SHALL we not join together the two women, whom love for Robert Emmet has dowered with a common immortality, and whom a common agony of loss has bound, one to the other, in the eternal sisterhood of sorrow? So best shall our love and pity reach them both—the fragile girl who died of a broken heart for _his_ sake, and the strong girl whose brave heart faced—for _his_ sake likewise—tortures that were worse than death. And let it not weaken our sympathy with Sarah Curran to remember that the sentimental generation which wept for her (in the rose-tinted shades of its Whig drawing-rooms, the while Tommy Moore set her sorrows to the sweetest and saddest of music) _allowed Anne Devlin to die of starvation_. SARAH CURRAN In thinking of Sarah Curran we paraphrase unconsciously the pitiful lines of one of our Irish poets and say of her: “There was a _maid_ whom Sorrow named his friend, And _she_ of her high comrade Sorrow dreaming, Went walking with slow steps.” From her earliest years sorrow had walked with her as friend with friend; and the sadness of her death was but in keeping with the sadness of her birth, of her disposition, of her home-life, of her love story. We know from the confidences of John Philpot Curran’s most intimate friends that the brilliant gaiety of his convivial hours alternated with fits of the blackest depression. His friend, Charles Phillips, writes of him: “It was with him as it is with every person whose spirits are apt to be occasionally excited—the depression is at intervals in exact proportion.... He was naturally sensitive—domestic misfortunes rendered his home unhappy—he flew for a kind of refuge into public life; and the political ruin of his country, leaving him without an object of private enjoyment or of patriotic hope, flung him upon his own heart-devouring reflections.... It was a deplorable thing to see him, in the decline of life, when visited by this constitutional melancholy. I have not unfrequently accompanied him in his walks upon such occasions, almost at the hour of midnight. He had gardens attached to the Priory, of which he was particularly fond; and into these gardens, when so affected, no matter at what hour, he used to ramble. It was then almost impossible to divert his mind from themes of sadness. The gloom of his own thoughts discoloured everything, and from calamity to calamity he would wander on—seeing in the future nothing for hope, and in the past nothing but disappointment.”