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[Aetat. 21-22 ] J O Y C E 137He travels after a winter sun,Urging the cattle along a cold red road,Calling to them, a voice they know,He drives his beasts above Cabra.The voice tells them home is warm.They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.He drives them with a floweringbranch before him.Smoke pluming their foreheads.Boor, bond of the herd,Tonight stretch full by the fire!I bleed by the black streamFor my torn bough!The month after May Joyce's death Stanislaus wrote in his diary aportrait of James, censorious but spellbound. It is another desperate effortto fix and so to master his protean brother:Jim is a genius of character. When I say 'genius' I say just the least littlebit in the world more than I believe; yet remembering his youth and thatI sleep with him, I say it. Scientists have been called great scientists becausethey have measured the distances of the unseen stars and yet scientistswho have watched the movements in matter scarcely perceptible tothe mechanically aided senses have been esteemed as great, and Jim is,perhaps, a genius though his mind is minutely analytic. He has, aboveall, a proud wilful vicious selfishness out of which by times now he writesa poem or an epiphany, now commits the meanness of whim and appetite,which was at first protestant egoism, and had perhaps, some desperatenessin it, but which is now well-rooted—or developed?—in his nature, a veryYggdrasil.He has extraordinary moral courage—courage so great that I have hopedthat he will one day become the Rousseau of Ireland. Rousseau, indeed,might be accused of cherishing the secret hope of turning away the anger^f~*"—--' : — readers by confessing unto them, but Jim cannot be sus-His great passion is a fiercescorn of what he calls the'rahblemdwt'—\ tiger-like, insatiable hatred. He has a distinguished ap-^^^^^-afld^bearing and many graces: a musical singing and especiallyvoice (a tenor), a good undeveloped talent in music, and wittyconversation. He has a distressing habit of saying quietly to those withwhom he is familiar the most shocking things about himself and others,and, moreover, of selecting the most shocking times for saying them, notbecause they are shocking merely, but because they are true. They aresuch things that, even knowing him as well as I do, I do not believe it isbeyond his power to shock me or Gogarty with all his obscene rhymes.His manner however is generally very engaging and courteous withstrangers, but, though he dislikes greatly to be rude, I think there is littlecourtesy in his nature. As he sits on the hearthrug, his arms embracing hisknees, his head thrown a little back, his hair brushed up straight off hisforehead, his long face red as an Indian's in the reflexion of the fire,there