Sarah Curran’s quiet annals are ungathered by any one hand, but the main outlines are henceforth discernible, and some celebrated writers have found them of interest. Washington Irving, in _The Broken Heart_, has given her an exquisite immortality; and the pathetic central incident of his narration is also the inspiration of Moore’s haunting song: _She is far from the land_. It was not, however, at the Rotunda in Dublin, but in a festal room in the friendly house where, after the death of her betrothed, she lived on in a dispirited convalescence, that she wandered away from the company, and sitting alone on the stair, began singing softly a plaintive air, “housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.” This happened at Woodhill, in Cork. Her voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there was a general development of musical genius in her father’s family. The incident was reported at firsthand to Irving, as to Moore. To those who knew her story, the little forgetful act was poignant enough: for she was singing to the dead. In her sorrow, her deprivations, her entire withdrawal from the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends and champions. The poet just named, who was one of Robert Emmet’s early comrades, knew how admiration followed her like her shadow. “And lovers are round her, sighing: But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps, For her heart in his grave is lying.” Among those who looked with infinite sympathy and respect on the gentle girl moving like a soulless phantom in an unreal world, was a very young Englishman, barely her senior, a newly commissioned captain of Royal Engineers, a lineal descendant of Strafford, and full of Strafford’s strong singleness of heart. Henry Robert Sturgeon was third son of William Sturgeon, Esquire, and the Lady Henrietta Alicia Watson-Wentworth; grandson of the first, and nephew of the second Marquis of Rockingham. He conceived for Sarah Curran an instinctive affection, ardent and profound, and free from stain of self as Emmet’s own. It was as if Emmet, absented for ever, had breathed himself into another for the comfort and protection of the well-beloved. But the well-beloved would not be comforted nor protected: not though she knew, as she knew perfectly, both what her suitor’s worth was, and what were his fortune and standing in the great world; not though every member of the Penrose family, devoted to him, encouraged his hope; not though all of them, of their own accord, interceded with their ward and guest. In the _Literary Souvenir_ for 1831, there is an agreeable paper of fifteen pages entitled _Some Passages in the History of Sarah Curran_, signed “M.” It has been conjectured that the writer was one of the Crawfords of Lismore, who had been very kind to Sarah when her mother’s flight broke up the Curran household. Whoever “M.” was, her devotion to her friend, of whose character and mental qualities she had