Four Years

Chapter 21

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments

possessed me without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on 'The

Rhymers,' thereby plunging into greater silence an already too

silent evening. 'Johnson,' I was accustomed to say, 'you are the

only man I know whose silence has beak & claw.' I had lectured on

it to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon it

later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested man, an

official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of

the Fenian Brotherhood. 'I am an extreme conservative apart from

Ireland,' I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that

personal experience made him share the sight of any eye that saw

the world in fragments. I had been put into a rage by the

followers of Huxley, Tyn