This gift of singing with such sweetness and power the old sacred songs
and airs of Ireland, was not the only one for which she was remarkable.
Perhaps there never lived a human being capable of giving the Irish cry,
or Keene, with such exquisite effect, or of pouring into its wild notes
a spirit of such irresistible pathos and sorrow. I have often been
present when she has "raised the keene" over the corpse of some relative
or neighbor, and my readers may judge of the melancholy charm which
accompanied this expression of her sympathy, when I assure them that
the general clamor of violent grief was gradually diminished, from
admiration, until it became ultimately hushed, and no voice was heard
but her own--wailing in sorrowful but solitary beauty. This pause, it
is true, was never long, for however great the admiration might be which
she excited, the hearts of those who heard her soon melted, and even
strangers were often forced to confess her influence by the tears which
she caused them to shed for those whose deaths could, otherwise, in no
other way have affected them. I am the youngest, I believe, of fourteen
children, and of course could never have heard her until age and the
struggles of life had robbed her voice of its sweetness. I heard enough,
however, from her blessed lips, to set my heart to an almost painful
perception of that spirit which steeps these fine old songs in a
tenderness which no other music possesses. Many a time, of a winter
night, when seated at her spinning-wheel, singing the _Trougha_, or
_Shuil agra_, or some other old "song of sorrow," have I, then little
more than a child, gone over to her, and with a broken voice and eyes
charged with tears, whispered, "Mother dear, don't sing that song, it
makes me sorrowful;" she then usually stopped, and sung some one which I
liked better because it affected me less. At this day I am in possession
of Irish airs, which none of our best antiquaries in Irish music have
heard, except through me, and of which neither they nor I myself know