Part 2

Songs of our land, ye are with us for ever, The power and the splendour of thrones pass away; But yours is the might of some far flowing river, Through Summer’s bright roses or Autumn’s decay. Ye treasure each voice of the swift passing ages, And truth, which time writeth on leaves or on sand; Ye bring us the bright thoughts of poets and sages, And keep them among us, old songs of our land.

The bards may go down to the place of their slumbers, The lyre of the charmer be hushed in the grave, But far in the future the power of their numbers Shall kindle the hearts of our faithful and brave. It will waken an echo in souls deep and lonely, Like voices of reeds by the summer breeze fanned; It will call up a spirit for freedom, when only Her breathings are heard in the songs of our land.

For they keep a record of those, the true hearted, Who fell with the cause they had vowed to maintain; They show us bright shadows of glory departed, Of love that grew cold, and the hope that was vain. The page may be lost and the pen long forsaken, And weeds may grow wild o’er the brave heart and hand; But ye are still left when all else hath been taken, Like streams in the desert, sweet songs of our land.

Songs of our land, ye have followed the stranger, With power over ocean and desert afar, Ye have gone with our wanderers through distance and danger, And gladdened their path like a home-guiding star. With the breath of our mountains in summers long vanished, And visions that passed like a wave from the sand, With hope for their country and joy from her banished, Ye come to us ever, sweet songs of our land.

The spring time may come with the song of her glory, To bid the green heart of the forest rejoice, But the pine of the mountain, though blasted and hoary, And the rock in the desert, can send forth a voice. It is thus in their triumph for deep desolations, While ocean waves roll or the mountains shall stand, Still hearts that are bravest and best of the nations, Shall glory and live in the songs of their land.

F. B.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

THE POOR AUTHOR.[1]

How many a time do we take up the page of news, or the sheet of literary novelty, without reflecting upon the nameless sources whence their contents have been derived; and yet what a fruitful field do they afford for our deepest contemplation, and our holiest and purest sympathies! There may be there brought together, and to the general eye displayed in undistinguished union, contributions over which the jewelled brow of nobility hath been knitted into the frown of thoughtfulness, and side by side with these, chapters wearily traced out by the tremulous hand of unbefriended genius. Upon the former we do not mean to dwell, but we _would_ wish for a few moments to contemplate the heart-trying condition of the latter.

It is hard to conceive a situation more replete with wretchedness than that of the struggling man of letters--of him who has offered his _all_ before the shrine of long-looked-for fame; who has staked health, and peace, and happiness, that he may win her favour, and who nevertheless holds an uncertain tenure even of his “daily bread.” He is poor and in misery, yet he lives in a world of boundless wealth; but in this very thing is to be found the exquisite agony of his condition. What though haggard want wave around him her lean and famished hands, what avails _that_? Write he must, if it be but to satisfy the cravings of a stinted nature; write he must, though his only reward be the scanty pittance that was greedily covenanted for, and when his due, but grudgingly presented him. And then he must delineate plenty and happiness; he must describe “the short holiday of childhood,” the guileless period of maiden’s modesty, the sunshine of the moment when we first hear that we are loved, the placid calm of peaceful resignation; or it may be, the charms that nature wears in England’s happy vales, the beauty of her scenery, the splendour and wealth of her institutions, the protecting law for the poor man, her admirable code of jurisprudence. All, all these may be the theme of his song, or the subject of his appointed task; but the hours will pass away, and the spirits he has called up will disappear, and his visions of happiness will leave him only, if it be possible, more fearfully alive to his own helplessness--they cannot wake their echo in his soul, and instead of their worthier office of healing and blessedness, they render his wound deeper, deadlier, and more rankling.

And who is there, think you, kind reader, that can feel more acutely the sting of neglect and poverty than the lonely man of genius? Of him how truly may it be said, “he cannot dig, to beg he is ashamed!” His intellect is his world; it is the glorious city in which he abides, the treasure-house wherein his very being is garnered; it is to cultivate it that he has lived; and when _it_ fails him in his wintry hour, is not he indeed “of all men most miserable?”

