ering woman, who had sent her
husband with words of comfort to his duty, now, after all the years of
trial, sending her son as proudly on his path. It is their first
parting. Let her own words speak: "Hitherto I had not allowed myself
even to feel that my William was my own and my only child; I considered
only that Tone's son was confided to me; but in that moment Nature
resumed her rights. I sat in a field: the road was long and white before
me and no object on it but my child.... I could not think; but all I had
ever suffered seemed before and around me at that moment, and I wished
so intensely to close my eyes for ever, that I wondered it did not
happen. The transitions of the mind are very extraordinary. As I sat in
that state, unable to think of the necessity of returning home, a little
lark rushed up from the grass beside me; it whirled over my head and
hovered in the air singing such a beautiful, cheering, and, as it
sounded to me, approving note, that it roused me. I felt in my heart as
if Tone had sent it to me. I returned to my solitary home." It is a
picture to move us, to think of the devoted woman there in the sunshine,
bent down in the grass, utterly alone, till the lark, sweeping
heavenward in song, seems to give a message of gentle comfort from her
husband's watching spirit. Our emotion now is of no enervating order. We
are proud of our land and her people; our nerves are firm and set; our
hearts cry out for action; we are not weeping, but burning for the
Cause. How little we know of this heroic woman. We are in some ways
familiar with Tone, his high character, his genial open nature, his
daring, his patience, his farsightedness, his judgment--in spirit
tireless and indomitable: a man peerless among his fellows. But he had
yet one compeer; there was one nature that matched his to depth and
height of its greatness--that nature was a woman's, and the woman was
Wolfe Tone's wife.

VI

It is well this heroic example of our womanhood should be before not
only our womanhood but our manhood. It should show us all that
patriotism does not destroy the finer feelings, but rather calls them
forth and gives them wider play. We have been too used to thinking that
the qualities of love and tenderness are no virtues for a soldier, that
they will sap his resolution and destroy his work; but our movements
fail always when they fail to be human. Until we mature and the poetry
in life is wakening, we are ready to act