From William Ginty   Saturday & Sunday | July 13th & 14th 1844

Lakeview, Ballifarnon.¹ | Saturday & Sunday | July 13th & 14th 1844.

My very dear Tyndall,

And is it so? Are all our dreams of happiness dispelled? All our hopes of social enjoyment destroyed? – All our anticipations of a delectable winter vanished into thin air?– All our glorious visions of six months uninterrupted bliss faded, all our dreams, hopes, anticipations and wishes consigned to a dull untimely and ignominious grave! Alas ‘tis far – far too true? All, all are gone! Gone, gone forever –––! How heartily, how sincerely, how emphatically could I shower a fierce and bitter torrent of imprecations on their heads – A flame is kindled, it burns, it blazes in my boiling and contemptuous breast, stretching its withering influence to my very tongue, prompting me to curse them in all the intense bitterness of my soul – But no I will not, henceforth and forever, the Grand Jury of Carlow,² be it honour or be it disgrace have looked for and have found – a resting place – a black hole in my memory, in which they never can be viewed by me again only when their ‘darkness is made visible’³ by the torch of impassioned scorn and contempt. Yes! you did kindle hopes, not of lucre nor of gain, not of pension nor of place, but hopes pre-eminently elevated above the truckling avarice and sensualities of these days, hopes of a purer kind, hopes of meeting with friendship and with friends, hopes of happiness and of pleasures, hopes, heaven-born hopes too pure to enter the conception of the despotic aristocrat, too noble to fill the breast of the willing and submissive slave. These hopes are trampled on and crushed but not by Tyndall. Hope again asserts her power, again she rules the wide extended empire of my breast and points to a time when we may meet free from the trammels of tyrants and together hail their memory with scorn and their actions with contempt.

I must as this is the Sabbath curb, nay quell, my ire which burns as furious as when on yesterday I penned the above malignant lines. If as they say it is a characteristic of charity to ‘endure all things’⁴ I have I fear little of it. What of the Lancashire job⁵ – What is the nature of it? Is it surveying? Do think further on it. I shall expect to hear from you soon and hope you will not be altogether so sore at heart as you were when you last wrote. I am just as much disappointed as you are and between you and I – I will now tell you you would not have made £1 by the job – We are now nearly 3 months applotting 20 thousand acres and we can and could do as much and have done as much as any other two sons of Adam.

Yours in haste | very faithfully | Ginty.

RI MS JT/1/TYP/11/3633

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