ballads some years ago, but now they are like extinct volcanoes, their day is over, and there is no demand for them. Even the best of them, A million a Decade, and another, with the refrain, Lov'd, Ireland, are difficult to find. A verse from The Famine Year is worth giving: —
Little children, tears are strange upon your infant faces,
God meant you but to smile within your mother's soft embraces.
Oh, we know not what is smiling, and we know not what is dying.
But we're hungry, very hungry, and we cannot stop our crying;
And some of us grow cold and white, we know not what it means.
But as they lie beside us, we tremble in our dreams!
A deep tone of feeling is touched in the poem of Related Souls—
Without human aidance
I cross the river of Life and Fate,
Wake me no more with that voice whose cadence
Could lure me back from the Golden Gate,
For my spirit would answer your spirit's call,
Though life lay hid where the shadows fall;
And the mystic joys of the world unseen
Would be less to me, than the days that have been.
