'Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?
The "drop" and the famine have made our ranks thin.
In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?
Will nobody give us the word to begin?

'Some brothers have left us in sadness and sorrow,
In despair of the cause they had sworn to win;
They owned they were sick of that cry of "to-morrow";
Not a man would believe that we meant to begin.

'We've been ready for months--is there one can deny it?
Is there any one here thinks rebellion a sin?
We counted the cost--and we did not decry it,
And we asked for no more than the word to begin?

'At Vinegar Hill, when our fathers were fighters,
With numbers against them, they cared not a pin;
They needed no orders from newspaper writers,
To tell them the day it was time to begin.

'To sit here in sadness and silence to bear it,
Is harder to face than the battle's loud din;
'Tis the shame that will kill me--I vow it, I swear it?
Now or never's the time, if we mean to begin.'

There was a wild rapture in the way he struck the last chords, that, if it
did not evince ecstasy, seemed to counterfeit enthusiasm.

'Very poor doggerel, with all your bravura,' said Kearney sneeringly.