OVERS are given to Poetry."-So says Shakspeare, with that truthfulness that pervades all his representations of human thought or action, and with that pithiness and conciseness that make his sayings so well remembered and so often quoted.

Much of what can be said in an introduction of songs of the affections is expressed in this one short sentence: "Lovers are given to poetry." No wonder then in the abundance of love songs, seeing that all mankind must love-must pass through that fever of the heart incidental to their existence, and

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in that fever rave in rhyme; no wonder such songs have had a favourable acceptance, seeing that all womankind catch the sweet infection, and, in the fever state, would listen to the wildest ravings of the lover with more delight than to the sublimest sentences of the sage.

Nor is it only then that the love-song holds its influence over us; it partakes of the quality (pardon the comparison, ladies) of that scourge, the small-pox-it leaves its mark behind it. That fever infuses a life-long influence into our blood. In after years we look back with tender recollection on the time when our hearts first beat to the measure of some amatory rhymes; and the pulsations of "sober sixty," under the spell of memory, sympathise with those of boyhood.

Who ever forgot that indescribable sensation which pervades our whole being when the heart is first conscious of love? It is as if the ripened bud of existence had but just burst, and the flower of life had opened. As the egg contains a hidden life, to be revealed only by the fond wings that enfold it, so the heart has a dormant existence within it that we know not of, till the brooding wing of love awakes it.

And what a waking!

"Oh, who would not welcome that moment's returning,

When passion first waked a new life thro' his frame;
And his soul, like the wood, that grows precious in burning,
Gave out all its sweets to love's exquisite flame?"

But other love than that which so potently affects our nature is -graciously granted to us-love which, if less dominant and entrancing in its nature, is purer and more enduring the love of the parent for the child, and the child for the parent; and such love has not been silent in the region of song. But this love, after all, is but secondary, and depends for its existence on the master-passion first alluded to; for without that there would be neither parents nor children. Hence, love is not only the agency ordained by Heaven to carry out its creative will, but also the prolific source of poetry. Let the humblest rhymer say, what first moved him to "lisp in numbers" or, perhaps, to stammer?-we venture to answer for him, "love."

Even the poet, who may in after life have achieved high things and won the laurel crown, looks back with a tenderness, that still moves him, to his first address to the "girl of his soul." Let Moore speak in eloquent evidence.

"Though the bard to purer fame may soar,
When wild youth's past;

Though he win the wise, who frown'd before,
To smile at last;

He'll never meet

A joy so sweet,

In all his noon of fame,

As when first he sung to woman's ear

His soul-felt flame;

And, at ev'ry close, she blush'd to hear

The one-lov'd name."

Even among the dullest there is hardly one who has not, some time or other, inscribed

"A woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow."

And amongst the greatest, there is abundant proof that the consciousness of possessing the "spark divine” never imparts so much pleasure to the gifted possessor, as when he pours out the treasure of his thought in passionate profusion at the feet of his mistress, and enjoys a delight beyond the present in the conviction that he can grasp the future, that his spirit shall rule over generations yet unborn, and that she who awoke and rewarded his lays shall share in his immortality.

Many of the greatest names might be called in proof of this; but let the "divine Spenser answer for all, and with prophetic passion :—

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves, and washed it away :

Agayne, I wrote it with a second hand;

But came the tyde, and made my paynes his prey.
Vayne man, say'd she, that doest in vaine assay
A mortall thing so to immortalize;

For I my selve shall like to this decay,

And eke my name bee wiped out likewise.

Not so, quod I; let baser things devize

To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame :

My verse your vertues rare shall éternize,

And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.

Where, when as death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."

I shall not attempt a dissertation upon the peculiar qualities of these Irish love-songs. I have no desire to coax the reader, by a pathway of preliminary praise, into one of those laudatory labyrinths in which both readers and editors so often lose their way, or, at least, get confused. I believe the following songs are good enough

not to need any editorial enconium, and I leave the reader to discover and enjoy their beauties, uninfluenced and undisturbed by any remark of mine. It is only where a note is required in explanation of an Irish word or idiom, in each song, or where some requisite or interesting information, or current remark properly belonging to it is given, that I put myself in the reader's way, and then, I hope, not intrusively.

Seldom runs the tide of talent so strongly through successive generations as it has done in the distinguished family of Sheridan. First springing into literary notice in the days of Swift, we see, in the witty Dean's lively correspondent, the grandfather of the illustrious Richard Brinsley Sheridan, commemorated by Thomas Moore, in his matchless monody as

"The orator, dramatist, minstrel, who ran

Thro' each mode of the lyre, and was master of all."

Through him is descended (in the sixth generation) the authoress of the two following songs. She has written many (though only two are selected here), all of great excellence, but none can evoke their mirth or their tenderness with such point or pathos as the fair and noble lady herself. One might suppose she was the original Moore had in his eye when he wrote

"Beauty may boast of her eyes and her cheeks,

But Love from the lip his true archery wings;
And she, who but feathers the shaft when she speaks,
At once sends it home to the heart when she sings."

So, my Kathleen, you're going to leave me
All alone by myself in this place,
But I'm sure you will never deceive me,
Oh no, if there's truth in that face.