THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 49

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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character and must enter into any distinctively national literature, and in considering how comes the startling paradox that, with a generation of young Irishmen penetrated to the core with the passion of Irish Nationality, it should be necessary to brave the charge of tediousness to claim a kindly thought for that national language which is the oldest of our national possessions and the inalienable title-deed to the individuality of our race.

Of ancient monuments of other descriptions, which are, after all, only the stocks and stones of a dead past, we have come to think tenderly enough. Public indignation is now wide awake to the vandalism of the man who should cart away the delicate stone traceries of our old Cathedrals to build into his cabin walls, or turn the Royal cemeteries of the Boyne into quarries to mend roads withal. Every Irishman of finely-strung nature loves to piece together the stones of the cloisters of Cong, where the last High King of Ireland found a more durable than earthly kingdom. Our pulses quicken as we trace amidst the vestiges of the old town wall of Limerick the breach where King William's Brandenburg Regiment was blown into the air, and where Robert Dwyer Joyce's Blacksmith might have wielded his hammer. We follow Dr. Petrie's footsteps reverently among the mounds on Tara Hill, while he proves to us where stood the Mead-circling Hall, once glittering with the revelry of kings, and where the Chamber of Sunshine from whose windows of bright glass Grainne's soft eyes first lighted on her young Munster hero as he gained the goal from all the men of Leinster on the grassy plain. A broken column, a place-name, a mere mound glorified with the dust of heroes, may enable us to live over again the feasts, the royal jousts, the romances which lit up the land a thousand years ago. We have an archi- … continue reading »

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