AMID IRISH SCENES.Thevery thought of a journey to distant lands is invigorating. We throw off the dust of old habits, quit the routine of daily life, shut out the customary thoughts of business, and, with hearts that in some mysterious way seem suddenly to have grown younger, turn towards other worlds. Even the uncertainty which is incident to travel has a peculiar charm. The love we bear our country and friends grows warmer and assumes unwonted tenderness when we leave them, not knowing whether it will be given us to look upon them again; and as the distance widens, the bonds of affection are drawn closer. Amid strange faces we reflect how sweet it is to dwell with those who love us; a thousand thoughts of home and friends come back to us, the heart is humanized, and we resolve to become more worthy of blessings for which we have been so little grateful. Indeed, I think that the chiefest pleasure of travel is in the thought and hope of communicating to others our own impressions of all the lovely things we see.Who would care to look on blue mountains, or ocean sunset, or green isles, if he might never speak of their beauty, never utter the deep feelings which they awaken? All strong emotion, whether of joy or sorrow, seeks to express itself. Nature is beautiful only when we associate it with God or man. No greater torment can be imagined than to think and feel, and yet to live alone for ever with that whichhas no thought or feeling. I remained in Ireland too short a time to be able to form well-founded opinions or to reach just conclusions concerning the present condition or the future prospects of the country. I was compelled to travel hurriedly, and therefore observed superficially; and in my haste I doubtless often failed to remark what was most worthy of attention. At least, I approached the sacred island with reverence. Whatever I might see, I knew that my feet were upon holy ground, and that I was in the midst of the most Catholic people on earth; I felt that if sympathy could give insight or reveal beauty, I should not look in vain.And now, with the liberty and quickness of thought, passing the vast expanse of ocean, I shall place myself at Oban, on the western coast of Scotland, opposite the island of Mull; for though we are not here on Irish soil, yet this whole region is so full of Irish memories and Irish glories that we may not pass it in silence. The scenery is sombre, bleak, and wild. It is not lovely nor yet sublime, though there is about it a kind of gloomy and desolate grandeur; and, indeed, this is the general character of all scenery in the Scotch Highlands. It is rugged, harsh, and waste. It does not invite to repose. Amid these barren moors and fog-covered hills we are chilled, driven back upon ourselves. We involuntarily move on, content with a passing glance at dark glens and lochs fromwhose waters crags and peaks lift their heads and frown in stern defiance. The gloomy tales of murder and treachery, of war and strife, and the ruined castles which tell of battles of other days, deepen the impressions made by nature’s harsh aspect. Even in summer the air is heavy with mist and fog. A day rarely passes without rain, and in the middle of August the traveller finds himself in an atmosphere as damp, cold, and dreary as that of London in November. Before us is the dark sea of the Hebrides, from whose sullen waters a hundred naked and desert islands rise in rough and jagged outlines. As we sail through the narrow straits of this archipelago, we see nothing but barren rocks, covered with black fog. There is no grass, there are no pleasant landscapes, no cultivated fields. We hear only the moaning of the waves, the howling wind, and the hoarse cry of the sea-bird. Nothing could be less beautiful or less attractive; and yet it is in this wild sea and among these rocky islands that we find the sacred spot from which Scotland and northern England received religion and civilization. During the summer a boat leaves Oban every morning to make the tour of the island of Mull, taking Staffa and Iona in the route. The steamer stops at Staffa to permit tourists to visit the Cave of Fingal, of which so much has been written. This cave, which is about seventy feet high and forty feet in width, with a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, opens into the ocean on the southern coast of the little island of Staffa. Its front and sides are formed of innumerable columns of basaltic rock, precisely similar to those which are found in the Giant’s Causeway. They are perfectly symmetrical, andone is almost tempted to think they must have been shaped by the hand of man. But, apart from this peculiarity, the only thing which struck me as very remarkable in this celebrated cave is the mighty surge of the ocean, whose angry waves, rushing into this gloomy vault, dash against its everlasting columns, and, with wild and furious roar that reverberates along the high arch in tones of thunder, are driven back, to be followed by others, and still others. And so all day long and through the night, from year to year, this concert of the waves far from human ears chants God’s awful majesty and infinite power.Nine miles south of Staffa lies Iona,St.Columba’s blessed isle. “We were now,” wrote Dr. Johnson one hundred years ago, “treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”It was in 563, more than thirteen hundred years ago, that Columkille, a voluntary exile from Erin,which he loved with more than woman’s tenderness, landed upon this island. Twelve of his Irish monks had accompanied him, resolved to share his exile. Others soon followed, drawn by the fame of his sanctity, and in a little while Columkille and his apostles issued forth from Iona to carry the religion of Christ to the pagans who dwelt on the surrounding islands and on the mainland of Scotland; and from this little island the light of faith spread throughout the Caledonian regions. All the churches of Scotland looked to it as the source whence they had received God’s choicest gifts, and for two hundred years the abbots who succeededSt.Columba held spiritual dominion over the whole country. The Scottish kings chose Iona as their burial-place, in the hope of escaping the doom foretold in the prophecy:“Seven years before that awful dayWhen time shall be no more,A watery deluge will o’ersweepHibernia’s mossy shore;The green-clad Isla, too, shall sink,While with the great and goodColumba’s happy isle shall rearHer towers above the flood.”In an age of ferocious manners and continual war this holy and peaceful isle, far removed from scenes of strife and blood, might well be regarded not only as the fit resting-place of the dead, but as the happiest home of the living.Even to-day, in its loneliness and desolation, there is a calm, sweet look about it that makes one linger as loath to quit so sacred a spot. But the simple, great ones of old are gone; their bones lie buried beneath our feet.