Yet idle as those visions seem,

They were a strange and faithful guide,
When Heaven itself had scarce a gleam
To light my darkened life beside;
And if from grosser guilt escaped

I feel no dying dread, the thanks
Are due unto the Power that shaped
My visions on the Brosna's banks.

And love, I feel, will come at last,
Albeit too late to comfort me;
And fetters from the land be cast,
Though I may not survive to see.
If then the gifted, good, and brave
Admit me to their glorious ranks,
My memory may, though not my grave,
Be green upon the Brosna's banks.

John Frazer.

Clare, the Island.

GRACE O'MALY.

GRACE O'MALY, lady of Sir Richard Burke, styled Mac William Eighter, distinguished herself by a life of wayward adventure which has made her name, in its Gaelic form, Grana Vaile, a personification among the Irish peasantry, of that social state which they still consider preferable to the results of a more advanced civilization. The real acts and character of the heroine are hardly seen through the veil of imagination under which the personified idea exists in the popular mind, and is here presented.

SHE left the close-aired land of trees

And proud Mac William's palace,

For clear, bare Clare's health-salted breeze,

Her oarsmen and her galleys;
And where beside the bending strand

The rock and billow wrestle,
Between the deep sea and the land
She built her Island Castle.

The Spanish captains, sailing by
For Newport, with amazement
Beheld the cannoned longship lie
Moored to the lady's casement;
And, covering coin and cup of gold
In haste their hatches under,
They whispered, ""T is a pirate's hold;
She sails the seas for plunder!"

But no: 't was not for sordid spoil
Of barque or sea-board borough
She ploughed, with unfatiguing toil,
The fluent-rolling furrow;
Delighting, on the broad-backed deep,
To feel the quivering galley
Strain up the opposing hill, and sweep
Down the withdrawing valley;

Or, sped before a driving blast,

By following seas uplifted,

Catch, from the huge heaps heaving past, And from the spray they drifted,

And from the winds that tossed the crest Of each wide-shouldering giant,

The smack of freedom and the zest
Of rapturous life defiant.

For, O, the mainland time was pent
In close constraint and striving,—
So many aims together bent

On winning and on thriving,

There was no room for generous ease,
No sympathy for candor,-
And so she left Burke's buzzing trees,
And all his stony splendor.

For Erin yet had fields to spare,

Where Clew her cincture gathers Isle-gemmed; and kindly clans were there, The fosterers of her fathers: Room there for careless feet to roam Secure from minions' peeping, For fearless mirth to find a home And sympathetic weeping.

*

And music sure was sweeter far

For ears of native nurture,

Than virginals at Castlebar

To tinkling touch of courtier,
When harpers good in hall struck up
The planxty's gay commotion,

Or pipers screamed from pennoned poop
Their pibroch over ocean.

Sweet, when the crimson sunsets glowed,
As earth and sky grew grander,
Adown the grassed, unechoing road.
Atlantic-ward to wander,

Some kinsman's humbler hearth to seek,
Some sick-bed side, it may be,

Or onward reach, with footsteps meek,
The low, gray, lonely abbey:

And where the storied stone beneath
The guise of plant and creature
Had fused the harder lines of faith
In easy forms of nature,

Such forms as tell the master's pains
'Mong Roslin's carven glories,
Or hint the faith of Pictish Thanes
On standing stones of Forres;

The Branch; the weird cherubic Beasts;
The Hart by hounds o'ertaken;

Or, intimating mystic feasts,

The self-resorbent Dragon,—

Mute symbols, though with power endowed

For finer dogmas' teaching,

Than clerk might tell to carnal crowd
In homily or preaching,-

Sit; and while heaven's refulgent show
Grew airier and more tender,

And ocean's gleaming floor below
Reflected loftier splendor,

Suffused with light of lingering faith
And ritual light's reflection,
Discourse of birth and life and death,
And of the resurrection.

But chiefly sweet from morn to eve,
From eve to clear-eyed morning,
The presence of the felt reprieve
From strangers' note and scorning;
No prying, proud, intrusive foes
To pity and offend her;
Such was the life the lady chose;
Such choosing, we commend her.

Samuel Ferguson.

Clondallagh.

THE BOG OF CLONDALLAGH.

RE the orchards of Scurragh

AR

With apples still bending?
Are the wheat-ridge and furrow
On Cappaghneale blending?
Let them bend, let them blend!

Be they fruitful or fallow,

A far dearer old friend

Is the bog of Clondallagh!

Fair Birr of the fountains,
Thy forest and river