'I leave it in my will that my heart rises as the wind rises, or as
the fog scatters, when I think upon Carra and the two towns below
it, on the two-mile bush, and on the plains of Mayo.... And if I
were standing in the middle of my people, age would go from me, and
I would be young again.'

He writes of friends that he has made in Galway as well as in Mayo, a
weaver, a carpenter, a priest at Kilcolgan who is 'the good Christian,
the clean wheat of the Gael, the generous messenger, the standing tree
of the clergy.' Some of his eulogies both on persons and places are
somewhat spoiled by grotesque exaggeration. Even Cilleaden has not only
all sorts of native fishes, 'as plenty as turf,' and all sorts of native
trees, but is endowed with 'tortoises,' with 'logwood and mahogany.' His
country weaver must not only have frieze and linen in his loom, but
satin and cambric. A carpenter near Ardrahan, Seaghan Conroy, is praised
with more simplicity for his 'quick, lucky work,' and for the pleasure
he takes in it. 'I never met his master; the trade was in his nature';
and he gives a long list of all the things he could make: doors and all
that would be wanted for a big house'; mills and ploughs and
spinning-wheels 'nicely finished with a clean chisel'; 'all sorts of
things for the living, and a coffin for the dead. And with all this 'he
cares little for money, but to spend, as he earns, decently. And if he
was up for nine nights, you wouldn't see the sign of a drop on him.'

Another of his more simple poems is what Spenser would call an 'elegie
or friend's passion' on a player on fiddle or pipes, Thomas O'Daly, that
gives him a touch of kinship with the poets who have mourned their
Astrophel, their Lycidas, their Adonais, their Thyrsis. This is how I
have been helped to put it into English by a young working farmer,
sitting by a turf fire one evening, when his day in the fields was