THE LAND OF ERIN

IN the land of Erin there are pleasant valleys,

Where the scented violets long and early blow; Where the golden sunshine in the evening dallies, Loath from leaf and blossom, shrub and tree to go. There the brooks keep singing songs both gay and tender, As in light and shadow swift or slow they run, Past the swaying grasses, and the willows slender, And the yellow sedges open to the sun.

There are hills in Erin famed in song and story,
Where the purple heather lures the busy bees;
Where the ivy garlands ruins old and hoary

That awaken bitter and sweet memories.
To these ruins swallows hasten, home returning

From the tropic splendours o'er the lone blue sea,
Heart sick for cool breezes, and the gorses burning,
And the merry blackbird's joyous minstrelsy.

In the land of Erin men are true and loyal,

Beauteous are the women both in hall and cot. In this land the stranger finds a welcome royal; This land by its exiles is forgotten not.

Vale, and glade, and mountain still fresh beauties showing, Kindly men and women north, south, east, and west; Skies soft, blue, and tender, streams, like silver, blowing Make this land of Erin of all lands the best.

MAGDALEN ROCK.

Τ

EDWARD KELLY, S.J.

A FEW NOTES IN REMEMBRANCE

II.

HESE notes are resumed on the 7th of February, the first anniversary of Father Edward Kelly's death. The February issue of this magazine contained no reference to him except in the first two "Pigeonhole Paragraphs," at page 115, which gave a few minute particulars, and are now referred to for the sake of some who would be reluctant to miss anything, however slight, about their venerated friend.

The first instalment of this unconventional account of an uneventful career reached the end of Edward Kelly's schooldays. That is a momentous epoch in a youth's career-the parting of the ways, where one turning may lead to Jerusalem and another to Jericho, just as in our excellent metropolitan tram system an almost imperceptible divergence will determine whether the terminus is to be Clonskeagh or Terenure. But this is too trivial an illustration of a solemn subject. Beside the personal destiny of the one gifted soul with whom the choice lay, how many souls had their higher interests involved in the choice of a state of life made by Edward Kelly at the end of his Rhetoric year at Clongowes! Enquiries made in the only likely quarter have failed to procure for me any information as to the precise period when his Jesuit vocation declared itself. In the Summer of 1842 he was accepted as a candidate by Father Robert St. Leger, who was then, for the second time, Provincial-to give him a title which, strictly speaking, was first borne by Father Joseph Lentaigne eighteen years later, when Ireland became what is called a "province" of the Society, with its own Novitiate and its foreign mission, namely, the great Australian continent. As there was then no noviceship on Irish soil, the young recruit was sent for his training to Tronchiennes in Belgium, which he reached on the 23rd of October; but he reckoned the feast of St. Raphael, the 24th, the first day of his religious life, as he often told a penitent of his whom on that day he conducted to the holy and happy

home where she is still preparing for the true home of Heaven -St. Mary's Convent, Drumcondra, where the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge carry on with God's manifest blessing the noblest work of Christian charity. Each year, as that day came round, he reminded himself and his spiritual child of the grace granted to them on that day. Even on the 24th of October, 1904, he telegraphed, "Happy feast!-am coming." But he did not come, and I think he never saw that beautiful convent again.

After two happy years as a novice in Belgium, Edward Kelly was summoned home to Ireland, and appointed one of the professors at Clongowes. Of course, when he stood again on the sacred soil of Erin, his first duty, easy to discharge, was to give as much comfort as he could by his company to the good parents who had unselfishly given him up to God. Probably, in hearing sermons at St. Francis Xavier's, her nearest church and now dearer to her because served by the elder brothers of her son, Mrs. Kelly sometimes suffered a distraction of which I heard another good mother accuse herself: "Ah, my Stephen will do it much better when his turn comes." But his turn never came.*

Before Edward Kelly's turn came for this particular kind of work he had done a great deal of solid work of other kinds. Through many years he taught all the classes in succession at Clongowes up to the highest. Some years indeed he filled the place of many professors, joining, for instance, to the Rhetoric class the class of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, in which last he was succeeded by Father Edward Kernan, who devoted himself exclusively to what had been only one of the other Father Edward's many activities. Both he and his brother Thomas had a strong inclination and special aptitude for the study of physical science; and in the case of the younger brother this taste would often betray itself even in the pulpit, in his choice of illustrations for spiritual subjects. In the catalogue of Irish Jesuits for the academic year which was already four months old on New Year's Day, 1851, Edward Kelly, who had then been teaching for six years, appears on the staff of Clongowes Wood College as the first of the professors, followed by two

