1775.

Six hundred stormy years have flown,
Since Erin fought to hold her own,
To hold her homes, her altars free,
Within her wall of circling sea. 
No year of all those years had fled,
No day had dawned that was not red,
(Oft shed by fratricidal hand),
With the best blood of all the land. 
And now, at last, the fight seemed o’er,
The sound of battle pealed no more;
Abject the prostrate people lay,
Nor dared to hope a better day;
An icy chill, a fatal frost,
Left them with all but honour lost,
Left them with only trust in God,
The lands were gone their fathers owned;
Poor pariahs on their native sod. 
Their faith was banned, their prophets stoned;
Their temples crowning every height,
Now echoed with an alien rite,
Or silent lay each mouldering pile,
With shattered cross and ruined aisle. 
Letters denied, forbade to pray,
And white-winged commerce scared away: 
Ah, what can rouse the dormant life
That still survives the stormier strife? 
What potent charm can once again
Relift the cross, rebuild the fane? 
Free learning from felonious chains,
And give to youth immortal gains? 
What signal mercy from on high?—­
Hush! hark!  I hear an infant’s cry,
The answer of a new-born child,
From Iveragh’s far mountain wild.

Yes, ’tis the cry of a child, feeble and faint in the night,
  But soon to thunder in tones that will rouse both tyrants and slaves. 
Yes, ’tis the sob of a stream just awake in its source on the height,
  But soon to spread as a sea, and rush with the roaring of waves.

Yes, ’tis the cry of a child affection hastens to still,
  But what shall silence ere long the victor voice of the man? 
Easy it is for a branch to bar the flow of the rill,
  But all the forest would fail where raging the torrent once ran.

And soon the torrent will run, and the pent-up waters o’erflow,
  For the child has risen to a man, and a shout replaces the cry;
And a voice rings out through the world, so wing`ed with Erin’s woe,
  That charmed are the nations to listen, and the Destinies to reply.

Boyhood had passed away from that child, predestined by fate
  To dry the eyes of his mother, to end the worst of her ills,
And the terrible record of wrong, and the annals of hell and hate,
  Had gathered into his breast like a lake in the heart of the hills.

Brooding over the past, he found himself but a slave,
  With manacles forged on his mind, and fetters on every limb;
The land that was life to others, to him was only a grave,
  And however the race he ran no victor wreath was for him.

The fane of learning was closed, shut out was the light of day,
  No ray from the sun of science, no brightness from Greece or Rome,
And those who hungered for knowledge, like him, had to fly away,
  Where bountiful France threw wide the gates that were shut at home.