Born in Belfast, 1907, John HEWITT was educated at Methodist College and Queen's University Belfast. He worked for 27 years in Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. Passed over for post of director in 1953, apparently because of his left-wing, anti-sectarian politics, Hewitt moved to Coventry as director of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 1957. He retired in 1972 and returned to Belfast (Co. Antrim) dying in 1987. "I may appear Planter's Gothic, " he wrote in 1953, "but there is a round tower somewhere inside, and needled through every sentence I utter." He identified with the radicalism of the Presbyterian United Irishmen and of the 18th and 19th century Rhyming Weavers of Antrim and Down, whose work he anthologised. Hewitt struggled to keep viable a submerged Ulster tradition of tolerance and faith in human progress. >From FREEHOLD (The Lonely Heart) Once in a seaside town with time to kill, the windless winter-daylight ebbing chill, the cafes shut till June, the shop blinds drawn, only one pub yet open where a man trundled his barrels off a dray with care, and two men talking, small across the square, I turned from broad street, down a red-brick row, past prams in parlours and infrequent show of thrusting bulbtips, till high steps and porch and rigid statue signalised a church. I climbed the granite past Saint Patrick's knees, saw cross in stone, befingered, ringed with grease, and water in a stroup with oily skin, swung door on stall of booklets and went in to the dim stained-glass cold interior between low pews along a marble floor to where the candles burned, still keeping pace with ugly-coloured Stations of the Cross. Two children tiptoed in and prayed awhile. A shabby woman in a faded shawl came hirpling past me then, and crumpled down, crossing herself and mumbling monotone. I stood and gazed across the altar rail at the tall windows, cold and winter pale; Christ and His Mother, Christ and Lazarus, Christ watching Martha bustle round the house, Christ crowned, with sceptre and a blessing hand. I counted seven candles on the stand; a box of matches of familiar brand lay on a tray. It somehow seemed my right to pay my penny and set up my light, not to this coloured Christ nor to His Mother, but single flame to sway with all the other small earnest flames against the crowding gloom which seemed that year descending on our time, suppressed the fancy, smiled a cynic thought, turned clicking heel on marble and went out. Not this my fathers' faith: Their walls are bare; their comfort's all within, if anywhere, I had gone there a vacant hour to pass, to see the sculpture and admire the glass, but left as I had come, a protestant, and all unconscious of my yawning want; too much intent on what to criticise to give my heart the room to realise that which endures the tides of time so long cannot be always absolutely wrong; not even with a friendly thought or human for the two children and the praying woman. The years since then have proved I should have stayed and mercy might have touched me till I prayed. For now I scorn no man's or child's belief in any symbol that may succour grief if we remember whence life first arose and how within us yet that river flows; and how the fabled shapes in dream's deep sea still evidence our continuity with being's seamless garment, web and thread. O windblown grass upon the mounded dead, O seed in crevice of the frost-split rock, the power that fixed your root shall take us back, though endlessly through aeons we are thrust as luminous or unreflecting dust. -- John Hewitt (1907-1987)