But let us suppose that his prescribed duty is done, that the required article is written, and that this child of his sick and aching brain is at last dismissed; and can his thoughts follow it? Can his heart bear the reflection that it shall find admission where _he_ durst not make his appearance? He knows that it will be laid on the gorgeous table of the rich and honourable. He knows, too, that it will find its way to the happy fireside, the home where sorrow hath not yet entered--such as once was his own in the days of his childhood. He knows that the unnatural relation who spurned him from his door when he asked the bread of charity, may see it, and without at all knowing the writer, that even _his_ scornful sneer may be thereby relaxed. He knows----but why more? Of _himself_ he knows that want and woe have been his companions, that they are yet encamped around him, and that they will only end their ministry “where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest!”

This is by no means--oh, would that it were so!--an ideal picture. In LONDON, amid her “wilderness of building,” there are _at this hour_ hundreds whose sufferings could corroborate it, and whose necessities could give the stamping conviction to its truth. We were ourselves cognizant of the history of one young man’s life, his early and buoyant hopes, his subsequent misfortunes and miseries, and his early and unripe death, to all of which, anything that is painted above bears but a faint and indistinct resemblance. He was an Irishman, and gifted with the characteristics of his country--a romantic genius, united with feelings the most tremulous, and tender, and impassioned. Many years have since passed away, and over and over again have the wild flowers sprung up, and bloomed, and withered over his narrow resting place, no unmeet emblem of

“The poor inhabitant below!”

but never has the memory of his sad story faded from us--never may it fade! His lot was unhappy, and he “perished in his pride.” His reason eventually bowed before his intense sufferings; and excepting the few minutes just before his spirit passed away, his last hours were uncheered by the glimpse of that glorious intellect which had promised to crown him with a chaplet of undying fame. Even as it was, he had attracted notice; his writings were beginning to make for him a name; and the Prime Minister of England did not think it beneath him to visit his lonely lodging, and to endeavour to raise his sinking soul with the promise of almost unlimited patronage. But the restorative came too late: the poison had worked its portion, and in the guise of Fame, DEATH approached;

“And as around the brow Of that ill-fated votary he wreath’d The crown of victory, silently he twined The cypress with the laurel: at his foot Perish’d the MARTYR STUDENT.”

We have nothing to add to this. Had we not hoped to strike a chord of sympathy in our reader’s heart, we should never have even advanced so far, or have uplifted the veil so as to exhibit the “latter end” of such. Reader, in conclusion, you know not the toil, and trouble, and bodily labour, and mental inquietude, that furnish you each week with the price of YOUR PENNY!

S. H.

[1] The writer, as will be seen, has had in view solely the literature of London.

PADDY CORBETT’S FIRST SMUGGLING TRIP.

“Then on the ’tither hand present her, A blackguard smuggler right behint her, And cheek-for-chow a chuffle vintner, Colleaguin’ join.”----BURNS.

No order of men has experienced severer treatment from the various classes into which society is divided, than that of excisemen, or, as they are vulgarly denominated, guagers. If, unlike the son of the Hebrew patriarch, their hand is not raised against every man, yet they may be truly said to inherit a portion of Ishmael’s destiny, for every man’s hand is against them. The cordial and unmitigated hostility of the lower classes follows the guager at every point of his dangerous career, whether his pursuit be smuggled goods, potteen, or unpermitted parliament. Literary men have catered to the gratification of the public at his expense, by exhibiting him in their stories of Irish life under such circumstances that the good-natured reader scarcely knows whether to laugh or weep most at his ludicrous distress. The varied powers of rhyme have been pressed into the service by the man of genius and the lover of fun. The “Diel’s awa’ wi’ the Exciseman” of Burns, and the Irishman’s “Paddy was up to the Guager,” will ever remain to prove the truth of the foregoing assertion.

But the humble historian of this unpretending narrative is happy to record one instance of retributory justice on the part of an individual of this devoted class, which would have procured him a statue in the temple of Nemesis, had his lot been cast among the ancients. Many instances of the generosity, justice, and self-abandonment of the guager, have come to the writer’s knowledge, and these acts of virtue shall not be utterly forgotten. The readers of the Irish Penny Journal shall blush to find men, whose qualities might reconcile the estranged misanthrope to the human family, rendered the butt of ridicule, and their many virtues lost and unknown.