“To each voyagerSome ragged child holds up for sale a storeOf wave-worn pebbles.…How sad a welcome!Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir,Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.”A few poor fishermen with their families dwell upon the island. They are all Protestants. After the Reformation, the Calvinistic Synod of Argyll handed over all the sacred edifices of Iona to a horde of pillagers, who plundered and destroyed them. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these ruins were given up to the ignorant inhabitants of the island, who turned the cathedral into a stable, used the church of the convent of canonesses as a quarry, and broke and threw into the sea nearly all of the three hundred and sixty crosses which formerly covered the island.As late as 1594 the three great mausoleums of the kings were to be seen, with the following inscriptions:Tumulus regum Scotiæ,Tumulus regum Hiberniæ,Tumulus regum Norwegiæ.But these have also disappeared, and nothing remains but the site. Here were buried forty-eight kings of Scotland, four kings of Ireland, and eight kings of Norway; and it is even said that one of the kings of France found here a last resting-place. Macbeth closes the line of Scottish kings who were buried in Iona. His successor, Malcolm Canmore, chose the Abbey of Dunfermline as the royal cemetery. Shakspere does not fail to send Duncan’s body to Iona:“Rosse.Where is Duncan’s body?Macduff.Carried to Colmekill,The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,And guardian of their bones.”There are still many tombs in this cemetery, most of which are covered with slabs of blue stone upon which figures are sculptured in relief. Here a bishop or an abbot, in cope and mitre, holds the pastoral staff of authority, and by his side lies some famous chieftainin full armor. On one of these slabs the traveller may behold the effigy of Angus MacDonald, Scott’s Lord of the Isles, and the contemporary of Robert Bruce.In the centre of the graveyard stands the ruin of a chapel which was built at the close of the eleventh century bySt.Margaret of Scotland, and dedicated toSt.Oran, the first Irish monk who died in Iona after the landing ofSt.Columba. Near by is the ancient Irish cross which is said to mark the spot whereSt.Columba rested on the eve of his death, when he had walked forth to take a last view of his well-beloved island. A little farther north lies the cathedral, ruined and roofless, with its square tower, which is the first object to attract the eye of the pilgrim as he approaches the sacred isle. Iona is but three miles in length and about two miles wide. Unlike the islands by which it is surrounded, it has a sandy beach, which slopes to the water’s edge, and its highest point is but little over three hundred feet above the level of the sea. The ruins all lie on the eastern shore, and are but a few paces from one another. Some little care is taken of them, now that the facilities of travel have turned the attention of travellers to this former home of learning and religion. The chapel of the nunnery is no longer used as a cow-house, nor the cathedral as a stable, as in the time of Dr. Johnson’s visit. Nevertheless, many interesting relics which he saw have since disappeared. Still, enough remains to awaken emotion in the breasts of those whom the thought of noble deeds and heroic lives can move. In treading this sacred soil, and walking among the graves of kings and princes of the church, surrounded by broken walls andcrumbling arches which once sheltered saints and heroes, we are lifted by the very genius of the place into a higher world. The present vanishes. The past comes back to us, and throws its light into the dim and awful future. How mean and contemptible seem to us the rivalries and ambitions of men! This handful of earth, girt round by the sea, holds the glories of a thousand years. All their beauty is faded. They are bare and naked as these broken walls, to which not even the sheltering ivy clings. The voice of battle is hushed; the song of victory is silent; the strong are fallen; the valiant are dead, and around forgotten graves old ocean chants the funeral dirge. Monuments of death mark all human triumphs. And yetSt.Columba and his grand old monks are not wholly dead. To them more than to the poet belongs thenon omnis moriar. Their spirit lives even in us, if we are Christians and trust the larger hope. What heavenly privilege, like them, to be free, and in the desert and ocean’s waste to find the possibility of the diviner life; like them, to be strong, leaning upon God only! The very rocks they looked upon seem to have gained a human sense; in the air is the presence of unseen spirits, and the waves approach gently as in reverence for the shore pressed by their feet. To have stood, though but for a moment and almost as in a dream, amid these sacred shrines, is good for the soul. It is as if we had gone to the house of one who loved us, and found that he was dead. The world seems less beautiful, but God is nearer and heaven more real.We have lingered too long among the ruins of Iona. Our ship puffs her sail, and we must go; but our faces are still turned towards theblessed isle; the cathedral tower rises sadly over the bleak shore, and in a little while the rough and rock-bound