* Stephen O'Donnell died in June, 1859, aged 24, a year after his noviceship. He was the most brilliant of a band of clever youths whom Dean O'Brien of Limerick gathered around him when founding the Young Men's Society. Another was Father Isaac Moore, S.J., widely known in more than one country.

priests, Father Joseph Lentaigne and Father Joseph Dalton, and by four who were not yet priests, Alfred Murphy, Eugene Walsh (who died four years later), James Dalton, and John Duffy. Edward Kelly's share of the school work that year was not only the class of Rhetoric but also Natural Philosophy and Higher Mathematics; and he also presided over the senior Debating Society. In this last capacity he must have received a letter which I remember reading long afterwards, in which his elder brother, William, suggested a vast number of interesting questions and problems from history that were suitable subjects for debate; for in those days the debates were all of a strictly classical and academic character, far removed from all the interests and passions of contemporary life, very unlike the exciting questions that are proposed for discussion nowadays in such associations, as far as I can judge from various college magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.

Father Kelly was eminently successful in all his educational work, gaining the admiration and affection and the unbounded confidence of all his scholars year after year.

"LL.D." is not properly translated by "learned in the law," but "teacher of laws," just as we say doctor divinitatis, not doctus. We can hardly be said to know anything unless we can teach it. Fichte and many others advise the earnest student to pay some one, if need be, for letting himself be taught by us what we are learning. Persons who study quite alone often mistake a vague shadowy acquaintance with a subject for real knowledge of it. An honest attempt to communicate their knowledge to others would show its limitations. Edward Kelly's long term of work as master-work so conscientiously prepared and so efficiently performed-stored his mind with accurate learning of a very varied kind on which he could ever after draw most readily and securely.

But after training so many young scholars he was himself to become a scholar again. His long course of philosophy and theology was gone through with the same quiet energy and thoroughness that marked his discharge of every duty. His theological studies were made in North Wales, at the beautiful college of St. Beuno's,* overlooking the Vale of Clwyd, which

The reader may like to know that the first syllable of this holy Bishop's name is pronounced like the verb "to buy." Clwyd = Cloo-id.

runs up from the sea at Rhyl to St. Asaph and Denbigh. Among his professors were two of his countrymen, Father Edmund O'Reilly and Father Daniel Jones. One of his fellowstudents tells me that Edward Kelly was the most gifted of all the band, beloved and respected by all for his great qualities of head and heart. As usual, before the end of his course he was ordained priest on the 23rd of September, 1855, by the Right Rev. Dr. Brown, Bishop of Newport and Menevia; and after his full course of theological studies was finished with great distinction, he made his Tertianship, that is, a third year of novitiate as a final spiritual training for the mature work of life. This year was spent at Notre Dame de Liesse, near what is still, I hope, the great Catholic city of Lyons, in France. His travelling companion and one of his associates there was Father Henry Rorke, a clever and genial man, much less aesthetic in his tastes than his kinsman and namesake before mentioned, from whom he was generally distinguished by being called Father Harry. When the two young priests were "doing" Paris, passing a church, Father Edward said to Father Harry: "Shall we go in here ? " Ah, no, Mister; they are all the same." A surfeit of art and architecture and of sight-seeing in general, is more tiresome than travellers like to confess.

Before the tertius annus probationis was more than half-way through, Father Kelly was summoned home to be the first Rector of the house of the Society of Jesus in Limerick, to which they were invited by the Bishop, Dr. John Ryan. He entrusted the Jesuits with the charge of St. Munchin's College, which had hitherto been conducted by the Rev. Michael Malone and the Rev. Thomas Browne, two priests of the diocese, men of great ability.

At this point the narrator changes from a testis auritus into a testis oculatus, an eye-witness; for the day after he ended his noviceship by taking the vows of religion in the domestic chapel of St. Francis Xavier's, Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin, he was sent to Limerick to help in the school which was not yet opened under the new auspices. Another of the "founders" was the Rev. Edmund Hogan, who had already begun those researches into the ancient language and history of Ireland which he has ever since pursued with quiet devotion and with rich results. He is sure to be heard of often again; but not so Father Peter