NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 6 March 1919, Page 26

NOTES

The Glamor of Dublin”

There are cities on the Continent that haunt one and woo one forever and a day by their old-world charm and loveliness. The English cities are too close to modern life with its hurry and its anxiety to affect one in the same way, but there are many towns and cities in Ireland which once known can never be forgotten. Greatest and most powerful of them all is Dublin, with its beautiful Bay, its background of historic hills among which the ghosts of ancient warriors move still and where a patriot may dream of swords and spears that will one day gleam in battle for Erin again. Many books might be written about the old Dublin houses with their marble mantelpieces and their rich ceilings and carved cornices and stately rooms in which in former days the men of Grattan’s Parliament foregathered. There is history in the streets wherever you turn. Here it was that Lord Edward the fine flower of romance and chivalry of the Rebellion of —was taken; there Swift lived and Stella’s heart broke; Emmet and Tone ‘ walked here; Goldsmith passed under that archway; that house at the corner welcomed Davis; and that other echoed the beautiful Gaelic tongue as spoken by Pearse. Chapelizod recalls the story of Iseult. A few miles away in Glendalough you are in a deep valley by a lovely lake shut in by purple hills, and all around you are memories of the great bishop, St. Laurence O’Toole. All the history of Ireland, all its romance and poetry and sorrow are in the streets of Dublin still. The ghosts of the immortal past walk side by side with the kindliest and brightest and wittiest people in the whole wide world.

A New Book About Dublin

We have before us a little volume which tells us all this beautifully and tenderly. It is a Talbot Press publication, by D. L. Kay. Our copy is', the first that has arrived here but it will not be the last. It is a book for a quiet half-hour of reverie, a book for those who love to dream of the ancient ' glories " of Erin ‘ and

who know that every failure of the past is a pledge of the final triumph. We have had from Germany the undying songs without words-the unforgettable Lieder ohne T Vorte. Here we have a color book without pictures ; for though there is no drawing in it, the sketches make you see, as if a pageant were staged before your eyes, the scenes and persons of which Mr. Kay has written. The curtain rises on O’Connell Street, and here is the picture: “ ‘No man has a right to fix a boundary to the march of a nation.’ Thus it is written in bronze at the base of a shaft of stone. And, before it, the bronze impenetrable Parnell stands confronting the centuries now at the top of O’Connell Street, in Dublin City. Straight down the wild boulevard he looks towards the Bridge, and the red flushes sweep over his face as though life were flowing in the metal again. It is not he who has done this immediate thing, but, in the refracted air, those limbs of his seem to strain forward and that outstretched arm quivers a little as though waving his people on. ‘No man can set a boundary.’ And lo ! they are thrusting at the frontiers again to-day. For this is the hour of Illusion in Europe, with ‘ Freedom ’ and ‘ Right ’ and ‘ Small Nations’ and Truth upon every Imperial breeze. Till here too, youth is beguiled by the call, and, however few, will hazard the proving of its faith even to the death for its own little land. As behold, over there that Post Office, a nest of poets and impassioned young fellows firing guns and breathing hard with the inspiration of a great ideal in their "breasts ! For rebellion is loose, and those desperate lovers have run up their Republican ensign and taken the eye of beholders from distant housetops, with a kind of troubled ecstasy— the end of it all by that fish-shop window in Moore Street over the way. For the English General Lowe has come round in his car to parley on the flagstones with Padraic Pearse, this Schoolmaster to whom so long ‘voices’ had been-vouchsafed till he donned his armor and marched away. And so with a squad of troops, Staffordshire lads from homes that seldom bred a dream, forward he goes to judgment and the final volley on Kilmainham Square Patrick Higgins Pearse, the London man’s son, whose heart was * all a hive for Ireland’s sake.’ ” The Convent of the Little Hills “College —sunset and evening star— an Angel us Bell above the treesbirds hushing their song at the sound. And, within, good Mother Bernard leading the final prayer. Then the slow trail of sandals down the corridors, one by on© the cell-gates closing, the bell quit© still, the late birds resuming their epilogue of the day. College Green it is indeed, but how changed ! For within those walls of the new Trinity are the old garden -closes of St. Mary of the Little Hills a sweet and tender name, surely,—in the heart of our roaring modern town : the convent founded by Dermot MacMurrough himself in the dim twelfth century Ireland, these fields outside Oxmantown unravaged by - the intellectualism of later days, the Little Hills a pool of praise for God to bend over and see His face reflected therein. ‘‘So fade ,a while, dark brotherhood of fellows of dour T.C.D. , and shine forth white sisters of the convent and meadows in the place of Little Hills.” Trinity College , _ Passing out from the College on a day when only the little wicket of the great main door is open, a magical scene unfolds as you come into the arch a view only of the pillared Parliament House across the way, with the green trees, like a ribbon about it, the very air and ease of classical Greece in the stateliness out of which one goes to this picture of dignity hung outside. Plato indeed might move untroubled by the Porter’s Lodge until, ©merging, there is eclipse. For Dame Street widens into view and that brazen infirmity of King William on his hors© abolishes beauty by its imperial conceit.” - J ■ J

Here follows a passage which tells of the Book of Kells, worked by artists in, old Meath who ‘knew what spirals the meteors make, what curves and graces'’ are in the ■ branches of trees and they moving aside for a young wind to pass, what : patterns the flowers, weave in their secret mills of - the night,” and how men came from Brittany and the Black Forest to be able to say that they saw such a one coloring the Book of Kells. And then—about the same sacred book—this —•

1894. August. Scene—the interior of the Library, T.C.D. Enter a group black-stoled: Provosts, Deans, Fellows, and other shapes. In the midst a lady, short, obese, young, ordinary. Behind her a tall, military-looking youth, dilettante in art and ethics, authentic blue-blood-husband by request. Slowly, majestically, stupidly, they bow low, little fat lady takes pen from prostrate Dean’s hand, the spirits of the books on all the shelves swoon within their bindings at the deed. You can read it still on an outraged page, the signatures of the two—‘Victoria Regina., * Albert.’ Reader, come away.” Tone There are pages and pages that we would love to quote ; for we love Dublin and the pictures haunt us. But we must pass them by, leaving Swift, Stella, Pamela, and Lord Edward to the reader of the book on a later day, and reluctantly resisting the appeal of Mangan, Mitchel, Davis, and a host of others who live still in dear Dublin town which the author recalls vividly. Here, however, is the concluding passage: And of the futureif one may indulge a dream! what destiny of stars and shining pinnacles may unfold ? For here amid the shock and onset of all the tyrannies of flesh and spirit, alone amidst the gross batterings of material things, she stands patient with her strange old sacred civilisation—a reverence for youth, a worship of womanhood unique in an age of apostacy, a devotion to lost causes that are often but virtue herself in distress—all these the stigmata of her martyred but indestructible soul. “And we love thee, O Banba ! Though the spoiler be in thy hall, And thou bereft of all, Save only that Spirit for friend Who shapes all things to the end : “Thine eyes are a sword that has slain Thy lovers on many a plain, When, glad to the conflict they pressed Drunk with the light of thy breast To die for thee, Banba!”