You were turbulent and haughty, proud and keen as Spanish

steel

But who had right of these, if not our Ulster's Chief, O'Neill,
Who reared aloft the Bloody Hand' until it paled the sun,
And shed such glory on Tyrone as chief had never done?

He was 'turbulent' with traitors; he was 'haughty' with the foe;

6

He was 'cruel,' say ye, Saxons! Ay! he dealt ye blow for blow! He was rough' and 'wild'—and who's not wild to see his hearthstone razed?

He was merciless as fire'—ah, ye kindled him—he blazed !

He was 'proud'—yes, proud of birthright, and because he flung

away

Your Saxon stars of princedom, as the rock does mocking spray. He was wild, insane for vengeance--ay! and preached it till

Tyrone

Was ruddy, ready, wild, too, with Red hands' to clutch their

own.

'The Scots are on the border, Shane!' Ye Saints, he makes no breath;

I remember when that cry would wake him up almost from death.
Art truly dead and cold? O Chief! art thou to Ulster lost?
'Dost hear-dost hear? By Randolph led, the troops the Foyle
have crossed!'

He's truly dead! He must be dead! nor is his ghost about-
And yet no tomb could hold his spirit tame to such a shout:
The pale face droopeth northward-ah! his soul must loom up

there,

By old Armagh, or Antrim's glynns, Lough Foyle, or Bann the Fair!

I'll speed me Ulster-wards—your ghost must wander there, proud Shane,

In search of some O'Neill, through whom to throb its hate again.

JOHN WALSH

THIS poet has been greatly neglected by his countrymen, and he appears in very few Irish anthologies. Yet he wrote some admirably simple and touching pieces. His poems, which mostly appeared in The Nation and the Waterford papers, have never been collected. He was a schoolmaster, like Edward Walsh, and was born at Cappoquin, County Waterford, on April 1, 1835, and died at Cashel, County Tipperary, in February 1881.

To MY PROMISED WIFE

DEAR maiden, when the sun is down,
And darkness creeps above the town,
The woodlands' green is changed to brown,
And the mild light

Melting beneath the tall hills' frown
Steals into night,

I don an honest coat of grey,
And, setting stupid care at bay,
Across the fields of scented hay
I stroll along,

Humming some quaint old Irish lay
Or simple song.

And when, dear maid, I come to you,
A laughing eye of brightest blue,
And flushing cheek of crimson hue,
Tell whom I greet,

And bounds a little heart as true
As ever beat.

The green grass on the river-side,
The full moon dancing on the tide,
The half-blown rose that tries to hide
Her blush in dew,

Are fair; but none, my promised bride,
As fair as you,

And though, dear love, our gathered store
Of gold is small, the brighter ore

Of love's deep mine we'll seek the more,
And truth shall be

The guard beside our cottage-door,

Astor mo chroidhe!

DRIMIN DONN DILIS1

OH! drimin donn dilis! the landlord has come,
Like a foul blast of death has he swept o'er our home;
He has withered our roof-tree-beneath the cold sky,
Poor, houseless, and homeless, to-night must we lie.

My heart it is cold as the white winter's snow;
My brain is on fire, and my blood's in a glow.
Oh! drimin donn dilis, 'tis hard to forgive

When a robber denies us the right we should live.

With my health and my strength, with hard labour and toil,
I dried the wet marsh and I tilled the harsh soil;

I moiled the long day through, from morn until even,
And I thought in my heart I'd a foretaste of heaven.

The summer shone round us above and below,
The beautiful summer that makes the flowers blow:
Oh! 'tis hard to forget it, and think I must bear
That strangers shall reap the reward of my care.

Your limbs they were plump then-your coat it was silk,
And never was wanted the mether of milk ;

For freely it came in the calm summer's noon,

While you munched to the time of the old milking croon.

How often you left the green side of the hill,
To stretch in the shade and to drink of the rill!
And often I freed you before the grey dawn
From your snug little pen at the edge of the bawn.

1 'Dear brown cow.'

But they racked and they ground me with tax and with rent,
Till my heart it was sore and my life-blood was spent :
To-day they have finished, and on the wide world

With the mocking of fiends from my home I was hurled.

I knelt down three times for to utter a prayer,

But my heart it was seared, and the words were not there;
Oh! wild were the thoughts through my dizzy head came,
Like the rushing of wind through a forest of flame.

I bid you, old comrade, a long last farewell;

For the gaunt hand of famine has clutched us too well;
It severed the master and you, my good cow,
With a blight on his life and a brand on his brow.

D. MACALEESE

BORN in 1833 at Randalstown, County Antrim, Mr. MacAleese worked for some time at his father's trade-that of a shoemaker-but his taste for letters led him into journalism, where he began as printer's reader on a Belfast paper. He is now editor and proprietor of The People's Advocate, Monaghan, and was returned to Parliament for North Monaghan in 1895.

A MEMORY

ADOWN the leafy lane we two,

One brown October eve, together sped;
The clustered nuts were hanging overhead,

And ever and anon, the deep woods through,
The grey owl piped his weird Tu-whut! tu-whoo!'

Adown the leafty lane we two

Strolled on and on, till sank the setting sun
In sapphire beauty round Tyleden dun,
And shadows long and longer round us grew;
Had earth a pair so happy as we two?

Adown the leafy lane we two

Loitered and laughed, and laughed and loitered more,
And talked of 'gentle folk' and fairy lore.
Till, one by one, from out the vaulted blue,
The diamond stars came softly forth to view.

Adown the leafy lane we two

Saw figures flitting 'mong the quicken trees,
Tall Finian forms, holding high revelries,
And dogs, like Bran in sinew and in thew,
Chased shadowy deer the vista'd woodlands through.

Adown the leafy lane we two

Heard fairy pipes play fairy music sweet,
And now and then the tramp of fairy feet,
And screams of laughter 'mong the fairy crew-
The elves and fays that haunt old Corradhu.

Adown the leafy lane no more

We two go loitering in the Autumn eves,
When merry reapers tie the golden sheaves,
And kine come lowing to the cottage door,
Where ready pails await the milky store.

Astoireen, no, far, far away,

Secluded lies that golden-memoried lane,

Where ceaseless flows the bright and sparkling Main
Through scenes of beauty to the storied Neagh-
Here by the Hudson's banks we two grow grey.

JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU

LE FANU was certainly one of the most remarkable of Irish writers. In UNCLE SILAS, in his wonderful tales of the supernatural, and in a short and less known but most masterly story, THE ROOM IN THE DRAGON VOLANT, he touched the springs of terror and suspense as perhaps no other writer of fiction in the