Dear country of my hope, and heart, and birth,
Each hour more loved, e'en for the misery,
That, like thy verdure, clings to thy doomed earth-
Eternal mourner! Island Niobe!

Let me withdraw the veil from thy sweet face,
And show some features of thy loveliness,
That heretofore men cared not much to trace,
Though bright with genius and with tenderness.

Thy wild romantic tales I seek to show,
Of outlaw, and of fairy, and of ghost;

Where fact and fancy, brightly mingled, glow,
And form a maze in which the mind is lost:
Yet still, o'er all, soft beauty reigns the while,
Throned in thy tales, as on thy hills, sweet isle!

DUBLIN:

PUBLISHED BY JAMES DUFFY,

7, WELLINGTON QUAY.

1850.

INTRODUCTION.

THE short space allowed for introductory matter in the twenty-third volume of this work, was devoted by me to an essay on the arrangement and nomenclature of minor poetry.

A farther consideration of this subject has induced me to make some alterations in that arrangement. In this volume I republish the essay, with those alterations which a closer examination and more exact analysis have convinced me to be necessary.

The present volume contains Ballads and Romances poems of the fifth and sixth classes, according to the subjoined nomenclature.

Of all the classes of minor poetry, the most interesting and valuable, in a national point of view, is the Romance. The people, whose heroic deeds, and noble thoughts, and graceful legends, are preserved in narrative poetry, of a high order, can never pass away from the world of the mind.

To this class of poetry Greece owes the intellectual sway which she has, for ages, exercised. In the darkest hour of her national degradation, mankind bowed with awe and reverence before the barren mountains of Greece, consecrated by the genius of romantic poetry. Neither time nor tyranny can deprive her of this sovereignty of the soul. While beauty moves, and poetry delights the human mind, so long shall Olympus remain the heaven of our imaginations. No change in climate, or religion, or philosophy,

can divest Ilium of its glories, or disenchant the Castalian spring, or drive the muses from their own Parnassus.

This eternal consecration of the soil is the work of the romantic poet. He paints, in the brilliant hues of poetry, the heroic deeds of a nation, and the portraits of the heroes who achieved them. He marks out the spots where those heroic deeds have been performed, and, by the power of his genius, blends, in indissoluble union, the names of the localities with the glory of those deeds. He clothes the graceful fancies of a people in beautiful poetry, and flowing verse, and arranges them in charming groups, and makes them eternal denizens of those mountains and valleys with which his narrative connects them; until the entire region, thus illustrated, appears to the mental vision, peopled with the loveliest creatures of imagination, and lighted by the sun of glory, and blooming with undying flowers of fame.

In this noble department of poetry the English language is by no means rich; and yet there is not any nation, ancient or modern, whose annals afford subjects for this class of composition more interesting and varied than do the annals of those races which have formed the British people -the Gael, the Cymry, the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane.

Out of the very moderate number of romances altogether written in the English language, it was only permitted to publish, in this volume, those written by Irish authors. A large number of this latter class have been already published in this series; some others are protected by copyright; the entire number of romances consequently available for this volume was very small.

I felt, however, that the interest of this collection of poems must mainly depend upon the number and variety of