Life and Letters of Edmund J. Armstrong

Birthplace. —A Characteristic Anecdote. — Early-awakened Love of Nature.-The Wicklow Mountains.-Reminiscences of Early Childhood.-Implanting of Superstitious Fancies.-A New Acquaintance.-Musical Aptitudes.— First Religious Impressions.-Irvingism.-Religious Pantomimes.-Irvingites Denounced.-Early Schooldays.— Literary Aptitudes.-Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. A Dangerous Feat.-Theatricals.-The Isle of Man.London and the Great Exhibition.-Rambles in London, and Impressions thence derived. -Military Aspirations.-Authority Defied.—In the Lock-up.-New Companions and Wild Amusements. — Musical Compositions. — Mountain Walks.-The Crimean War.-Suggestions for "Ovoca.”A Disappointed Ambition.-Poetry and the Mountains.

HERE is a large red-brick mansion in Upper

THE

Merrion-Street, Dublin, once the town residence of Lord Mornington, and still sometimes known as "Mornington-House." It has been claimed as the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington. It is likewise honoured as the scene of the nativity

of the well-known chant which bears the name of "Mornington;" and the room-a large and handsome one-in which that pretty piece of music was composed used to be pointed out to me there when a child. It has since attained a less enviable distinction as the Office of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Ireland; and is now-the Irish Church being sent adrift and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners being removed to (let us hope) a better place the headquarters of the Commissioners of the Irish Church Temporalities. In this house Edmund John Armstrong first saw the light of day, on the 23rd of July, 1841. He had been preceded in his advent by an elder brother, about a year before; but that tender youngling, having for a few days gazed upon the world with eyes of wonder, and satisfied himself that it was no place for him, at the end of that period relinquished his earthly possessions; and, returning to the gloom and silence whence he had emerged, left behind him, as a legacy to his little brother to be, a mysterious and tender tradition; for which reason he finds mention here. But the boy born in the July of 1841 was in no mood to depart so soon. Strong, vigorous, healthy, he took the world with a "frolic welcome," and held on to it with a characteristic tenacity; a child noticeable and noticed, as he grew, for his large dark-blue eyes, his well-formed features, and his extreme vivacity, sensitiveness, and activity.

Of the many anecdotes of his early childhood which have been fondly repeated to me over and over again, there is one which has always had for myself a peculiar fascination. It relates how, in his third year, travelling with his parents in England, having been brought by them to a well-known cemetery in Liverpool, he was suddenly missed from the group of visitors, and for some time could not anywhere be found. At last, after anxious search, he was discovered all alone, kneeling before a tomb, spell-bound, awe-stricken, abstracted from all other perception, his little hands stretched out towards the white marble figure of an angel that stood with folded wings as guardian there.

In the same year his city-life was brought to an abrupt close-a consummation for which in afterdays he was ever profoundly grateful; and he was carried out to reside in a house situated beyond what was then the utmost limit of the southern suburbs of Dublin. The suburbs of that city now extend two miles or more farther south. The struggles of the citizens to breathe free air have, in the course of a few years, transformed beautiful meadows and kine-land into ugly squares and red-brick terraces, have laid thick groves prostrate, and turned delightful field-paths into gruesome roads. But the home to which he then came looked out upon the greenest of fields, and an old historic wood of stately elms stood within a perch of its doors. Between it and the

Wicklow mountain-ranges there was but one house visible. The boy's eyes seldom rested upon it. That strange purple wall of hills stretching across the southern horizon, with the peak of the Great Sugar-Loaf lifted above their eastern slope (in colour and form the most beautiful peak in all the island); the green meadows rolling away to their feet; the distant woods; the clouds that rose up in vast throngs, and moved with shadow and sunshine over the green and purple landscape; these were his daily contemplation, and his imagination's food and wine. The mountains became his absorbing passion; they haunted him, they drew him towards them like beings whose will was not to be gainsaid. His entreaty ever was to be brought to their summits, to be allowed to wander over them, to see what lay beyond them; to learn whether what were indeed the tall dishevelled pines in their hollows were trees, or spectres, as he deemed them; whether what seemed like galaxies of stars were but the dancing rivulets and the rain-swept rocks glittering in the sunshine, as they were said to be.

In his later days he used to declare that his memory reached back to this very early period and, among other proofs of this, he would describe vividly several events which happened some months at least before he reached his fourth birthday. One of these was a journey, in 1845, to a friend's country house in one of the western counties of Ireland

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