two Irish things

If poetry creates a paradise of its own, and tends to make mankind happier, Ireland has indeed need of song…The days of her mourning are not ended. The dirge of a thousand years still swells over the land of numberless sorrows. The voice of her song is still plaintive over the razed homesteads of her valleys, over the sweltering plague-ship and shattered bark of the Western Main.

—Edward Hayes, The Ballads of Ireland, 1856

---

The Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains them throughout temporary periods of joy.

—Oscar Wilde