‘The Moonlight of Memory’ by Canon Patrick Sheehan

Page 1

THE MOONLIGHT OF MEMORY By The Rev. Canon P. A. Sheehan, D.D., P.P. 1. "The moonlight of memory!" The phrase is not mine. It is a favourite expression of that greatest of German humanists,—Jean Paul Richter. And it is a very beautiful one; because memory undoubtedly does cast a strange uncanny, wistful light over events which in the broad sunlight of experience, had sometimes very little of poetry or tenderness in them. And it is very strange that, as we advance in years, old times, old faces, old scenes, that seemed to have been blurred over or entirely blotted out in our adolescence, have a new resurrection in our memory; and stand out clear and distinct as the figures in a stereoscope against the dark background of the past. How beautifully, for example, do the plain, prosnic, limestone walls of the old Market-House in Mallow, which crossed and terminated the New Street in which I was born, stand out in the diotama, which memory unrolls from out the side-scenes of the little theatre of my existence! How well I remember it in the sunlight and in the moonlight—the exact flat stone which we singled out for our halls; the niches which were such a some trouble to us; the old weighing-machine; the vast and tremendous circuscus whose splendours, as of Arabian Nights, were hidden within under locked and closed gales. How romantic now, seen in the light of memory, was the dear old glen, where we first learned the art of poetry in its wild flowers,—the primroses and the cowslips, and the wild hyacinths, whose fragrance, like the perfume that hangs around old letters, comes back to us across the years; and the brook, narrowing and broadening, which we leaped in the summer to me, and whose flags we wove into tiny boats, and where we fished for collies and sticklebacks; and where we wondered at the gorgeous dragon-flies, that swam and sang in the air on the hot summer-days; and the little chalet on the cliff with its fringe of firs, which looked so beautiful and poetical against the sunset; and the song of the cuckoo, chooing the lines of Wordsworth; and the ditch overheat where many a summer evening we watched and en