Irish

“ Ah, that Irish! How frequently do circumstances, at first sight the most trivial and unimportant, exercise a mighty and permanent influence on our habits and pursuits!—how frequently is a stream turned aside from its natural course by some little rock or knoll, causing it to make an abrupt turn! On a wild road in Ireland I had heard Irish spoken for the first time; and I was seized with a desire to learn Irish, the acquisition of which, in my case, became the stepping-stone to other languages. ”

“ Who were those Celts, of whose race the Irish are to-day perhaps the most striking representatives, and upon whose past the ancient literature of Ireland can best throw light?
Like the Greeks, like the Romans, like the English, this great people, which once ruled over a fourth of Europe, sprang from a small beginning and from narrow confines. ”

“ I have but one wish under heaven, and that is for the liberty and prosperity of Ireland. I am for leaving England to the English, Scotland to the Scotch; but we must have Ireland for the Irish. I will not be content until I see not a single man in any office, from the lowest constable to the lord chancellor, but Irishmen. This is our land, and we must have it. ”

“ You say that Ireland is a millstone about our necks; that it would be better for us if Ireland were sunk at the bottom of the sea; that the Irish are a nation of irreclaimable savages and barbarians. How often have I heard these sentiments fall from the plump and thoughtless squire, and from the thriving English shopkeeper, who has never felt the rod of an Orange master upon his back. Ireland a millstone about your neck! ”

“ The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave, rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of free knowledge and candid thinking. ”

“ The people stood up respectfully as she came forward, and while each made his or her humble obeisance, a muttered sound ran through them, in Irish, of wonder and astonishment at her grace and beauty; for, whatever be the privations of the Irish peasant, however poor and humble his lot in life, two faculties pertain to him like instincts—a relish for drollery, and an admiration for beauty—these are claims that ever find acknowledgment from him, and in his enjoyment of either, he can forget himself, and all the miseries of his condition. ”

“ On account of this perpetual silence about Ireland, all Europe looks upon her as under a constant fog, the seat of dulness, and the dismal mansion of ignorance and distress. Scarce any people are taken for mere Irish, either in England or on the continent, but the vulgar of the country, and the few unfortunate exiles. ”

“ The characteristics which we deem essentially Irish are not distinctly Irish; they are merely more widely distributed among the Irish. Wit, humor, poesy, melancholy, loyalty to faith and fatherland, patience under trial and hardship, daring in adventure, valor in battle,—these are found in all lands, among all peoples, though the Irish have displayed them so conspicuously in all the centuries that some, aye, many of our own people have come to regard them as exclusively theirs. ”

“ For the present nothing better can be done than to paraphrase the Songs of the Nation into racy and musical Irish; though a time may come when someone born amid the Irish tongue, reared amid Gaelic associations, instructed in the state of modern Ireland, and filled with passion and prophecy, shall sing the union and destiny of all the races settled on Irish ground, till the vales of Munster and the cliffs of Connaught ring with the words of Nationality. ”

“ And our surprise would be the measure of the deepest difference between England and Ireland. To express it in the same idle imagery it would be the fact that even a casement is a part of a house, as a kettle is a part of a household. Every word in Irish is a household word. ”

“ None who has ever breathed the air of Ireland can breathe in another land without memory of the ancient harp of Ireland. But it is as a memory-deep, wonderful, and abiding, yet a memory. I sometimes think I have forgotten, and then I hear coming through this Virginia the notes of some old Irish melody, the song of some wayfarer of Mayo or Connemara, and I know then that Ireland is persuasive and perpetual ”

“ Anything absolutely first-rately done of its kind is always very refreshing, and I [280] do not see how such national songs could be done much better. They are Irish to the core!
Irish in local colour—in wealth of word variety—in poetry of the earliest and freshest type—in shallow passion like a pebbly brook!—and in a certain comicality and shrewdness. Irish—I was going to say in refinement, but that is not the word—modern literature is full of refinements—but Irish in the surpassingly Irish grace of purity, so rare a quality in modern verse! ”

“ It is Irish because its sons and grandsons have made their weight felt in every walk of life, and are commemorating the conditions that were given to them by their sires. It is historic because it is our pleasure, our pride and our privilege to record the achievements of Irishmen in every walk of life, and to make them better known in the history of today and in the history to come, and to give force and color and emphasis to what they have done for our Republic. ”

“ From the ideas I have formed of the primeval grandeur of Ireland, I should almost expect to see a Balbec or Palmyra arising amidst these stupendous mountains and picturesque scenes.”
“My dear sir,” he replied, “a country may be civilized, enlightened, and even learned and ingenious, without attaining to any considerable perfection in those arts, which give to posterity sensible memorials of its past splendour. The ancient Irish, like the modern, had more soul, more genius than worldly prudence, or cautious, calculating forethought. ”

“ Let us first judge ourselves fairly, and then judge the Irish, remembering always that they are more imaginative and sentimental, and need some centre of national feeling and affection more than ourselves. ”