On a foggy evening in the November of a year of which Irish tradition, not being critically learned in chronology, has not furnished the date, two men pursued their way along a bridle road that led through a wild mountain tract in a remote and far westward district of Kerry. The scene was savage and lonely. Far before them extended the broad Atlantic, upon whose wild and heaving bosom the lowering clouds seemed to settle in fitful repose. Round and beyond, on the dark and barren heath, rose picturesque masses of rock--the finger-stones which nature, it would seem, in some wayward frolic, had tossed into pinnacled heaps of strange and multiform construction. About their base, and in the deep interstices of their sides, grew the holly and the hardy mountain ash, and on their topmost peaks frisked the agile goat in all the pride of unfettered liberty.

These men, each of whom led a Kerry pony that bore an empty sack along the difficult pathway, were as dissimilar in form and appearance as any two of Adam’s descendants possibly could be. One was a low-sized, thickset man; his broad shoulders and muscular limbs gave indication of considerable strength; but the mild expression of his large blue eyes and broad, good-humoured countenance, told, as plain as the human face divine could, that the fierce and stormy passions of our kind never exerted the strength of that muscular arm in deeds of violence. A jacket and trousers of brown frieze, and a broad-brimmed hat made of that particular grass named _thraneen_, completed his dress. It would be difficult to conceive a more strange or unseemly figure than the other: he exceeded in height the usual size of men; but his limbs, which hung loosely together, and seemed to accompany his emaciated body with evident reluctance, were literally nothing but skin and bone; his long conical head was thinly strewed with rusty-coloured hair that waved in the evening breeze about a haggard face of greasy, sallow hue, where the rheumy sunken eye, the highly prominent nose, the thin and livid lip, half disclosing a few rotten straggling teeth, significantly seemed to tell how disease and misery can attenuate the human frame. He moved, a living skeleton: yet, strange to say, the smart nag which he led was hardly able to keep pace with the swinging unequal stride of the gaunt pedestrian, though his limbs were so fleshless that his clothes flapped and fluttered around him as he stalked along the chilly moor.

As the travellers proceeded, the road, which had lately been pent within the huge masses of granite, now expanded sufficiently to allow them a little side-by-side discourse; and the first-mentioned person pushed forward to renew a conversation which seemed to have been interrupted by the inequalities of the narrow pathway.

“An’ so ye war saying, Shane Glas,” he said, advancing in a straight line with his spectre-looking companion, “ye war saying that face of yours would be the means of keeping the guager from our taste of tibaccy.”

“The devil resave the guager will ever squint at a lafe of it,” says Shane Glas, “if I’m in yer road. There was never a cloud over Tim Casey for the twelve months I thravelled with him; and if the foolish man had had me the day his taste o’ brandy was taken, he’d have the fat boiling over his pot to-day, ’tisn’t that I say it myself.”

“The sorrow from me, Shane Glas,” returned his friend with a hearty laugh, and a roguish glance of his funny eye at the angular and sallow countenance of the other, “the sorrow be from me if it’s much of Tim’s _fat_ came in your way, at any rate, though I don’t say as much for the _graise_.”

“It’s laughing at the crucked side o’ yer mouth ye’d be. I’m thinking, Paddy Corbett,” said Shane Glas, “if the thief of a guager smelt your taste o’ tibaccy--Crush Chriest duin! and I not there to fricken him off, as I often done afore.”

“But couldn’t we take our lafe o’ tibaccy on our ponies’ backs in panniers, and throw a few hake or some oysters over ’em, and let on that we’re fish-joulting?”

“Now, mark my words, Paddy Corbett: there’s a chap in Killarney as knowledgeable as a jailor; Ould Nick wouldn’t bate him in roguery. So put your goods in the thruckle, shake a wisp over ’em, lay me down over that in the fould o’ the quilt, and say that I kem from Decie’s counthry to pay a round at Tubber-na-Treenoda, and that I caught a faver, and that ye’re taking me home to die, for the love o’ God and yer mother’s sowl. Say, that Father Darby, who prepared me, said I had the worst spotted faver that kem to the counthry these seven years. If that doesn’t fricken him off, ye’re sowld” (betrayed.)

