THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 50
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
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tect of the Board of Works more or less (generally less) ready to patch up every crack and flaw that time works in our Round Towers and ruined Shrines. How comes it that alone among our national monuments the greatest and most venerable of them all is suffered to crumble to dust in our sight, with none but a few mournful watchers here and there to lament the stages of its doom? Of what avail, however, are tombs or battered ruins to enable us to realise, to touch, to feel the warm current of life revive in the veins of the picturesque generations who lived and loved and fought and feasted in this land before us, compared with the language which was the very voice of their souls—which was, in their own phrase, the pulse of their hearts—and which preserves for us, as in a national phonograph, the thoughts, the accents, the very inflections with which Oisin sang the songs of his youth, and King Brian cheered on his hosts, and Columbanus ruled half Western Europe from his cell in far-famed Bobbio?
Let us take another aspect in which the national language is the national treasure-house. It is the unique distinction of the Gaelic race that the lowliest family inherits a genealogy as well authenticated and as rich in inspiring traditions as the family tree of most modern dukes. For the last three centuries, indeed, the record is blurred or defaced. The sharp facts of the Celtic genealogies, verified every three years in the great national assemblies, and stamped indelibly in the national memory by the bards and shanachies, merge into one vast, indistinguishable scene of degradation for the race. But now that the race has risen to its feet, and can look back behind the weltering gulf of the past three hundred years, we can take up the distant traces of whence we came, and, by evidences as reliable as those which attest any of the facts of … continue reading »
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