
Of morning on her maiden lips, asleep
In the green woods of warbling Anamoe,
And wooed and won her for his blushing bride.
GEORGE FRANCIS SAVAGE-ARMSTRONG
MR. ARMSTRONG is one of the most fertile of Irish writers of the present day. He has given himself to poetry in that spirit of single-hearted devotion in which great works are achieved; and his array of volumes-containing dramas, lyrics, narrative poems, odes, meditations, and what not-represent a strenuous attempt to pay what Baudelaire calls the poet's ransom by the harvest of his art.
The earliest years of Mr. Armstrong were spent in the southern part of the County Wicklow, and as in the case of his elder brother, Edmund J. Armstrong (q.v.), whom he accompanied in endless rambles and explorations
... Along the stormful shore,
Roaming underneath the lonely woodlands' branches old and hoar,
Where the golden rills of Wicklow foaming
Flash from rock to rock through many a dark ravine,
Where the crags above the hollows and the lakes in splendour lean,
this region with its singular and pathetic beauty was the true nursing-mother of his poetic gift. The following passage from a letter which I am permitted to quote gives the clue to the character of his whole poetic work: The love of Nature led in my brother's case and in mine to the love of poetry. At the age of twelve I had read all Shakespeare's plays and a vast deal of other poetry and prose besides. I used to spend hours,
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