Just as she was on the point of doing so she heard
that her mother had died fifteen months before. The keenness and
persistence of her grief defy description. With a delicacy of feeling
which showed the native poetry of the Irish mind, she dwelt, most of
all, upon the thought that while she was working, and pinching, and
dreaming of happiness with her mother, it was indeed but a dream, and
that cherished parent lay still and cold beneath the ground. She felt
fully the cruel cheat of Fate. "Och! and she was dead all those times
I was thinking of her!" was the deepest note of her lament.
They are able, however, to make the sacrifice of even these intense
family affections in a worthy cause. We knew a woman who postponed
sending for her only child, whom she had left in Ireland, for years,
while she maintained a sick friend who had no one else to help her.
The poetry of which I have spoken shows itself even here, where they
are separated from old romantic associations, and begin the new life
in the New World by doing all its drudgery. We know flights of poetry
repeated to us by those present at their wakes,--passages of natural
eloquence, from the lamentations for the dead, more beautiful than
those recorded in the annals of Brittany or Roumelia.
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