But when Moore's _Irish Melodies_ appeared, it was as if the grief and wrath of a whole nation had suddenly found expression; in these songs it rose and fell, whispered and shouted, moaned and murmured, like the waves of the sea, and with the irresistible force of a natural element. Soon there was not a peasant in Ireland, as there is not one today, unfamiliar with the song: "When he who adores thee." To this day Robert Emmet's last speech is read in American schools. It is the gospel of the Irish struggle for independence. But, strangely enough, Emmet's heroic death contributed less to his fame among his countrymen than did his touching love story. His betrothed, regarded by the Irish people as their hero's widow, became the object of silent veneration. Her unhappiness was increased by her being obliged to live amongst people who sided with England, and who considered, much as they pitied him, that Emmet had deserved his fate. Some years after Emmet's death Miss Curran made the acquaintance of an English officer, a Captain Sturgeon, who, touched by her forlorn position and attracted by her many charms, offered her his hand. After long hesitation she married him. As she was beginning to show symptoms of decline, he took her to Italy. Her appearance, says Admiral Napier, who saw her at Naples, was that of "a wandering statue." She died, not long after her marriage, in Sicily, "far from the land where her young hero sleeps." Washington Irving has described her in his _Sketch Book_, in the beautiful tale called "The Broken Heart." But her most worthy monument is the song: "She is far from the land."[7] In the _Melodies_, however, the griefs of the individual are but a symbol of those of the nation, an embodiment of the universal suffering. We come upon songs in which we seem to hear all the sons and daughters of Ireland lamenting over the fruitlessness of the great French Revolution and the disappointment of the hopes which all nations, but theirs above all others, had set upon the stability and victory of the Republic. Such a song is the touching: "'Tis gone, and for ever, the light we saw breaking"; with its wild lament that the first ray of liberty, welcomed with blessings by man, has disappeared, and by its disappearance deepened the darkness of the night of bondage and mourning which has again closed in over the kingdoms of the earth, and darkest of all over Erin. Truly noble and lofty is the flight of this verse: "For high was thy hope, when those glories were darting Around thee, through all the gross clouds of the world; When Truth, from her fetters indignantly starting, At once, like a sunburst, her banner unfurled. Oh, never shall earth see a moment so splendid! Then, then, had one Hymn of Deliverance blended The tongues of all nations; how sweet had ascended The first note of Liberty, Erin, from thee!"