ttle volume. But their writer has
had, in his beautiful translations of the 'Love Songs of Connacht,' to
put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of
putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers'
words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the
sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back:
'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!'
Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of
her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost;
and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks
through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.' And
another boasts of 'a love without littleness, without weakness; love
from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me
close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without
envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of my
heart beyond women.' Douglas Hyde's own love songs are quiet and staid
in contrast to these; but nevertheless they have a sober charm. Here are
the last verses of one of them:--

'Will you be as hard,
Colleen, as you are quiet?
Will you be without pity
On me for ever?

'Listen to me, Noireen,
Listen, aroon;
Put healing on me
From your quiet mouth.

'I am in the little road
That is dark and narrow,
The little road that has led
Thousands to sleep.'

In his preface to the 'Love Songs of Connacht' he says he finds in them
'more of grief and trouble, more of melancholy and contrition of heart,
than of gaiety or hope'; and he writes: 'Not careless and light-hearted
alone is the Gaelic nature; there is also beneath the loudest mirth a
melancholy spirit; and if they let on to be without heed for anything
but sport and revelry, there is nothing in it but letting on.' There is
grief and trouble, as I have shown, in many of his own songs, which the
people have taken to their hearts so quickly; but there is also a touch
of hope, of glad belief that, in spite of heavy days of change, all
things are working for good at the last.

Here are some verses from a poem called 'There is a Change coming':--

'When that time comes it will come heavily;
He will grow fat that was lean;
He will grow lean that was fat,
Without shelter for the head, without