By this time they had reached a deep ravine, through which a narrow stream pursued its murmuring course. Here they left the horses, and, furnished with the empty sacks, pursued their onward route till they reached a steep cliff. Far below in the dark and undefined space sounded the hollow roar of the heaving ocean, as its billowy volume broke upon its granite barrier, and formed along the dark outline a zone of foam, beneath whose snowy crest the ever-impelled and angry wave yielded its last strength in myriad flashes of phosphoric light, that sparkled and danced in arrowy splendour to the wild and sullen music of the dashing sea.

“Paddy Corbett, avick,” said Shane Glas, “pull yer legs fair an’ aisy afther ye; one inch iv a mistake, achorra, might sind ye a long step of two hundred feet to furnish a could supper for the sharks. The sorrow a many would vinture down here, avourneen, barring the red fox of the hill and the honest smuggler; they are both poor persecuted crathurs, but God has given them _gumpshun_ to find a place of shelter for the fruits of their honest industhry, glory be to his holy name!”

Shane Glas was quite correct in his estimate of the height of this fearful cliff. It overhung the deep Atlantic, and the narrow pathway wound its sinuous way round and beneath so many frightful precipices, that had the unpractised feet of Paddy Corbett threaded the mazy declivity in the clear light of day, he would in all probability have performed the saltation, and furnished the banquet of which Shane Glas gave him a passing hint. But ignorance of his fearful situation saved his life. His companion, in addition to his knowledge of this secret route, had a limberness of muscle, and a pliancy of uncouth motion, that enabled him to pursue every winding of the awful slope with all the activity of a weasel. In their descent, the wild sea-fowl, roused by the unusual approach of living things from their couch of repose, swept past on sounding wing into the void and dreary space abroad, uttering discordant cries, which roused the more distant slumberers of the rocks. As they farther descended round the foot of the cliff, where the projecting crags formed the sides of a little cove, a voice, harsh and threatening, demanded “who goes there?” The echo of the questioner’s interrogation, reverberating along the receding wall of rocks, would seem to a fanciful ear the challenge of the guardian spirit of the coast pursuing his nightly round. The wild words blended in horrid unison through the mid air with the sigh of waving wings and discordant screams, which the echoes of the cliffs multiplied a thousand fold, as though all the demons of the viewless world had chosen that hour and place of loneliness to give their baneful pinions and shrieks of terror to the wind.

“Who goes there?” again demanded this strange warder of the savage scene; and again the scream of the sea bird and the echo of human tones sounded wildly along the sea.

“A friend, avick machree,” replied Shane Glas. “Paudh, achorra, what beautiful lungs you have! But keep yer voice a thrifle lower, ma bouchal, or the wather-guards might be after staling a march on ye, sharp as ye are.”

“Shane Glas, ye slinging thief,” rejoined the other, “is that yerself? Honest man,” addressing the new comer, “take care of that talla-faced schamer. My hand for ye, Shane will see his own funeral yet, for the devil another crathur, barring a fox, could creep down the cliff till the moon rises, any how. But I know what saved yer bacon; he that’s born to be hanged--you can repate the rest o’ the thrue ould saying yerself, ye poor atomy!”

“Chorpan Doul,” said Shane Glas, rather chafed by the severe raillery of the other, “is it because to shoulder an ould gun that an honest man can’t tell you what a Judy ye make o’ yerself, swaggering like a raw Peeler, and frightening every shag on the cliff with yer foolish bull-scuttering! Make way there, or I’ll stick that ould barrel in yez--make way there, ye spalpeen!”

“Away to yer masther with ye, ye miserable disciple,” returned the unsparing jiber. “Arrah, by the hole o’ my coat, afther you have danced yer last jig upon nothing, with yer purty himp cravat on, I’ll coax yer miserable carcass from the hangman to frighten the crows with.”

