that made them echo in Larry's heart, nor why the restless, passionate
spirit that inspired them should have remained with him, a perturbing
influence from which he never wholly escaped. His young soul burned
with hatred of England, borrowed from the Bards of "The Nation"
Office; he lay awake at nights, stringing rhymes in emulation of their
shouts of fury, or picturing rebellions, of which he was to be the
leader and hero. Larry's enthusiasms were wont to devour not him only,
but also his friends. It is impossible to escape from the conclusion
that the career of the Companionage of Finn was abbreviated by Larry's
determination to recite to the Companions of the Order, in season and
out of season, the poems by which, during his first Irish summer, he
was possessed. There came a time when he had, as he believed, put away
childish things, that, returning to these venerable trumpet-blasts, he
asked himself, in the arrogance of youth, how these stale metaphors,
these conventional phrases, these decorations as meretricious as stage
jewellry, and metres that cantered along, as he told himself, like
solemn old circus-horses, could have had the power to shake his voice
and fill his eyes with tears, as he spoke them to Christian, who had
so soon become his sole audience.

The strange thing was, as he acknowledged to himself, that while he
could mock at them as poetry, he could not ignore their power. The
intensity of their hatred, and of their sincerity, made itself felt,
as the light of the sun will shine through the crude commonness of a
vulgar stained-glass window.




CHAPTER V