SOME NEW BOOKS Paradoxes of Catholicism.-Rhymes on the Old Testament.— The Epistle to the Ephesians-Roman Documents and Decrees.- etc. Lyrical Poems.-A Text-book for the Study of Poetry.-Letters PAGE 53 ΙΙΟ 172 The Fairy of the Snows.-Echo from Africa.-Jesus Christ, Priest Back to Holy Church.-Lives and Legends of English Saints.- A Garden of Girls.-The Life of St. Francis Assisi.-Maxims from the The Life of Gemma Galgani.-The Holy Mass.-The Crucifix.- Lourdes. The Religious Poetry of Richard Crashaw.-Perilous 231 292 351 411 471 529 Index to the Works of Cardinal Newman.-Meditations and Devo- The Flower of Peace.-Down West: Sketches of Irish Life.- What is the Sacred Heart ?-St. Bernardino, the People's Preacher. 591 651 708 DEPARTMENTS The many kind friends who take a personal interest in the prosperity of this Magazine can serve it best by forwarding at once their subscription of SEVEN SHILLINGS for 1915, its forty-third year, to THE EDITOR, RATHFARNHAM CASTLE, Co. DUBLIN. THE IRISH MONTHLY JANUARY, 1914 I CANON SHEEHAN A MEMORY AND AN APPRECIATION I REMEMBER very well the last occasion on which I visited him at Doneraile. It was a glorious spring day. High overhead floated soft white fleecy clouds in a sky of vivid blue. As we drove along the high road from Mallow, suddenly, at a turn in the way, the beautiful panorama of wood and valley and mountain burst into view. There was Doneraile far below, as he himself once described it, "nestling in a deep well, sheltered by the impenetrable umbrage of woods and forests"; away behind it lay the brown and green solitudes of the Ballyhoura Hills, and to the left the towering Galtees still topped with their winter night-caps of snow. Across the hills the cloud shadows chased each other in the sun; below us in the fields a busy farmer guided his plough over the fresh green turf. All was peaceful, quiet, remote from the roar of the railway and the traffic of the town. And then we came down into the valley along the winding road well shaded with interlacing trees, past the comfortable labourers' cottages, where his name was a household word, down the long village street, and there at the end was the Mecca of our pilgrimage-the little two-storied, unpretentious house where Canon Sheehan lived. A few yards away Spenser's "gentle Mulla " flowed on its even way through reeds and shallows. Across the road were the trees of Lord Castletown's beautiful demesne. All around was the quiet leisured flow of life in this prosperous little Irish village. There were the surroundings amidst which all his great work was done, not only the work which made his name VOL. XLII.-No. 487 I famous throughout the world, but that other work which he placed first, his work as priest and guardian of his people. II I had come for the week-end, one of many that I had the honour and privilege of spending under his roof. There was, as always, the kindly, hospitable welcome, the enquiries after many common friends, the discussion of events in the great world which here seemed so remote. In the afternoon we went for a drive to visit the historic Kilcolman, where Spenser lived and wrote the Faerie Queene. It is an old grey frontier castle, perched above a brown bog. From the summit, on a clear day, you can see five counties. The Galtees seem to frown over your head and the lordly Shannon is a gleam of glory on the horizon We talked there amongst the ruins of many things of how it it was there Spenser welcomed Ralegh, newly home from his voyage round the world, bringing with him those two commonplace necessities of modern life, potatoes and tobacco; of how there, too, he wrote his magnificent Epithalamium in loyal fealty to his Irish wife, and how there, finally, as a reward for his ruthless policy, the "wilde Irishe," as he called them, burnt his castle to the ground. Back at Doneraile again, we spent the afternoon in the garden he loved so well. The long, narrow garden, a hortus conclusus, et disseptus, with its high trees and shrubs, the garden with which readers of his books are so familiar, and which he greatly loved. Here he showed me the crocuses bursting up joyously from their winter sleep, and we paced up and down the narrow, sheltered path where much of his work was thought out. There, too, was the little wooden summerhouse where, in summer, he often wrote. Before his last illness fell upon him he often worked in the garden himself, directing or helping the gardener. It was his place of peace and meditation-secure from all interruption or observation; it was there he spent the happiest hours of his life. And when the evening came we strolled out along the country roads in the dusk and talked of books and men. He was at his best then. He never shone in a crowd. His natural shyness and modesty, which he so often admitted and deplored, seemed in a crowded company to dry up that delightful easy flow of genial, speculative conversation to which those who knew him intimately loved to listen. But with a friend on a country walk or by his own fire |