’Death is quicker than the wave of drowning or than any horse,
     however fast, on the racecourse.  He would strike a goal against the
     crowd; and no sooner is he there than he is on guard before us.

     ’He is changing, hindering, rushing, starting, unloosed; the day is
     no better to him than the night; when a person thinks there is no
     fear of him, there he is on the spot laid low with keening.

     ’Death is a robber who heaps together kings, high princes, and
     country lords; he brings with him the great, the young, and the
     wise, gripping them by the throat before all the people.

’It is a pity for him who is tempted with the temptations of the world; and the store that will go with him is so weak, and his lease of life no better if he were to live for a thousand years, than just as if he had slipped over on a visit and back again.

     ’When you are going to lie down, don’t be dumb.  Bare your knee and
     bruise the ground.  Think of all the deeds that you put by you, and
     that you are travelling towards the meadow of the dead.’

Some of his poems of places, usually places in Mayo, the only ones he had ever looked on—­for smallpox took his sight away in his childhood—­have much charm.  ‘Cnocin Saibhir,’ ’the Plentiful Little Hill,’ must have sounded like a dream of Tir-nan-og to many a poor farmer in a sodden-thatched cottage:—­

’After the Christmas, with the help of Christ, I will never stop if I am alive; I will go to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a fine place, without fog falling; a blessed place that the sun shines on, and the wind doesn’t rise there or any thing of the sort.

     ’And if you were a year there, you would get no rest, only sitting
     up at night and eternally drinking.

’The lamb and the sheep are there; the cow and the calf are there; fine lands are there without heath and without bog.  Ploughing and seed-sowing in the right month, and plough and harrow prepared and ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay it.  There is oats and flax and large-eared barley....  There are beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay.  Rods grow there, and bushes and tufts, white fields are there, and respect for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing scarce.’

In another song in the same manner on ‘Cilleaden,’ he says:—­

’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