Oh the Lion shall lose his strength, And the bracket thistle pine ... And the harp shall sound sweet, sweet at length Between the eight and nine. THE HOUR-GLASS. _TRADITIONAL ARAN AIR._ I was going the road one day ... O! the brown and the yellow beer, And I met with a man that was no right man, ... Oh my dear, my dear. CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN. FLORENCE FARR. I. I will go cry with the woman, For yellow-haired Donough is dead, With a hempen rope for a neck-cloth, And a white cloth on his head. II. Do not make a great keening When the graves have been dug tomorrow. III. They shall be remembered forever [repeat 3 times] The people shall hear them forever. MUSIC FOR LYRICS. Three of the following settings are by Miss Farr, and she accompanies the words upon her psaltery for the most part. She has a beautiful speaking-voice, and, an almost rarer thing, a perfect ear for verse; and nothing but the attempting of it will show how far these things can be taught or developed where they exist but a little. I believe that they should be a part of the teaching of all children, for the beauty of the speaking-voice is more important to our lives than that of the singing, and the rhythm of words comes more into the structure of our daily being than any abstract pattern of notes. The relation between formal music and speech will yet become the subject of science, not less than the occasion of artistic discovery; for I am certain that all poets, even all delighted readers of poetry, speak certain kinds of poetry to distinct and simple tunes, though the speakers may be, perhaps generally are, deaf to ordinary music, even what we call tone-deaf. I suggest that we will discover in this relation a very early stage in the development of music, with its own great beauty, and that those who love lyric poetry but cannot tell one tune from another repeat a state of mind which created music and yet was incapable of the emotional abstraction which delights in patterns of sound separated from words. To it the music was an unconscious creation, the words a conscious, for no beginnings are in the intellect, and no living thing remembers its own birth.