For happy are they now reposing afar,-- Thy Grattan, thy Curran, thy Sheridan, all Who for years were the chiefs in the eloquent war, And redeemed, if they have not retarded, thy fall. Yes, happy are they in their cold English graves! Their shades cannot start to thy shouts of to-day,-- Nor the steps of enslavers and chain-kissing slaves Be stamped in the turf o'er their fetterless clay. Till now I had envied thy sons and their shore, Though their virtues were hunted, their liberties fled; There was something so warm and sublime in the core Of an Irishman's heart, that I envy--thy _dead_. Or if aught in my bosom can quench for an hour My contempt for a nation so servile, though sore. Which though trod like the worm will not turn upon power, 'Tis the glory of Grattan, and genius of Moore! THE DREAM I Our life is twofold: sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence; sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality; And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being; they become A portion of ourselves as of our time, And look like heralds of eternity; They pass like spirits of the past,--they speak Like sibyls of the future; they have power-- The tyranny of pleasure and of pain; They make us what we were not--what they will, And make us with the vision that's gone by, The dread of vanished shadows.--Are they so? Is not the past all shadow? What are they? Creations of the mind?--The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed Perchance in sleep--for in itself a thought, A slumbering thought, is capable of years, And curdles a long life into one hour. II