The Wild Irish Girl: A National TaleMorgan, Lady (Sydney)
General
The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale
Morgan, Lady (Sydney)
British -- Ireland -- Fiction; Celts -- Fiction; Ireland -- Fiction; Love stories; Princesses -- Fiction
“Sweet is the word of her lip, and sparkling the beam of her blue
rolling eye; and close round her neck cling the golden tresses of her
head: and her teeth are arranged in beautiful order. I say to the maid
of youthful mildness, thy voice is sweeter than the song of birds;
every grace, every charm play round thee; and though my soul delights to
sing thy praise, yet I must quit the theme--to drink with a sincere
heart to thy health, Gracy of the soft waving ringlets.”
Does not this poetical effusion, awakened by the charms of the fair
Gracy, recal to your memory the description of Helen by Theocritus, in
his beautiful epithalamium on her marriage?--
“She is like the rising of the golden morning, when the night departeth,
and when the winter is over and gone--she resembleth the cypress in the
garden, the horse in the chariot of Thessaly.”
While the invocation to the enjoyment of convivial pleasure which
breathes over the termination of every verse, glows with the festive
spirit of the Tean bard.
When I remarked the coincidence of style, which existed between the
early Greek writers and the bards of Erin, Glorvina replied, with a
smile, “In drawing this analogy, you think, perhaps, to flatter my
national vanity; but the truth is, we trace the spirit of Milesian
poetry to a higher source than the spring of Grecian genius; for many
figures in Irish song are of Oriental origin; and the bards who ennobled
the train of our Milesian founders, and who awakened the soul of song
here, seem, in common with the Greek poets, ‘to have kindled their
poetic fires at those unextinguished lamps which burn within the tomb of
oriental genius.’ Let me, however, assure you, that no adequate version
of an Irish poem can be given; for the peculiar construction of the
Irish language, the felicity of its epithets, and force of its
expressions, bid defiance to all translation.”
“But while your days and nights are thus devoted to Milesian
literature,” you will say, “what becomes of Blackstone and Coke?”
Faith, e’en what may for me--the mind, the mind, like the heart, is not
to be forced in its pursuits; and, I believe, in an intellectual, as
in a physical sense, there are certain antipathies which reason may
condemn, but not vanish. Coke is to me a dose of ipecacuhana; and my
present studies, like those poignant incentives which stimulate the
appetite without causing repletion. It is in vain to force me to a
profession, against which my taste, my habits, my very nature revolts;
and if my father persists in his determination, why, as a _dernier
resort_, I must turn historiographer to the prince of Inismore.------
Like the spirit of Milton, I feel myself, in this new world, “vital in
every part:”
“All heart I live, all head, all eye, all ear.
All intellect, all sense.”
LETTER X.
TO J. D. ESQ., M. P.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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