INDUSTRY.

Free children of a land set free,

A land late bound in fetters, Demand ye why your critic guest Scoffs oft in you his betters? Nor race alone, nor creed to him

Is stumbling-block or scandal:
Your rags offend he loathes in you
Light purse and slipshod sandal.

His virtue builds on self-respect:
Upon that clay foundation,
Nor rock nor sand, his trophies stand,
The unit and the nation.

Sad martyr of a finite hope,

Nor seeks he, nor attains he

The all-heavenly prize. He toils for earth;
But what he seeks that gains he.

Grasp ye, with ampler aim, that good
His tragic creed o'erprizes:
With loftier mind revere in him

The will that energizes,

The strong right hand, the lion heart,
The industrial truth and valour :
When comes reverse he too can die,
But not in dirt and squalor.

The natural virtues yield to those
Of heavenly birth affiance:
O, ye so strong in faith, be strong
In truth and self-reliance!

Strength, justice, prudence, self-constraint!
Behold the four-square turret

From which a triad spire-should rise
The virtues of the Spirit!

Advance, victorious years! we land

On solid shores and stable :
Recede, dim seas, and painted cloud
Of legend and of fable!

The Heroic Age returns. Of old

Men fought with spears and arrows:

The sea-bank is the shield to-day :

The true knight drains and harrows !—Pp. 23–26.

One of the longest poems in the book, and, we think, the finest, is called "The Sisters." The heroine seems to be drawn from the life. In no nature more fully than the Irish is displayed the power of faith in hours of trial; in none more fully than that of Irish women is verified the Apostle's saying, Virtus in infirmitate perficitur. The character of Mary MacCarthy is a beautiful illustration of this divine truth. But before we attempt a brief analysis of the poem, we must say a word about the manner of its introduction. The author discusses with an English friend who is visiting him the question of the condition of Ireland. The Englishman is wrathfully eloquent in his denunciation of everything he sees-unreclaimed lands, broken-down gates, ill-thatched hovels, rutty roads, feasts and fasts, wakes and weddings, and (worst of all) cripples at holy wells. His host speaks him gently; politely pretermits England's responsibility for some of these results; urges the authority of Querite primùm; admits that England's destiny is great, but mildly hints that Ireland's is greater, inasmuch as Heaven is better worth striving for than earth. To soothe him, however, he sings in high strains of fair and storied England; and our English readers will probably thank us for quoting the passage, which reminds one of Virgil's noble lines ("Sed neque Medorum, &c.") in the second Georgic, imitated successfully though with too much diffuseness in Thomson's "Summer" :-

He loved his country;

An older man than he for things less great

Had loved her less. Yet who could gaze, unmoved,

From Windsor's terraced heights o'er those broad meads

Lit by the pomp of silver-winding Thames,

Dropping past templed grove, and hall, and farm,

Toward the great city? Who, unthrilled, could mark
Her minsters, towering far away, with heads
That stay the sunset of old times; or them,
Oxford and Cambridge, England's anchors twain,
That to her moorings hold her? Fresh from these
Who, who could tread, O Wye, thy watery vale,

Where Tintern reigns in ruin; who could rest
Where Bolton finds in Wharf a warbling choir,
Or where the sea-wind fans thy brow discrowned,
Furness, nor love and wonder? Who, untouched,
When evening creeps from Scawfell toward Black Combe,
Could wander by thy darkly gleaming lakes,

Embayed 'mid sylvan garniture, and isles

From saint or anchoret named, within the embrace
Of rural mountains green, or sound, scent, touch,
Of kine-besprinkled, soft, partition'd vales,
Almost domestic? Shadow-haunted land!
By Southey's lake Saint Herbert holds his own!
The knightly armour now by Yewdale's crag
Rings loud no longer; Grasmere's reddening glass
Reflects no more the on-rushing clan; yet still
Thy Saxon kings and ever-virgin queens
Possess thee with a quiet pathos; still,
Like tarnished path forlorn of moon that sets
Over wide-watered moor and marsh, thy Past,
A spiritual sceptre, though deposed, extends
From sea to sea-from century-worn St. Bees
To Cuthbert's tomb under those eastern towers
On Durham's bowery steep!--Pp. 163-4.

