IN THE DAYS OF YOUTH

New Zealand Tablet, 9 July 1914, Page 9

IN THE DAYS OF YOUTH

In the castles of romance there was a room in which I felt, in youth, a special interest (writes the Rev. M. Watson, S.J., in the Austral Light). 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 bight, 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 armor, 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 forgottenmay 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which is drawn over them as a veil ; and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.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 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 1 an unsubstantial faery 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.'

It is true that we may regret ‘the lad that is gone,’ but 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 vigor. ‘ 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 one of memory’s earliest- pictures, which represents a small boy standing before a bookseller’s shelves, in the presence of his schoolmaster and the shopman. The lad had been given, as a school prize,

Bunyan Lilyri/n’s Progress, but this book his parents had condemned as ‘ too Protestant/ and he had returned it to his teacher. The latter now said to him : ‘ Look at the shelves before you; I will give you , an book you choose.’ The youngster hesitated. It was plainly a-case of embarras des rich esses — there were too many volumes to select from. ‘ Is there any book you would like to read?’ ‘Yes; Robinson Crusoe. So he was made happy with a small copy of Defoe’s famous story. 1 cannot say how often he read it probably half a dozen times. How he revelled 111 the changing scenes and stirring events of the tale! He himself, not Crusoe, he thought, was the hero of the adventures there described; he was in slavery among the Moors; he escaped in the long-boat, with Xury; and, after shooting ‘the terrible great lion on the African coast, ho was rescued by the Portuguese ship, and landed in the Brazils. Then came the shipwreck and the desert island, where he found the print of a man’s naked foot in the sea sand, and rescued Friday from the savages. But why go through the details? The story was to ‘ the lavish heart of youth ’ a veritable treasure, the source of varied emotions of hope and fear and delight. Yet there was another book which he read even oftener, and which exercised, doubtless, a greater influence upon his character. __ It was the tale of the early Christian martyrs, which Cardinal Wiseman has given us under the title of Fahiola; nr. The. Church of the Catacombs. The character in this story that appealed most strongly to him was the Christian youth, Pancratius, who was trained by a saintly mother to tread the highest paths of faith, fortitude, and charity, and who died by martyrdom in the Roman amphitheatre. A similar work, teaching the same sublime lessons —Cardinal Newman’s Cal 11* fa — he also read, but as it is, in treatment and plan, nothing more, than a sketch, it did not interest him to the same extent as did Cardinal Wiseman’s elaborate and artistic story. Another of memory’s pictures represents the large, gas-lit study hall of a college, where some seventy pupils (boarders) were engaged in the preparation of lessons for the morrow’s classes. A few days previously carpenters had been engaged in constructing bookcases, which they set up along one side of the hall, and the shelves had been stocked with a selection of English literary works. The silence which prevailed during the hour of study was broken by the entrance of the president and the masters. From the prefect’s pulpit the president spoke of the new school library, and announced the rules that were to be observed with respect to the books. The distribution of the volumes at once began, and each boy returned to his place with a story, a biography, or a book of poems. Oliver 'heist and David Copper field were the first of Dickens’ masterpieces which I then read, and they have ever remained my favorites among his works and it was not long until I had won my way into the ‘ realm of gold ’ which Sir Walter Scott claimed as his own, and I was soon well acquainted with the adventures of Ivanhoe, Quentin

Durward, Waverley, and Guy Manneriug. One of the boys present on that occasion is now known as Mr. 1. 1 . O Connor, M.P. In the first number of his popular periodical, T. I‘. s II eddy, he gave a. description of the opening of this school library, and said that the first book which he took from its shelves Chambers’ Encyclopedia of English Literature —began his education in the domain of letters. Another of our schoolfellows at the college'*" was the present Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir Antony Mac Donnell. I he new library was instrumental in leading some of us into the goodly states and kingdoms ‘ that bards in fealty to Apollo hold.’ i Nearly every Irish boy, I suppose, owes his first knowledge of poetry to Moore's Irish Melodics, and the songs of the Spirit of the Notion. At least, so it was with one Irish lad already referred to, and many a time, by lonely lough or riverside, or on the seashore, he repeated to himself or recited aloud Emmet s address to Ireland, ‘ When he who adores thee,’ Breffni’s lament,’ ‘ Let Erin remember,’ Rich and rare cre the gems she wore,’ ‘ She is far from the land,’ and ‘ Dear harp of my country.’ And the Spirit of the Nation songs, how they rouse and sway the young Irish heart! Perhaps the best description of the effect they produce is given by Father loin Burke, 0.P., in his lecture on ‘The National Music of Ireland. I may here be allowed to say that this famous priest was to me, in youth, an object of hero-worship. I had often heard him speak, and his eloquence and striking figure, clothed, as I always saw it, in the Dominican habit, inspired me with admiration, and form now an imperishable memory. The sound of his voice comes to me across the years, and 1 hear again the lessons which lie taught——lessons which inspired hope and courage in striving' after what' is worthiest and highest, in life. Speaking once of the success of the writers of the Nation in creating a national literature, he appealed to his own experience, and said: ‘ Under the magic voices and pens of these men, every ancient glory of Ireland again stood forth. I remember it well. I was but a boy at the time, but I remember with what startled enthusiasm I would arise from reading Davis’ poems, and it would seem to me that, before my young eyes, I saw the dash of the brigade at Fontenoy. It seemed to me that my ears were filled with the shout that resounded at the Yellow Ford and Benburb — the war-cry of the Bed Hand —■ as the English hosts were swept away, and, like snow under the beams of the sun, melted before the Irish onsets’ * ■ Sir Walter Scott’s poems gave me many a happy hour. There I found magician and goblin page, border trooper and mail-clad knight, fair ladies, moated castles, and brave adventures by field and flood. ‘ The Lay,’ ‘ M arm ion,’ ‘The Lady of the Lake’ were all devoured. Nothing in the shape of a chase could, I thought, beat the stag hunt in the last-named— and who shall say that the opinion was wrong?

It is the fashion nowadays to speak slightingly of Scott’s ‘Rokeby,’ but that poem was a favorite of mine, mainly because the hero, Redmond O’Neale, is a young Irishman, and in it 1 found one of the poet’s most stirring battle-pictures— the fight between Bertram’s robber band and Rokeby ’s veterans, led on by Redmond. Beautiful, doubtless, are the illusions and dreams of youth, fated though they are to be shattered in the collision with the realities of life ; but if the young heart entertains generous aspirations, and learns to sympathise with truth and fidelity and courage, with gentleness and kindliness to friend and foe, it meets with a training that better fits its energies for life’s combat than if it were taught to take cynical views and devote itself to the pursuit of selfish ends. In any worthy training books like those mentioned above play an important part, and all who love the young, and seek ‘The mind to strengthen and anneal, While on the stithy glows the steel,’ act wisely in gaining the help which such books afford. The true preparation for the trials of the future is found in the building up of a strong and generous character. If a man lives practically for mean and sordid views, mean and sordid, too, will be his life and the material success which he gains. For we build a homo for our spirit in strict conformity with the ideals which we prize and to which we are faithful., * The college of the Immaculate Conception, Summerhill, near Athlon?.