s, as it were by accident, have
found their way into Irish song. And it is likely they are the last to
find a place there, for the imagination of Ireland still tilts the beam
to the national side; and the loyalty the poets of many hundred years
have called for, is loyalty to Kathleen ni Houlihan. 'Have they not
given her their wills, and their hearts, and their dreams? What have
they left for any less noble Royalty?'

1902.

_AN CRAOIBHIN'S_ POEMS

'"I would much rather (and I take every occasion of making this protest)
write, so to say, in a dead language and for a dead people, than write
in those deaf and stammering (_sorde e mute_) tongues, French and
English, notwithstanding they are the fashion with their rules and
exercises." This is so with me. Alfieri wrote these words a hundred
years ago, and they express what is in my own mind. I would like better
to make even one good verse in the language in which I am now writing,
than to make a whole book of verses in English. For if there should be
any good found in my English verses, it would not go to the credit of my
mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, England.'

I have translated this from Douglas Hyde's preface to his little book of
poems, lately published in Dublin, _Ubhla de'n Craoibh_, "Apples from
the Branch." _An Craoibhin Aoibhin_, "The delightful little branch," is
the name by which he is called all over Irish-speaking Ireland; and a
gold branch bearing golden apples is stamped on the cover of his book.
The poems had already been published, one by one, in a weekly paper; and
a friend of mine tells me he has heard them sung and repeated by
country people in many parts of Ireland--in Connemara, in Donegal, in
Galway, in Kerry, in the Islands of Aran.

Three or four of the thirty-three poems the book holds are, so to speak,
official, written for the Gaelic League by its president; and these,
like most official odes, are only for the moment. Some are ballads
dealing with the old subjects of Irish ballads--emigration, exile,
defeat, and death; for Douglas Hyde, as may be guessed from his preface,
has, no less than his fellows--

'Hidden in his heart the flame out of the eyes
Of Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.'

But these national ballads, though very popular, are, I think, not so
good as his more personal poems. I suppose no narrative of what others
have done or felt or suffered can move one like a flash from 'that
little infinite, f