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drawn in his bath-chair through the various places of interest in Paris; his daily pleasures were few, and when the day was fortunately painless, the night came on, and with it agony. Often, as he writhed beneath his tortures, he thrust sharp pointed pins through his thighs, as if, by counter tortures, he hoped to check the pangs that came involuntarily upon him.

Still he attempted, even whilst in this state, to contribute to the Newspapers and Magazines, and he felt now as he had felt eleven years before, when he wrote gaily, and so bravely, to Michael By the life of Pharaoh, sir, if I did not ply and teaze the brain, as wool-combers teaze wool, the fire should go out, and the spit could not turn."*

Of the various pieces, in verse and prose, contributed by him at this period to the press, the following is a fair specimen, and first appeared in The Times:

TO THE COLOSSAL ELEPHANT,

ON THE SITE OF THE BASTILE.

I know not why they've based thee here--
But unto me thou art a thought,
With pity, doubt, and sorrow fraught-
For now, and future, far and near,

Because no warning they are taught,
Can make the careless-cruel fear.
O'erawing thought! of a giant strength,
Who out of love and reason took
From a pigmy keeper blows and spurns,
And slight that chills, and scorn that burns,
And bore all gently, till at length,

Love died, and reason could not brook

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Friends gathered around him in Paris, and he was happy as his state of health would permit; but his continued prostration alarmed Michael, who tells us-"In 1834, I wrote to the brother from whom I had been so long separated, urging him to return home; and I did so with the hope, that tranquillity, his native air, and the attentions of his kindred, might be more beneficial than excitement and a foreign climate."

When Banim received this letter, to which Michael here refers, he was happy in the society of some of the most distinguished literary men, French and foreign, resident in Paris; but there was no certain rest or ease from his bodily sufferings, and the "si gravis, brevis: si longus, levis" of Cicero was not a true axiom in his case. He felt his health becoming each day more weak, and thus he wrote to his brother, in reply to the letter advising him to come home once more to his native place:

See IRISH Quarterly REVIEW, Vol. IV. No. 14, p. 844.

"Paris, January 19, 1835. Michael, long enough ago, Nothing but the want of

I got your letter, my dearest to have replied to it before now. power has kept me so many weeks silent.-How could I be willingly silent to it?

I will go home to you, and to the grave of―another: still, I cannot do so, so directly as you propose.

Besides, spring will be better than the present season, better than the biting January, for poor cold I."

Poor fellow! he was not, however, to leave France until he had passed through another and a most bitter sorrow. He had two children, a girl and a boy, surviving at the date of the last letter. He loved them dearly, and none knew better than he the tender, holy truth expressed in those lines of Martin Tupper which teach that,

"A babe in a house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love;

A talent of trust-a loan to be rendered back with interest;"

and the faces, the voices, the laughter of his boy and girl had cheered him in many a weary hour, and now his boy was about to be snatched from his arms for ever. "Tell us," we said to Michael," of this death, and how your brother withstood the shock" and Michael wrote to us thus ::

"His daughter was now (1835) in her eighth year, his son beyond four. That dreadful and dangerous malady, the croup, attacked his boy, and he fell a sacrifice to it. I have listened to him for hours of an evening, after his return home, describing the noble qualities, and the affection of this child to him. I have heard him tell how the little fellow would come in from his play, steal gently to the back of the father's sick sofa, and press his soft lips on the hand that lay listlessly hanging over. The first intimation of the child's presence would be this affectionate salutation. And when the father turned his eyes to greet the saluter, then there was a spring into the parent's arms, and a fond, lengthened embrace between them. Other and various excellencies he would repeat, when he lay helplessly and discoursed of his affections. Immediately after the date of the last letter, this attached, fond boy was taken from him. He did not write himself, his wife announced to me the fatality.

Dearest Brother,

'January 27th, 1835.

The first real sorrow I ever experienced came on me this morning. I have lost my noble little son; noble, generous, and good-natured as if he were grown up; and, no doubt, if the Lord had spared him, he would have done honor to his father's name. He is, I hope, this moment communing with your sainted mother.

I know not what I write, but I had rather you should learn this through me than through any other channel.

When I am more composed I will tell you more about him. The event has almost killed his father; their affection for each other was unbounded.""

