BOOK NOTICES

New Zealand Tablet, 16 May 1918, Page 13

BOOK NOTICES

Mud and, Purple, by Seumas O’Sullivan. (Talbot Press, Dublin.)

If you know Dublin you will appreciate this little book. If Dublin has no memories for you you will still love Mr. O’Sullivan’s sketches for their delicate fantasies and for their beautiful prose, but you will miss the heart of his writing. When we read the book we were again walking among those old streets in the North side where at one time the old Irish gentry had their town houses, and where now the families of workers are crowded into lofty, decayed palaces in which, ‘often, a wonderfully carved ceiling looks down on unspeakable poverty, and a mantelpiece of Carrara marble keeps company with bare tables and broken chairs. The rich have long left the North side and gone down to breathe the sea breezes along the coast between Merrion and Dalkey, but the old-world Dublin is still there and a great many old-world people have remained with it. Mud and Purple is a happy title for the book. Mr. O’Sullivan has caught the charm of the eighteenth-century streets and houses and people which still remain in Dublin. He does not confine his reveries to this aspect of the Irish capital. We will take you for a philosophic stroll among the paths of the Botanic Gardens, and he will not allow you to grow weary while in his company. He writes delightfully .of the old canals which form such dreamy chains between Dublin and the far-away west and the alluring south. As he stands by the lake in Stephen’s Green he muses: “Strange creatures they are —those guests of ours which have come from such far places to grace a Dublin pond. Well-content they seem, and seldom home-sick, and after all why should they be? For can they not go back to their own native countries in a single cry ? That small bird standing at the edge of the little island there with his eyes shut can put more of Norway and its fiords and pine-trees into a single cry than you could get in a twelve-guinea tour. And here is another which has all the south and its sunlight in a sound that is little more than a sigh. How weird it sounds in the night-time—this crying of the wild birds. An alien sound which can change the duck ponds to enchanted seas, and the very windows of the Shelbourne to magic casements.”

’ The funeral processions which go out of the city every morning are familiar, sights to ; all who know Dublin. Her© is the end of a sketch about a man who met.them on his way to work every day and religiously saluted the passing dead:— • “And so at last one morning' in the depths of winter, when the funeral horses could but keep their ponderous dignity by walking at an almost imperceptible pace, when the faces of the tall drivers had deepened to purple in the frosty keenness of the morning air, there was no one standing in the accustomed corner to do honor to the passing cortege, and so also on the following morning. And on the third morning as an unaccompanied hearse went slowly past the vacant corner the driver and his . companion looked at one another, and the driver muttered “strange”; but it was really not so strange after all had they but known it, for in the plain deal coffin beneath them Philip Sharon was lying at rest.” The dedication of the book, from which we quote a few verses, tells us in Mr. O’Sullivan’s words what the sketches are about, and also that he can write poetry as well as prose :

Since you have loved my city well Accept the booh wherein I tell Of common things that you and I - Held sacred in the days gone hi/. Where these old lovely streets still hold About them proudly fold on fold Then- ancient purple, though the stress Of a late age's littleness Prevail around, and only the// Are mindful of a kinglier day.