THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 76

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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whose heat all fair and seemly accessories of national life are sure to blossom forth again. I am fully persuaded that any general Gaelic revival will not come as a mere matter of national penance for past forgetfulness, much less on the terms of penalising the use of that agglomeration of languages which is called the English. It will have to be proven that the language of our fathers is a pleasure and a luxury to the Celtic tongue and brain, even as the hurling and the hunting sports of our fathers have been proven to be an exhilaration to Celtic brawn and muscle. Poor human nature will have to be convinced that a knowledge of the Irish language, in place of being a thing to blush for and disown, a mark of inferiority to be concealed like the faint dark circle around the fingernails of the octoroon, ought to be the first object of an Irish Nationalist's young ambition, a new sense, a delicious exercise of the faculties, the key that unlocks to him the old palaces, and the old hunting-grounds of his dreams, the music which comes ringing down the ages from the lips of the saints who chanted in the old abbeys, of the warriors whose lusty shouts rang over the old battlefields, and of the lovers who whispered by the haunted Irish springs. Approached thus with the loving ardour of a nation's second youth, the tongue of Tara and Kinkora may realise the fond prophecy that 'the Gaelic will be in high repute yet among the music-loving hosts of Eirinn,' and the men who clung to it when it was persecuted, who believed in it when it was scorned, who in the watches of the night hoped on beside what seemed to be its bed of death, may yet taste the reward of knowing that they have preserved unto the happier coming time a language which will be the well-spring of a racier national poetry, … continue reading »

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