Residence in Paris, after the death of his boy, became painful to him. His life there had been gloomy, and he would now be at home, amidst old scenes and faces, "with memories not all sad." And yet what were these memories not all sad? The dream-land of those days when he wandered with Anne D; the lost love; the dead mistress; his own long sickness; the debts of the wild days; a dead mother; a broken, ruined body; fame dimmed as it shone most brightly; and now a forced return to all these scenes. Truly might he ex

claim of Memory :—

"To me, she tells of bliss for ever lost;
Of fair occasions, gone for ever by;

Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crossed;
Of many a cause to wish-yet fear to die."

But to be at home, to be at Kilkenny, was henceforth his constant longing. There was a beauty in the scenery, a balm in the air, a charm in the Nore, which no other place on earth could now supply to him; and he thus wrote to Michael, explaining his wishes as to the house he desired to secure :

My dear Michael,

"Paris, April 30th, 1835.

What I require is this. I must have a little garden, not overlooked, for with eyes on me I could not enjoy it. Herein paths to be, or afterwards so formed as to enable three persons to walk abreast. If not paths, grass plats formed out of its beds, for with the help of your neck or arm, dear Michael, I want to try and put my limbs under me: this is the reason for my last, and to you, perhaps, strange request; but indeed

there is a reason, connected with my bodily and mental state, for all the previous matters to be sought for in my contemptible abode, and which I have so minutely particularised.

If possible, I would wish my little house to have a sunny aspect; sun into all possible windows every day that the glorious material god shines. I am a shivering being, and require, and rejoice in his invigorating rays as does the drooping sickly plant.

If this little house could be within view of our Nore stream, along the banks of which you and I have so often bounded, but along which I shall never bound again, it would enhance my pleasure.

I will begin to go home the 10th of the next month (May): travelling is to me a most expensive and tedious process. Every league of the road will take a shackle off me. My mind is fixed on a little sunny nook in Kilkenny, where I may set myself down and die easily, or live a little longer as happily as I can."*

He was impatient, as we have stated, to leave Paris, and commence his homeward journey; and so, to use the words of Mrs. Banim, he "bundled every thing," and started for Boulogne. Even here, on his journey, his invariable attendant, sickness, pursued him-Mrs. Banim was attacked by typhus fever. He thus announces his position to Michael :

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I left Paris the 10th, as I told you I should do, although much weakened from a regimen to arrest throwing up blood, which happened to me some weeks before. I arrived here the 13th, and was about to cross to England the 16th, when my

This description of the house in which he would pass his future life is very beautiful, and it may interest some readers to mark the similarity between it and that poet's home which Tennyson has so exquisitely described in "The Gardener's Daughter"::

"Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the minster-towers."

poor Ellen was struck down by Typhus Fever-which fastening on a previous cold, has so inflamed her chest and side, that I don't yet know if she is to be spared to me. At any rate, do as well as she can, I must not stir for a month at least-God's will be done. There is always something to be grateful for. Had Ellen taken ill on the road from Paris, amongst strangers, instead of here, surrounded by real affec tion, how much more must I have suffered.

Indeed, from men and women, French, and English, and Irish, in Boulogne, we find nothing but great kindness.

May 24th. I am glad I did not send this yesterday; Ellen is better to-day, and the chances are all in her favour."

As "Ellen is better to-day, and the chances are all in her favour," and as he is on the road towards home, towards Kilkenny, with the garden not overlooked, and the flowers, and the sunshine, and the sparkling, winding, shady Nore, and with the soft warm wind of summer playing around him, and with kind English and French friends smiling by him, and helping him to restore Ellen, he must take up his pen, and he writes, and encloses, in the last quoted letter to Michael

THE CALL FROM HOME.

From home, and hearth, and garden it resounds,
From chamber, stair, and all the old house bounds,
And from our boyhood's old play grounds.
And from my native skies and airs, which you
Tell me must nerve my wretched form anew,
Breathing forth hopes of life, alas! how few.
And from the humble chapel path we've trod
So often 'morn and eve, to worship God,
Or kneel, boy penitents, beneath his rod.
And from its humble grave yard, where repose

Our grandsire's ashes and our mother's woes,

That saint, who suffered with a smile to life's last close.

Brother, I come, you summon and I come;

From love like yours I never more will roam,

Yours is the call from brother and from home.

From the world's glare and struggle, loving some
And hating none; to share my mother's tomb,
Hoping to share her bliss, brother, I come.

In the succeeding parts of this Biography, we shall describe Banim in his own Irish home; somewhat improved in health; writing and hoping, and his heart cheered by visits from distinguished friends; and, strangest of all in Ireland, recognized as a man of genius, and respected, in his native town, though owing nothing to politics, and being merely a sick man, who was an honor to his country's literature.

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