“This man from Kerry was in some way connected with the army, as most of the Irish were, for they’re natural fighting min from the oldest times. And wan day as he was out a-walking fer his health, and faring to and fro, he came upon a blanket lying on the ground; and at once he picked it up and with great loud laughter he sed, sed he: Sure I’ve found me blanket with me name upon it: U fer Patrick and S for McCarty; sure edication’s a foine thing, as me faather before me wud say.”
“Oh, Julia, I don’t believe that’s true. That’s just another Irish yarn.”
“Will, maybe it isn’t true and maybe it’s just a yarn; but I belave it’s true and I want to till ye this; the man from Kerry had a rale edication. Ye may think I’m a-jokin’ now, but when ye get older and have more sinse ye’ll be noticin’ that that’s the way everywan rades; and the higher educated they are, the more they rade just as Pat McCarty did, and add some fancy flourishes of their own. Now run along and carry in the wood, and do the chures. Me two feets is sore wid me weight. And take along the pans and the stool as ye go. I suppose it’s the whole batch of yees I’ll have to be feedin’; and I’ve a blister on me small toe, and me back is broke with handlin’ the wash tubs; an’ it’s little patience I have with ye, furr ye don’t seem to learn in school or out, and yit, be the powers, ye ask some mighty quare questions for a lad, so I suppose there’s something in the back of yer head that makes yer father support ye when ye ought to be wurkin’.”
And thus Julia grumbled on to the kitchen door and Louis did the chores. But his heart was not in them. Julia had told the story mockingly. She seemed to leave in it somewhere a sting he could feel but could not understand; and he mused as to what might perhaps be behind Julia, Irish to the core. She had set him vibrating at the suggestion of an unseen power and he became rigid in his resolve to penetrate the mystery that seemed to lie back of the tale she told.
Later on, say about the age of twelve, this same boy, to his own surprise, became aware that he had become interested in buildings; and over one building in particular he began to rave, as he detached it from the rest and placed it in his wonder-world. It stood at the northeast corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets. It was a Masonic Temple built of hewn granite, light gray in tone and joyous of aspect.
Boston, as a conglomerate of buildings, had depressed Louis Sullivan continuously since he became engulfed in it. These structures uttered to him as in chorus a stifling negation, a vast No!—to his yea-cry for the lighthearted. In their varied utterance, they were to him unanimous in that they denied the flowers of the field. Some were austere, some gave forth an offensive effluvium of respectability, some fronted the crowded street as though they had always been there and the streets had come later; some seemed to thank God that they were not as other buildings, while others sighed: “I am aweary, aweary.” Most of them were old and some very new; and individually they impressed Louis, in their special ways, as of an uncanny particularity. He seemed to feel them as physiognomies, as presences, sometimes even as personalities; thus the State House with its golden dome seemed to him a thin, mean, stingy old woman; while Park Street Church seemed to tower as a loyal guardian above its ancient graveyard, and as friendly monitor of the crowds below. And one day as they looked at Faneuil Hall, Grandpa said of it: “The Wild Ass of the City stamps above its head but cannot break its sleep.” This sounded thrilling and imaginary to Louis, like a wild thing out of Julia’s land of enchantment; but Grandpa said he got it out of a book and that its meaning was too deep for the boy—that he was talking to himself.
Thus buildings had come to speak to Louis Sullivan in their many jargons. Some said vile things, some said prudent things, some said pompous things, but none said noble things. His history book told him that certain buildings were to be revered, but the buildings themselves did not tell him so, for he saw them with a fresh eye, an ignorant eye, an eye unprepared for sophistries, and a mind empty of dishonesty. Nevertheless, a vague sense of doleful community among buildings slowly suffused him. They began to appear within his consciousness as a separate world in their way; a world of separated things seemed, in unison, to pass on to him a message from an unseen power. Thus immersed, he returned again and again to his wonder-building, the single one that welcomed him, the solitary one that gave out a perfume of romance, that radiated joy, that seemed fresh and full of laughter. How it gleamed and glistened in the afternoon sunlight. How beautiful were its arches, how dainty its pinnacles; how graceful the tourelle on the corner, rising as if by itself, higher and higher, like a lily stem, to burst at last into a wondrous cluster of flowering pinnacles and a lovely, pointed finial. Thus Louis raved. It has been often said that love is blind! If Louis chose to liken this new idol of
