ones, both as to words and airs, have perished with her.  Her family were all imbued with a poetical spirit, and some of her immediate ancestors composed in the Irish tongue several fine old songs, in the same manner as Carolan did; that is, some in praise of a patron or a friend, and others to celebrate rustic beauties, that have long since been sleeping in the dust.  For this reason she had many old compositions that were almost peculiar to our family, which I am afraid could not now be procured at all, and are consequently lost.  I think her uncle, and I believe her grandfather, were the authors of several Irish poems and songs, because I know that some of them she sang, and others she only recited.

Independently of this, she had a prejudice against singing the Irish airs to English words; an old custom of the country was thereby invaded, and an association disturbed which habit had rendered dear to her.  I remember on one occasion, when she was asked to sing the English version of that touching melody, “The Red-haired Man’s Wife,” she replied, “I will sing it for you; but the English words and the air are like a quarrelling man and wife:  the Irish melts into the tune, but the English doesn’t,” an expression scarcely less remarkable for its beauty than its truth.  She spoke the words in Irish.

This gift of singing with such sweetness and power the old sacred songs and airs of Ireland, was not the only one for which she was remarkable.  Perhaps there never lived a human being capable of giving the Irish cry, or Keene, with such exquisite effect, or of pouring into its wild notes a spirit of such irresistible pathos and sorrow.  I have often been present when she has “raised the keene” over the corpse of some relative or neighbor, and my readers may judge of the melancholy charm which accompanied this expression of her sympathy, when I assure them that the general clamor of violent grief was gradually diminished, from admiration, until it became ultimately hushed, and no voice was heard but her own—­wailing in sorrowful but solitary beauty.  This pause, it is true, was never long, for however great the admiration might be which she excited, the hearts of those who heard her soon melted, and even strangers were often forced to confess her influence by the tears which she caused them to shed for those whose deaths could, otherwise, in no other way have affected them.  I am the youngest, I believe, of fourteen children, and of course could never have heard her until age and the struggles of life had robbed her voice of its sweetness.  I heard enough, however, from her blessed lips, to set my heart to an almost painful perception of that spirit which steeps these fine old songs in a tenderness which no other music possesses.  Many a time, of a winter night, when seated at her spinning-wheel, singing the Trougha, or Shuil agra, or some other old “song of sorrow,” have I, then little more than a child, gone over to