“ They are sufficiently familiar with the British vernacular to lie with the easy grace of a person speaking his mother-tongue. They are a gifted people, and a patriotic—at least they tell us so, and the Irish, they say, is the queen of languages, the softest, the sweetest, the most poetical, the most sonorous, the most soul-satisfying. ”

“ It is very certain that Ireland of all countries, if left to itself, would never of its own will allow history to lie in a backwater among the flotsam of the current. History was the early study of the Irish, the inspiration of their poets and writers. Every tribesman of old knew, not only the great deeds and the famous places of his own clan, but of the whole of Ireland. In the lowliest cabin the songs of Irish poets lived on for hundreds of years, and dying fathers left to sons as their chief inheritance the story of their race. ”

“ The works of the one, are read and admired wherever the language in which they are written extends, the name and writings of the other are wholly unknown, except to the solitary Irish scholar, who may happen to pore over the mouldering manuscripts in which these disjecta membra are preserved. But such has been the fate of Ireland. Its native genius, learning, and talents, have been doomed to languish in obscurity. ”

“ Truly has it been said of the American Irish that they were with the Republic at its birth, guarded its infancy, rejoiced in its growth and prosperity, and will endure with it until the end, which comes, in the fulness of time, to even the greatest among nations. ”

“ Now the English, who settled in Ireland at that time, soon grew more like Irish than Englishmen, and they were as ready to quarrel with any new English that went to settle there as the old Irish had been to quarrel with them ”

“ It was from the time when he first began to patronize the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established. ”

“ When you think of the way the British government treats the Irish, and then you look on while an orderly sergeant calls the roll of a company, and find that nine out of ten answer to Irish names, and only one out of ten has the cockney accent, you feel that the Irish ought to rule England, and an O'Rourke or a O'Shaunnessy should take the place of King Edward. ”

“ Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. ”

“ The wild Irish do say that they haunt the pools; and they do no manner of harm, sir, when you are coming up to them; but when you are past, sir, they jump on your back like to apes, sir,—and who can tackle that manner of fiend? ”

“ The Irish at home are proud to know, from the mouths of independent and even hostile witnesses, that though a stormy ocean separates their exiled brethren from the land of their affections, they are still as Irish in heart and feeling as ever ”

“ The Irish, however, present an exception to this rule. I have scarce ever met a thorough-paced Irishman whose oddities totally deserted him; the humorous idiom of his language, and the rich flavour of his dialect, are intrinsic, and adhere as steadily to his tongue as fancy does to his brain, and eccentricity to his actions.
An Irishman is toujours an Irishman, and wheresoever he “puts up” seldom fails to find one inveterate enemy—“himself.” ”

“ On the one hand, then, we have the ancient universal Irish traditions, backed up by all the authority of the bards, the annalists and the shanachies, that the Milesians—who are the ancestors of most of the present Irish—came to Ireland direct from Spain; and, on the other hand, we have these rationalistic grounds for believing that Ireland was more probably peopled from Gaul and Britain. ”

“ Here we recognize the Irishman as Nature has made him,—docile, confiding, and single-hearted; slow to anger, and ever ready to control his passions!”
“That's exactly his portrait, Father!” said I, enthusiastically. “Without a double of any kind,—a creature that does not know a wile or a stratagem!”
The priest seemed so captivated by my patriotism and my generous warmth that he sat down beside me, and we continued to make Ireland still our theme, each vying with the other who could say most in praise of that country. ”

“ To judge of Ireland by the conversation one sometimes hears in England, it would be supposed that one-half of it was covered with bogs, and the other with mountains filled with Irish ready to fly at the sight of a civilised being. ”

“ Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in this respect; for they are poorer; their land is in the English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling is far more common and more eloquent among them, than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, very like a southern people ”

“ Well remind the people that Ireland is not yet a nation and that there are Irishmen who are still willing to die for their country. They've become very English, but they're not altogether English, Henry. They've still some of the old Irish spirit in them, and we may quicken that! ”

“ Tales of heroes, triumphs of ancient kings, were written in the form in which we now know them, genealogies of the tribes and old hymns of Irish saints. Clerics and laymen rivalled one another in zeal. In kings' courts, in monasteries, in schools, annals of Ireland from the earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. ”

“ CHAPTER V. THE CHRISTIAN IRISH AND THE PAGAN DANES. For several centuries the Irish continued in the happy state described in the last chapter. While the whole European Continent was convulsed by the irruptions of the Germanic tribes, and of the Huns, more savage still, the island was at peace, opened her schools to the youth of all countries—to Anglo- Saxons chiefly—and spread her name abroad as the happy and holy isle, the dwelling of the saints, the land of prodigies, the most blessed spot on the earth. ”

“ The Irish are more ardent lovers, the English better husbands. The Irishman is more exhilarating in society, the Englishman’s comforts are more domestic. One is formed to give more delight, the other more tranquil and rational happiness to life. ”

“ The labor involved in this from its very nature is such as can only be performed by an organization such as the American-Irish Historical Society.
The true status of the Irish in America, notwithstanding the fact that their brain and brawn have been interwoven in the woof and web of our nation’s fabric, has never been fully appreciated by reason of the prejudices which have been associated with anything that bore an Irish name. ”