Shout, shout, puny slaves, though each banner that dances Round the path of the Prince is the alien red, Crack your throats, though the gleam of yon glittering lances Is dimmed by the blood of your innocent dead. Kiss the ground at his feet, though the soldiers that guard him, Your fathers and kinsmen have ruthlessly slain, Be dogs to the last, and like mongrels reward him, By coating in slime every link of your chain.
But cowardly serfs, in your crouching remember The people and ye are no longer the same, And every heart where one flickering ember Of manhood’s ablaze has contempt for your shame. Then go, join the ranks of the knaves who have bartered God’s birthright of freedom for titles and gold. The heart of the nation beats still for the martyred, Though their glory and cause be unsung and untold.
When ye, abject hounds, and your cheers shall have perished, When the Prince and his courtiers shall sleep in the grave, Their name and their fame and their work shall be cherished While one Irish bosom is faithful and brave. In honorless tombs all their foes will be rotten, When the cause that they died for, triumphant and grand, Shines out, o’er the tombstones of princes forgotten, In the sunrise of Liberty bathing our land.
For enterprise, facility of invention and expedient, and the ability to “get there” in spite of every difficulty and obstacle, the American newspaper man is a century ahead of his European brother; but I know of one Irish knight of the stylograph who could give even a Yankee points, if we are to believe his friends.
Brian has been known to take notes in a rain-storm with a sharp-pointed scissors on the ribs of his umbrella.
When his leg was broken in a boiler explosion, he chronicled the event on the bandages.
When he had to disguise himself as a bandsman at an Orange demonstration, he took down the chairman’s speech in the mouth of his trombone.
He sent a graphic account of an Arctic expedition engraven on blocks of ice from Smith’s Sound, and he once pencilled the story of a railway collision on the wooden leg of a survivor. He forgot to mention how the mangled victim was accommodated with an artificial limb so soon after the disaster, but he never bothers his head about such minor details.