ich I have just left at three in the
morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in
various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with
head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I
hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, "I believe in nothing but the
Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes spoke of drink as something
which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I
think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did
he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when
he would write _The Dark Angel_? I am almost certain that he did, for he
had already written _Mystic and Cavalier_, where the historical setting
is, I believe, but masquerade.

"Go from me: I am one of those, who fall.
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company? Before the end,
Go from me, dear my friend!

Yours are the victories of light: your feet
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet.
But after warfare in a mourning gloom
I rest in clouds of doom.

* * * * *

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds:
Dimness, and airy shrouds.

* * * * *

O rich and sounding voices of the air!
Interpreters and prophets of despair:
Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come
To make with you my home."

VIII

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the
private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing
unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William
Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that
nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to
read him, after dinner, Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, and before
dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our
Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca,
and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old
man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated
to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime
Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so
little ra