A third phrase peculiar to love and affection, is "_Manim asthee
hu--or_, My soul's within you." Every person acquainted with languages
knows how much an idiom suffers by a literal translation. How beautiful,
then, how tender and powerful, must those short expressions be, uttered,
too, with a fervor of manner peculiar to a deeply feeling people, when,
even after a literal translation, they carry so much of their tenderness
and energy into a language whose genius is cold when compared to the
glowing beauty of the Irish.
_Mauourneen dheelish_, too, is only a short phrase, but, coming warm and
mellowed from Paddy's lips into the ear of his _colleen dhas_, it is
a perfect spell--a sweet murmur, to which the _lenis susurrus_ of the
Hybla bees is, with all their honey, jarring discord. How tame is
"My sweet darling," its literal translation, compared to its soft and
lulling intonations. There is a dissolving, entrancing, beguiling,
deluding, flattering, insinuating, coaxing, winning, inveigling,
roguish, palavering, come-overing, comedhering, consenting, blarneying,
killing, willing, charm in it, worth all the philters that ever the
gross knavery of a withered alchemist imposed upon the credulity of
those who inhabit the other nations of the earth--for we don't read that
these shrivelled philter-mongers ever prospered in Ireland.
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