Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/415

Rh one who has not felt and endured the yoke of cruel inhuman tyranny, that for centuries has weighed down a gallant, a generous, a noble people, in spite of faults incident to humanity, can properly enter into the ardent, patriotic love of Irishmen for Ireland or their hatred of oppression and the oppressor. And such, in his ardent love for his native country, was our friend.

A word of his home life. If we follow him a young and brilliant man, we see him repairing from the conversation, from the club, from the evening joys, and hastening home to the bedside of his sick wife, to the children anxious to greet him, to the playfulness of a warm father, in whom they felt they had a friend. Such was he as a husband and a father.

On such an occasion and within these walls, the mouth-piece of the Lord would speak to no purpose unless he should speak of the disciple of Christ as he was, or as he ought to be. And our friend was a Christian, a child of the Church of God.

He is gone—our friend sleepeth. The body, indeed, rests in the tomb, far from the land he longed so much to revisit; but the soul liveth unto God. And do you now, venerable pontiff, and his friend, begin those prayers of Holy Church which follow the departing soul even to the throne of God. Do you, brethren in Faith, join your prayers with the pontiff, asking for him rest, light, life, the awakening unto God; and do Thou, O Divine Lord, whose words we have quoted for Thy friend—"I go to wake him"—do Thou come at the last great day to wake him, to wake the body from the grave, that thus, soul and body reunited in light and glory and joy eternal, our friend may rejoice forevermore.

The Catholic Union of Boston, the Charitable Irish Society, the Boston Press Club, and hundreds of other organizations throughout the country, and on both sides of the ocean, passed similar resolutions, the mere chronicling of which would be but a reiteration of the fact, known to all the English speaking world, that John Boyle O'Reilly was the most sincerely loved and the most truly mourned man of his generation.

His body lay in the receiving tomb of Calvary until November 7, when it was removed to Holyhood cemetery, Brookline, Mass., for final interment.

The poet's grave is marked by a natural monument worthy of the man. On the highest point of Holyhood