Poetical Works; With a Memoir (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTEE THE MARCHIONESS DOWAGER OF DONEGAL, PREFIXED TO THE THIRD NUMBER. While the publisher of these Melodies very properly inscribes them to the Nobility and Gentry of Ireland in general, I have much pleasure in selecting one from that number, to whom my share of the Work is particularly dedicated. I know that, though your Ladyship has been so long absent from Ireland, you still continue to remember it well and warmly, ? that you have not suffered the attractions of English society to produce, like the taste of lotus, any forget- fulness of your own country, but that even the humble tribute which I offer derives its chief claim upon your interest and sympathy from the appeal which it makes to your patriotism. Indeed, absence, however fatal to some affections of the heart, rather tends to strengthen our love for the land where we were born; and Ireland is the country, of all others, which an exile from it must remember with mostenthusiasm. Those few darker and less amiable traits with which bigotry and misrule have stained her character, and which are too apt to disgust us upon a nearer intercourse, become at a distance softened, or altogether invisible. Nothing is remembered but her virtues and her misfortunes, ? the zeal with which she has always loved liberty, and the barbarous policy which has always withheld it from her,? the ease with which her generous spirit might be conciliated, and the cruel ingenuity which has been exerted to " wring her into undutifulness." It has been often remarked, and still oftener felt, that in our music is found the truest of all comments upon our history. The tone of defiance, succeeded by the languor of despondency, ? a burst of turbulence dying away into softness, ? the sorrows of one moment lost in the levity of the next, ? and ...