II
“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.”