When the emaciated man and his companion had proceeded a few paces along the narrow ledge that lay between the steep cliff and the sea, they entered a huge excavation in the rock, which seemed to have been formed by volcanic agency, when the infant world heaved in some dire convulsion of its distempered bowels. The footway of the subterranean vault was strewn with the finest sand, which, hardened by frequent pressure, sent the tramp of the intruder’s feet reverberating along the gloomy vacancy. On before gleamed a strong light, which, piercing the surrounding darkness, partially revealed the sides of the cavern, while the far space beneath the lofty roof, impervious to the powerful ray, extended dark and undefined. Then came the sound of human voices mixed in uproarious confusion; and anon, within a receding angle, a strange scene burst upon their view.

Before a huge fire which lighted all the deep recess of the high over-arching rock that rose sublime as the lofty roof of a Gothic cathedral, sat five wild-looking men of strange semi-nautical raiment. Between them extended a large sea-chest, on which stood an earthen flaggon, from which one, who seemed the president of the revel, poured sparkling brandy into a single glass that circled in quick succession, while the jest and laugh and song swelled in mingled confusion, till the dinsome cavern rang again to the roar of the subterranean bacchanals.

“God save all here!” said Shane Glas, approaching the festive group. “O, wisha! Misther Cronin, but you and the boys is up to fun. The devil a naither glass o’ brandy: no wonder ye should laugh and sing over it. How goes the Colleen Ayrigh, and her Bochal Fadda, that knows how to bark so purty at thim plundering thieves, the wather-guards?”

“Ah! welcome, Shane,” replied the person addressed; “the customer you’ve brought may be depinded on, I hope. Sit down, boys.”

“’Tis ourselves that will, and welkim,” rejoined Shane. “Depinded on! why, ’scure to the dacenther father’s son from this to himself than Paddy Corbett, ’tisn’t that he’s to the fore.”

“Come, taste our brandy, lads, while I help you to some ham,” said the smuggler. “Shane, you have the stomach of a shark, the digestion of an ostrich, and the _gout_ of an epicure.”

“By gar ye may say that wid yer own purty mouth, Misther Cronin,” responded the garrulous Shane. “Here, gintlemin, here is free thrade to honest min, an’ high hangin’ to all informers! O! murdher maura (smacking his lips), how it tastes! O, avirra yealish (laying his bony hand across his shrunken paunch), how it hates the stummuck!”

“You are welcome to our mansion, Paddy Corbett,” interrupted the hospitable master of the cavern; “the house is covered in, the rent paid, and the cruiskeen of brandy unadulterated; so eat, drink, and be merry. When the moon rises, we can proceed to business.”

Paddy Corbett was about to return thanks when the interminable Shane Glas again broke in.

“I never saw a man, beggin’ yer pardon, Misther Cronin, lade a finer or rolickinger life than your own four bones--drinking an’ coorting on land, and spreading the canvass of the Colleen Ayrigh over the salt say, for the good o’ thrade. _Manim syr Shyre_, if I had Trig Dowl the piper forninst me there, near the cruiskeen, but I’d drink an’ dance till morning. But here’s God bless us, an’ success to our thrip, Paddy, avrahir;” and he drained his glass. Then when many a successive round went past, and the famished-looking wretch grew intoxicated, he called out at the top of his voice, “Silence for a song,” and in a tone somewhat between the squeak of a pig and the drone of a bagpipe, poured forth a lyric, of which we shall present one or two stanzas to the reader.

I thravelled France an’ Spain, an’ likewise in Asia, Fal de ral, &c &c. And spint many a long day at my aise in Arabia, Fal de ral, &c &c. Pur-shoeing of their ways, their sates an’ their farims, But sich another place as the lakes o’ Killarney I never saw elsewhere, the air being most charming, Fal de ral, &c &c. There the Muses came to make it their quarthers, Fal de ral, &c &c. An’ for their ray-creation they came from Castalia, Fal de ral, &c &c. With congratulations playing for his lordship, A viewing of that place, I mean sweet Killarney, That the music been so sweet, the lake became enchanted, Fal de ral, &c &c.