Took aim, and shot with all his strength
A dart of such prodigious length,
It pierced the feeble volume through,
And deep transfixed her bosom too.”
This is part of his story of it, which he put in her hands for her reading;[114] and which, like the Stella journal, only saw the light after the woman most interested in it was in the ground.
In Ireland Again.
Well, Swift at last goes back to Ireland—all his larger designs having miscarried—a saddened and disappointed man; full of growlings and impatience; taking with him from that wreck of London life and political forgatherings, only the poor flotsam of an Irish deanery.
He has some few friends to welcome him there: Miss Hester and Mrs. Dingley among the rest. How gladly would Stella have put all her woman’s art and her womanly affection to the work of cheering and making glad the embittered and disappointed Dean: but no; he has no notion of being handicapped by marriage; he is sterner, narrower, more misanthropic than ever. All the old severe proprieties and distance govern their intercourse. He visits them betimes and listens to their adulatory prattle; they, too, come up to the deanery when there are friends to entertain; often take possession when the Dean is away.
The church dignitaries are not open-handed in their advances; the Tale of a Tub, and stories of that London life (not much of it amongst churches) have put a wall between them and the Dean. But he interests himself in certain questions of taxation and of currency, which seem of vital importance to the common people; and he wins, by an influence due to his sharp pamphleteering, what they count a great relief from their dangers or burdens. Thus he becomes a street idol, and crowds throw up their caps for this doctor militant, whom they call the good Dean. He has his private large charities, too; there are old women, decrepit and infirm, whom he supports year after year; does this—Swift-like—when he will haggle a half hour about the difference of a few pennies in the price for a bottle of wine, and will serve his clerical friends with the lees of the last dinner: strange, and only himself in everything.