Examining more closely for himself the traces of ruin wrought by misrule, the stranger's candid mind experiences a revulsion. He now begins to lay the blame where the chief part of it undoubtedly should rest, on those who, having had the mastery in the isle for seven hundred years, could do no better than leave such a cruel botchery after them. Then his host, starting from the reflection, that

The history of a soul holds in it more
Than doth a nation's,

unfolds his simple tale.

The sisters were Irish peasant girls, left orphans in early childhood, and taken to the home of their grandmother. Their characters are well contrasted; the elder active, quick, industrious,

Kept the house;

Hers was the rosier cheek, the livelier mind,

The smile of readier cheer.

The younger sister was of a different mood; pensive and solitary; prone to indolence

And self-indulgence, not that coarser sort

Which seeks delight, but that which shuns annoy.

She was not idle, however, but, while her bustling sister ruled the dairy, the spinning-wheel was Mary's favourite employment. This picture of domestic peace soon gives way to a scene of horror.

Sudden fell

Famine, the terror never absent long,

Upon our land. It shrank-the daily dole;
The oatmeal trickled from a tighter grasp;
Hunger grew wild through panic; infant cries
Maddened at times the gentle into wrong:
Death's gentleness more oft for death made way ;
And like a lamb that openeth not its mouth
The sacrificial people, fillet-bound,
Stood up to die. Amid inviolate herds
Thousands the Sacraments of death received,

Then waited God's decree. These things are known:
Strangers have witnessed to them; strangers writ
The epitaph again and yet again.

The nettles and the weeds by the wayside

:

Men ate from sharpening features and sunk eyes
Hunger glared forth, a wolf more lean each hour;
Children seemed pigmies shrivelled to sudden age;
And the deserted babe, too weak to wail,

But shook if hands, pitying or curious, raised
The rag across him thrown.
From many a private hearth
As ofttimes they have been.

In England alms
were largely sent,
'Twas vain. The land

Wept while her sons sank back into their graves
Like drowners 'mid still seas.-P. 174.

Flying from the stricken land, Mary is on her way to America, when she falls sick of fever at Liverpool. On her recovery, she meets with an aged priest, who is her kinsman by the mother's side, and is persuaded by him to renounce the idea of going further. She settles herself with some friends outside the city, and, while employed in the gardens, attracts the notice of a young man of prosperous condition, who becomes her suitor.

Her country was his own: he loved it not ;
Had rooted quickly in the stranger's land;
And versatile, cordial, specious, seeming-frank,
Contracting for himself a separate peace,
Had prospered, but had prospered in such sort
As they that starve within. Her confidence
He gained. To love unworthy, still he loved her:
Loved with the love of an unloving heart-

That love which either is in shallows lost,

Or in its black depth breeds the poison weed.
She knew him not; how could she? He himself
Knew scantly. Near her what was best within him
Her golden smile sunn'd forth; but, dark and cold,
Like a benighted hemisphere abode

A moiety of his being which she saw not.
His was a superficial nature, vain
And hard, to good impressions sensitive,
And most admiring virtues least his own;
A mirror that took in a seeming world,

And yet remained blank surface.-P. 176.

This man's attachment is not proof against the promise of a fortune offered him by an uncle, who had lost the last of his own children, and called his nephew home to be his heir, but to wed another bride. When he appeals to his betrothed for "counsel" in this difficulty, she scornfully releases him; and she returns unopened a letter which, in a tardily repentant mood, he had written to her. Afterwards, when early affliction comes upon him, she bewails her pride. But hers was

That wrath of tender hearts, which scorns
Revenge, which scarcely utters its complaint,
And yet forgives but slowly.-P. 178.

After this trial, Mary's longings to journey further on return again. She crosses the Atlantic, passes from place to place, not unhappy, yet not feeling as if at home, until at last sickness again seizes her in a Southern city. After her recovery, in a moment of sadness and desolation, she is met by a nun, who persuades her to enter her own convent, where, as a lay sister, she at length finds peace and joy. There are some beautiful lines descriptive of the religious life, of which we can give but a few:

From the vow

Which bound the will's infinitude to God,

Upwelled that peaceful strength whose fount was God:
From Him behind His sacramental veil

In holy passion for long hours adored,

Came that great love which made the bonds of earth
Needless, thence irksome. Wondering, there she learned
The creature was not for the creature made,
But for the sole Creator; that His kingdom,
Glorious hereafter, lies around us here,
Its visible splendour painfully suppressing,
And waiting its transfigurance.-Pp. 182-3.