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to England to hear Shakespeare's lark sing at heaven's gate; and Thomas Hughes came to America to hear Lowell's bobolink.
These ties again are formed very slowly, and the colonial spirit still lingers so much among us that a very little English reputation goes farther in the United States than a much higher American fame in England.
Yet here we are sometimes startled with the discovery that we are also interesting to our elder cousins, as well as our elder cousins to us. Twenty-five years ago the present writer, visiting Europe for the first time, began with the city of Cork, and stood delighted before the humble sign “Fishamble Lane,” because it recalled the song whose burden was,
“Misthress Judy McCarthy of Fishamble Lane.”
On mentioning this a day or two after, in London, to that fine old Irish abolitionist, the late Richard D. Webb, he received it with sympathy, and said that he felt just so when he first saw the sign “Madison Square” in New York and thought of Miss Flora McFlimsey.
It was pleasant to find that we too had some small poetic associations to be exported, so that we could restore the balance of trade.
It is a pity that we should now be beginning
New York, Harper and Brothers, 1897.
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