For lo! to love-lorn fantasy,

The hero of her heart is nigh.

IV.

Bright as the bow that spans the storm,

In Erin's yellow vesture clad,

A son of light-a lovely form,

He comes and makes her glad:
Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tassell'd horn beside him laid;

Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,

The hunter and the deer a shade!

Sweet mourner! those are shadows vain,

That cross the twilight of her brain;

Yet she will tell you, she is blest,

Of Connocht Moran's tomb possess'd,

More richly than in Aghrim's bow'r,

When bards high prais'd her beauty's pow'r,

And kneeling pages offer'd up

The morat in a golden cup.

V.

"A hero's bride! this desert bow'r,

It ill befits thy gentle breeding:

And wherefore dost thou love this flow'r

To call my love lies bleeding?"

This purple flow'r my tears have nurs'd;

'A hero's blood supplied its bloom:

• I love it, for it was the first

'That grew on Connocht Moran's tomb. 'Oh! hearken, stranger, to my voice!

" This desert mansion is my choice

< And blest, tho' fatal, be the star That led me to its wilds afar:

For here these pathless mountains free • Gave shelter to my love and me;

• And every rock and every stone

Bare witness that he was my own.

VI.

O'Connor's child, I was the bud

Of Erin's royal tree of glory;

But woe to them that wrapt in blood

The tissue of my story!

Still as I clasp my burning brain,

A death-scene rushes on my sight;

It rises o'er and o'er again,

The bloody feud,-the fatal night,

VOL. II.

E

When chafing Connocht Moran's scorn,

They call'd my hero basely born;

And bade him choose a meaner bride

Than from O'Connor's house of pride.

Their tribe, they said, their high degree,
Was sung in Tara's psaltery';

Witness their Eath's victorious brand1o,

And Cathal of the bloody hand,—

Glory (they said) and power and honour

Were in the mansion of O'Connor:

But he, my lov'd one, bore in field

A meaner crest upon his shield.

The psalter of Tara was the great national register of the ancient Irish.

I Vide the note upon the victories of the house of O'Connor.

VII.

Ah, brothers! what did it avail,

That fiercely and triumphantly

Ye fought the English of the pale,
And stemm'd De Bourgo's chivalry?
And what was it to love and me,

That barons by your standard rode;
Or beal-fires for your jubilee,

Upon an hundred mountains glow'd.

What tho' the lords of tower and dome

From Shannon to the North-sea foam,

Thought ye your iron hands of pride
Could break the knot that love had tied?
No-let the eagle change his plume,

The leaf its hue, the flow'r its bloom;

"Fires lighted on May-day on the hill tops by the Irish. Vide the note on stanza VII.