Page:The poem-book of the Gael - Hull.djvu/39

men for rescuing and printing, at a time when little value was placed upon such things, these stores of Irish song. But the translations suited better the taste of their own day than of ours; we cannot read them now, nor do they in the slightest way represent the verse they are intended to reproduce. Naturally, too, it is easier to give the spirit and language of a serious poem than that of a humorous one in another tongue, so that the more playful verse has been neglected.

It may be thought that this book is overweighted by religious and love poems; but in a collection essentially lyrical, religion and love must ever be the two chief themes. In Ireland, the inner spirit of the national genius ever spoke, and still speaks, through them.

Among the people of the quiet places where few strangers come, and where night passes into day and day again to night with little change of thought or outward emotion, simple sorrows and simple pleasures have still time to ripen into poetry. The grief that came to-day will not pass away with a new grief to-morrow; it will impress its groove, straight and deep, upon the heart that feels it, lying there without hope of a summer growth to hide its furrow. The long monotonous days, the dark unbroken evenings are the nurseries of sorrow; the white open roads are the highways of hope or the paths for the wayfaring thoughts of despair. The stranger who came one day comes again no more, though we watch the long white track never so earnestly; the boy or girl who went that way to foreign lands has not thrown his or her shadow across the road again. Where the turf fire rises curling and blue into the air, where the young girl stands waiting by the winding "boreen," where the old woman croons over the hearth, there we