t year he died.'

But it is hard to judge of the quality of Raftery's poems. Some of them
have probably been lost altogether. There are already different versions
of those written out in manuscript books, and of these books many have
disappeared or been destroyed, and some have been taken to America by
emigrants. It is said that when he was on his deathbed, he was very
sorry that his songs had not all been taken down; and that he dictated
one he composed there to a young man who wrote it down in Irish, but
could not read his own writing when he had done, and that vexed Raftery;
and then a man came in, and he asked him to take down all his songs, and
he could have them for himself; but he said, 'If I did, I'd always be
called Raftery,' and he went out again.

I hear the people say now and then: 'If he had had education, he would
have been the greatest poet in the world.' I cannot but be sorry that
his education went so far as it did, for 'he used to carry a book about
with him--a Pantheon--about the heathen gods and goddesses; and whoever
he'd get that was able to read, he'd get him to read it to him, and then
he'd keep them in his mind, and use them as he wanted them.' If he had
been born a few decades later, he would have been caught, like other
poets of the time, in the formulas of English verse. As it was, both his
love poems and his religious poems were caught in the formulas imported
from Greece and from Rome; and any formula must make a veil between the
prophet who has been on the mountain top, and the people who are waiting
at its foot for his message. The dreams of beauty that formed themselves
in the mind of the blind poet become flat and vapid when he embodies
them in the well-worn names of Helen and Venus. The truths of God that
he strove in his last years, as he says, 'to have written in the book of
the people,' left those unkindled whose ears were already wearied with
the well-known words 'the keys of Heaven,' 'penance, fasts, and alms,'
to whom it was an old tale to hear of hell as a furnace, and the grave
as a dish for worms. When he gets away from the formulas, he has often a
fine line on death or on judgment; the cheeks of the dead are 'cold as
the snow that is at the back of the sun;' the careless--those who 'go
out looking at their sheep on Sunday instead of going to Mass'--are
warned that 'on the side of the hill of the tears there will be Ochone!'

His love songs are many; and they were not always