A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue Book

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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
BOOK II WILLIAM DRENNAN This writer, the best of the poets of the 1798 Rebellion, was born in Belfast on May 23, 1754, and died on February 5, 1820. He was one of the strongest supporters of the Society of United Irishmen, whose original manifesto he wrote. In 1794 he was tried for sedition, but was acquitted. His verses, which are very few in number, are perhaps rhetoric rather than poetry, but the rhetoric is always strong and sincere. Most of them, apart from the national lyrics, appeared first in Joshua Edkin's Collection Of Poems, Dublin 1801 (restricted to Irish writers). He published Fugitiye Pieces in Belfast, 1815, and a translation of 'The Electra' of Sophocles in 1817. He took particular pride in the fact of having invented the phrase ' Emerald Isle,' which occurs in a song highly extolled by Moore, but hardly deserving of his extravagant eulogy. His best piece is unquestionably 'The Wake of William Orr,' commemorating the execution of a respectable Ulster farmer who was convicted on perjured evidence, and whose name has never been forgotten in Ireland. The toast ' Remember Orr' was for some years one of the watchwords of the aristocratic Whig party in England. D j O'DouoGHUE. When Erin first rose from the dark swelling flood God bless'd the green Island, and saw it was good ; The em'rald of Europe, it sparkled and shone— In the ring of the world the most precious stone. In her sun, in her soil, in her station thrice blest, With her back towards Britain, her face to the West,Erin stands proudly insular on her steep shore, And strikes her high harp 'mid the ocean's deep roar. But when its soft tones seem to mourn and to weep, The dark chain of silence is thrown o'er the deep ; At the thought of the past the tears gush from her eyes, And the pulse of her...