COMFORTED

As down the winding country road
I went through wind and rain,
Upon my heart a heavy load

Of loneliness and pain,

An old man whom I chanced to know,

In happier days gone by,

Came towards me-white his head as snow,
And dull and dimmed his eye.

Unconscious there a while he stood,
An alms from me to ask,
Peering through eyes beshot with blood
As though to pierce a mask.
Until swift recognition came

To light aglow his face;

"Mavrone! and is he just the same?
We missed him round the place!"

But when my black and sombre gown
Its tale all-grievous told,

The joy from out his face had flown,
Again 'twas seared and old.
No word of sorrow he let fall,
Nor tear of mourning shed,
Yet in his eyes I plain read all
He, tongue-tied, would have said.

As sad and bareheaded he went
Adown the winding road,

Some message seemed from Heaven sent
To ease me of my load.

For well I knew for whom he prayed-
Who would not come again-

And I went, strangely comforted,
Home through the wind and rain.

NORA TYNAN O'MAHONY.

603

AN AUTUMN REVERIE

HE turning woodbine comes creeping in at my window,

ΤΗ laden with memories of springtimes of the past. How

much this vine has seen and known of what was to be and has not been! Have I left my springtime behind me? Have I lost with it my power of dreaming? Can I build no more castles in Spain because I never laid foundations?

There was a time when I was so rapturously happy in the future that I saw not the multitudinous blessings of the present. What glorious visions were mine! How far they excelled all earthly realizations! I would be an artist-such a one as earth has not seen. I would portray with old earth's beauties the joy of the heart that beheld them. Wait until I have mastered the technicalities of art, acquired the skill which would enable me to depict my day-dreams, so that others might appreciate their loveliness! But I have seen other springs and summers since, and I know now that I shall never see my wonderful dreams on

canvas.

I would be a musician—the musician for whom the world has long been waiting. The melodies which inspire the angels should resound at my touch. My art should give expression to Nature's glories, and the heart's affections; it would voice sentiments hitherto inexpressible. Wait until I had learned the principles of harmony and trained my fingers! But springs and summers have rolled by, and I know now that, if ever the world is rejoiced by such strains, they will come from other hands than mine.

I would be a poet-the poet who would wed celestial thought to ideal rhythm, and send their offspring to ennoble men. Wait until I had practised the literary scales and cadences, and become an adept in the harmony of words. But springs and summers have destroyed youth's illusions, and I know now that, when the poems of which I dreamed have been written, I shall not call them mine.

Yet am I tender towards my abortive offspring. Among my secret treasures, are not the brain-children I craved, but a simple song, a crude picture, some faulty rhymes. I love them so jealously that no one else has ever seen, will ever see them, lest they wound me by smiling at them; for defective as I know them to be, I love them because they are mine.

Ah, Master Workman! Dost Thou love Thy creations ?

Nay, I do not question, I need not be told. Art Thou tender towards their defects? I know; they are Thine. Thou lovest them with a jealous love; Thou hast no anger, only loving compassion for the frailties of Thy creatures-because Thou art their Creator. Thou seest in them beauties the world cannot see, Thou lovest them not only for what they are, but for what they might have been and may yet be.

Ah, Master Workman, Master Workman! There is none so tender as Thou! Dost Thou smile with gracious commiseration on the dreamer at Thy feet? Did she wound Thy infinite love when she had other dreams than of Thee?

Nay, she but dreamt of honour, and Thou art Infinite Glory; she but dreamt of affection, and Thou art Infinite Love. Thou must look on her with gentle pity, that she should think the flights of her imagination great.

And to-day, when she catches some faint reflection of Thy infinite Beauty in the glories of the autumn day, Thine earthweary creature feels Thy sanctioning smile, and is encouraged to dream on with the full assurance that all her heart's desires will yet be satisfied.

Master Workman, Master Workman! All-Beautiful, AllGlorious, All-Loving! How necessary art Thou to the works of Thy hands! Throughout all the ages of eternity Thy dreamer shall find in Thee with ever-growing delight an ever ampler fulfilment of her highest, holiest ideals.

M. I. J.

FOR THE DYING

Omnipotens faustam donet morientibus horam.

To those who're drawing now their last faint breath
May God Almighty grant a happy death!

M. R.

LITTLE ESSAYS ON LIFE AND CHARACTER

VI.-IN THE DAYS OF YOUTH

N the castles of romance there was a room in which I felt, in youth, a special interest. It was the picture gallery, the spot that witnessed the perambulations of the ghost, whose apparition in the deepening shades of the gloaming, or at the dead noon of night, filled the living with awe and terror. Yet not the ghost only, but the pictures themselves, were enough to excite unwonted sensations, and send me into a fit of pleasant musing-pictures of knights in armour, of fair.dames and damsels, and representations of scenes or events connected with the family history. With so many heroes and heroines in view, it was not difficult for the imagination to weave a tale of high emprize and of love faithful until death.

Such a gallery is memory, on whose walls hangs many a painting, the undying record of past events, untoward or painful, as well as those that are agreeable. It is said that the memory never loses what has once been lodged in it; and, however obscured or forgotten may be the details of former occurrences, a time will arrive when that gallery shall be rehung with all its pictures, and not even the least or the ugliest but shall be assigned its proper place.

Of this I feel assured," says De Quincey, "that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind: a thousand accidents may, and will, interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever, just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil; and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn."*

The most pleasant inscriptions on the mind are those which remind us of our youth.

What days were ours when the heart was young, and cherished pure ideals, and beat with the pulse of poesy natural to the springtime of life! Even when we reach the autumn or the winter of our years, the thought of home and of our youth is an unfailing source of pensive pleasure. For youth was a time of sailing clouds and golden sunsets, of flowers and scented

* Confessions of an Opium Eater.

meads and forest glades, of singing birds and the other wild things of Nature, of lakes and islands and rushing streams; a time that rang with the voices (we hear them still) of playmates and true-hearted comrades, and of all we loved; a time when the merest trifle, the sight of a rainbow or of a bird on the wing, or the breath of perfume from a hill or a moor, thrilled us with joy that broke into a shout or a song, and the wide earth seemed not the rough, material world it is, but "an unsubstantial faëry place," the abode of warmth and light and gladness. One can sympathise with Robert Louis Stevenson, when, recalling a day on which he sailed in his boyhood among the Hebrides, he exclaims, in one of his ballads :

Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone ;
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that's gone.
Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun;

All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone."

" but

It is true that we may regret the lad that is gone; if we still retain something of his bright and brave spirit, and value the memories of the Eden in which he lived, and keep in view the unselfish aspirations that thrilled his heart in the morning of life, we have not wholly lost him. He still lives on, justifies to some degree the illusion that haunted him in youth that he should never die. For then it seemed to him that, like Nature herself, he was immortal, such was his vitality and vigour. "Life is indeed a strange gift," says Hazlitt "and its privileges are most mysterious. No wonder when it is first granted to us, that our gratitude, our admiration, and our delight should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness or from thinking it will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest impressions are borrowed from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendour to ourselves."

The world of Nature is not the only world to which we are introduced in early years; we are admitted into another, that bestows some of life's keenest pleasures-the world of books. The first books that fell into my hands were cheap copies of Jack the Giant-Killer, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and some of the tales from The Arabian Nights. Those veracious histories glowed with brightly-tinted paper covers, and there was a rough wood-cut on nearly every page. My first acquaintance with an English classic is the subject of