WE all know what it is to feel hurt and angry, to feel that we are misunderstood, that no one loves us.  At such times it may be we want to hurt ourselves so that in some mysterious way we may hurt those who do not love us.  We long to die so that they may be sorry.  But these feelings do not come often and they soon pass.  We cry ourselves to sleep perhaps and wake up to find the evil thoughts are gone.  We forget all about them, or if we remember them we remember to smile at our own foolishness, for we know that after all we are understood, we are loved.  And when we grow old enough to look back upon those times, although we may remember the pain of them, we can see that sometimes they came from our own fault, it was not that we were misunderstood so much as that we were misunderstanding.  Yet whether it be our own fault or not, when such times do come, the world seems very dark and life seems full of pain.  Then think of what a whole life filled with these evil thoughts must be.  Think of a whole life made terrible with bitter feelings.  That would be misery indeed.

Yet when we read the sad story of the life of Jonathan Swift who has in Gulliver’s Travels given to countless children, and grown-up people too, countless hours of pleasure, we are forced to believe that so he passed a great part of his life.  Swift was misunderstood and misunderstanding.  It was not that he had no love given to him, for all his life through he found women to love him.  But it was his unhappiness that he took that love only to turn it to bitterness in his heart, that he took that love so as to leave a stain on him and it ever after.  He had friendship too.  But in the hands stretched out to help him in his need he saw only insult.  In the kindness that was given to him he saw only a grudging charity, and yet he was angry with the world and with man that he did not receive more.

In the life of Jonathan Swift there are things which puzzle even the wisest.  Children would find those things still harder to understand, so I will not try to explain them, but will tell you a little that you will readily follow about the life of this lonely man with the biting pen and aching heart.

Jonathan Swift’s father and mother were very poor, so poor indeed that their friends said it was folly for them to marry.  And when after about two years of married life the husband died, he left his young wife burdened with debts and with a little baby girl to keep.  It was not until a few months after his father’s death that Jonathan was born.

His mother was a brave-hearted, cheerful woman, and although her little son came to her in the midst of such sorrow she no doubt loved him, and his nurse loved him too.  Little Jonathan’s father and mother were English, but because he was born in Dublin, and because he spent a great deal of his life there, he has sometimes been looked upon as an Irishman.