1800-1829.

Yet! ’twas on that barren strand
Sing his praise throughout the world! 
  Yet, ’twas on that barren strand,
O’er a cowed and broken band,
  That his solitary hand
    Freedom’s flag unfurled. 
Yet! ’twas there in Freedom’s cause,
  Freedom from unequal laws,
  Freedom for each creed and class,
  For humanity’s whole mass,
    That his voice outrang;—­
  And the nation at a bound,
  Stirred by the inspiring sound,
    To his side up-sprang.

Then the mighty work began,
Then the war of thirty years—­
Peaceful war, when words were spears,
And religion led the van. 
When O’Connell’s voice of power,
Day by day and hour by hour,
Raining down its iron shower,
  Laid oppression low,
Till at length the war was o’er,
And Napoleon’s conqueror,
Yielded to a mightier foe.

1829.

    Into the senate swept the mighty chief,
      Like some great ocean wave across the bar
    Of intercepting rock, whose jagged reef
      But frets the victor whom it cannot mar. 
    Into the senate his triumphal car
      Rushed like a conqueror’s through the broken gates
    Of some fallen city, whose defenders are
      Powerful no longer to resist the fates,
But yield at last to him whom wondering Fame awaits.

    And as “sweet foreign Spenser” might have sung,
      Yoked to the car two wing`ed steeds were seen,
    With eyes of fire and flashing hoofs outflung,
      As if Apollo’s coursers they had been. 
    These were quick Thought and Eloquence, I ween,
      Bounding together with impetuous speed,
    While overhead there waved a flag of green,
      Which seemed to urge still more each flying steed,
Until they reached the goal the hero had decreed.

    There at his feet a captive wretch lay bound,
      Hideous, deformed, of baleful countenance,
    Whom as his blood-shot eye-balls glared around,
      As if to kill with their malignant glance,
    I knew to be the fiend Intolerance. 
      But now no longer had he power to slay,
    For Freedom touched him with Ithuriel’s lance,
      His horrid form revealing by its ray,
And showed how foul a fiend the world could once obey.

    Then followed after him a numerous train,
      Each bearing trophies of the field he won: 
    Some the white wand, and some the civic chain,
      Its golden letters glistening in the sun;
    Some—­for the reign of justice had begun—­
      The ermine robes that soon would be the prize
    Of spotless lives that all pollution shun,
      And some in mitred pomp, with upturned eyes,
And grateful hearts invoked a blessing from the skies.

1843-1847.

A glorious triumph! a deathless deed!—­
  Shall the hero rest and his work half done? 
Is it enough to enfranchise a creed,
  When a nation’s freedom may yet be won? 
Is it enough to hang on the wall
  The broken links of the Catholic chain,
When now one mighty struggle for all
  May quicken the life in the land again?—­