Throughout, I think, it can hardly be denied that the poetry of Moore's lyrics lies very close to eloquence and is remote from that distinctive quality of the highest poetic expression which transcends rhetoric altogether. A proof lies in the fact that these songs are among the most translatable of all poetry--and among the most translated. Their charm lies, like that of French poetry (before the Romantic movement), in the felicitous expression of an apt or moving thought. It might be difficult to express the idea so well in another language; but no one would feel it impossible. Take such lines as:-- "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day," and the most careless will feel that, beyond the idea expressed, there is an accent, and a suggestion as if of gesture, somehow incorporated with the actual words and inseparable from them. An effect of this kind is rarely achieved by Moore. His words always clearly convey the definite thought, but they hardly ever convey anything more. We have, in the most characteristic examples of his art, a quite extraordinary eloquence, in such poems as those on Emmet and on Emmet's betrothed, or that on Lord Edward ("When he who adores thee"), or "The Prince's Song" ("When first I met thee"); or again in the fierce strain of "Sad one of Sion." The last stanzas of this may be quoted; they compare the fate that was Judea's with the fate that may be Ireland's. "Yet hadst thou thy vengeance--yet came there the morrow, That shines out, at last, on the longest dark night, When the sceptre that smote thee with slavery and sorrow, Was shiver'd at once, like a reed, in thy sight. "When that cup, which for others the proud Golden City Had brimm'd full of bitterness, drench'd her own lips; And the world she had trampled on heard, without pity, The howl in her halls, and the cry from her ships. "When the curse Heaven keeps for the haughty came over Her merchants rapacious, her rulers unjust, And, a ruin, at last, for the earthworm to cover, The Lady of Kingdoms lay low in the dust." Nothing could be more complete and rounded as the expression of an emotion than "The Harp that once"; but I find less rhetoric and even more poetry in the lovely address to the spirit of Irish music which closed the sixth number of the _Melodies_, and should have closed the series. Familiar as it is, Moore has become so far obsolete, for English readers, that it may be given here:--