coast of the Ross of Mull takes the vision from our eyes. And now I am in Ireland. Landing at Belfast, I went south to Dublin; thence to Wicklow, where I took a jaunting-car and drove through the Devil’s Glen, to Glendalough, through Glenmalure and the Vale of Avoca, and back to Wicklow.Returning to Dublin, I went southwest to the Lakes of Killarney, passing through nearly the entire extent of the island from east and west. Having made the tour of the lakes and visited Muckross Abbey and Ross Castle, I went to Cork, where I took the train for Youghal, on the Blackwater. I sailed up this beautiful river to Cappoquin, near Lismore. From this point I visited the Trappist monastery of Mt. Melleray. Again taking a jaunting-car, I drove over the Knockmeledown Mountains into Tipperary, along the lovely banks of the river Suir, into Clonmel, thence to Cashel, to Holy Cross Abbey and to Thurles. Returning to Cork, I of course visited Blarney Castle, and then, sailing down the noble sea-avenue that leads to Queenstown, went aboard the steamer which was to bring me home again.In Rome, it has been said, none are strangers. So much of what is greatest and best in the history of the human race centres there that all men instinctively identify themselves with her life and are at home. In Ireland a Catholic, no matter whence he come, forgets that he is in a foreign land; and in proportion to the love with which he cherishes his faith is the sympathy that draws him to the people whohave clung to it through more suffering and sorrow than have fallen to the lot of any other. More than other races they have loved the church; more than others they have believed that, so long as faith and hope and love are left to the heart, misery can never be supreme. The force with which they realize the unseen world leaves them unbroken amid the reverses and calamities of this life. They are to-day what they were in ages past—the least worldly and the most spiritual-minded people of Europe.They live in the past and in the future; cling to memories and cherish dreams. The ideal is to them more than the real. Their thoughts are on religion, on liberty, honor, justice, rather than upon gold. They fear sin more than poverty or sickness. When the mother hears of the death of her son, in some distant land, her first thought is not of him, but of his soul. Did he die as a Catholic should die, confessing his sins, trusting in God, strengthened by the sacraments? When he left her weeping, her great trouble was the fear lest, in the far-off world to which he was going, he should forget the God of his fathers, the God of Ireland’s hope; and when in her dreams she saw him back again, her heart leaped for joy, not that he was rich or famous, but that the simple faith of other days was with him still.The life that is to be is more than that which is. The coldest heart is warmed by this strong faith. In the midst of this simple and pure-hearted people, so poor and so content, so wronged and so patient, so despised and so noble, one realizes the divine power of religion. Whithersoever our littlesystems of thought may lead us, whatsoever mysteries of nature they may reveal, nothing that they can give us could compensate for the loss of honest faith and child-like trust in God. Whatever may be, this is the best. Better to die in a hovel, yearning for God and trusting to him, than without hope “to walk all day, like the sultan of old, in a garden of spice.” The first and deepest impression made upon me in travelling through Ireland was that it is a country consecrated by unutterable suffering. The shadow of an almost divine sorrow is still upon the land. Each spot is sacred to some sad memory. Ruined castles tell how her proudest families were driven into exile or reduced to beggary; roofless cathedrals and crumbling abbeys proclaim the long martyrdom of her bishops and priests; tenantless cottages and deserted villages speak of the multitudes turned upon the road to die, or, with weary step, to seek shelter in a foreign land. We pass through desolate miles of waste lands that might be reclaimed, through whole counties that have been turned into sheep and cattle pastures, through towns once busy, now dead; and John Mitchel’s cry of anguish, when last year, in triumphal funeral march, he went to meet the electors of Tipperary, strikes upon the ear: “My God, my God, where are my people?”Go to the abandoned ports of Wexford, of Youghal, of Waterford, of Galway, and you will be told of ships, freighted with human souls, that sailed away and never returned. It seemed to me on those silent shores that I could still hear the wail of countless mothers, wringing their hands and weeping for the loss of children whom acruel fate had torn from them. Was ever history so sad as Ireland’s? Great calamities have befallen other nations—they have been wasted by war and famine, trodden in the dust by invading barbarians; but their evils have had an end. In Ireland the sword has never wearied of blood. “The wild deer and wolf to a covert may flee,” but her people have had no refuge from famine and danger. Without home and country, they have stood for centuries with the storm of fate beating upon their devoted heads, and in their long night of woe some faint glimmer of hope has shone out, only suddenly to disappear, leaving the darkness blacker. True were the poet’s words of despair:“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”I stood in Glendalough, by the lake“Whose gloomy shoreSkylark never warbles o’er.”The sun was just sinking to rest behindSt.Kevin’s Hill, covered with the purple heather-bloom. There was not a sound in the air, but all the mountains and the valley held their breath, as if the spirits of the monks of old were felt by them in this hour, in which, in the ages gone, the song of prayer and praise rose up to God from the hearts of believing men, and all the plain and the hillsideswere vocal with sweet psalmody. Here, a thousand years ago and more, a city grew up, raised by the power of holiness. ToSt.Kevin flocked men who sought the better way, and the Irish people, eternally drawn to religion and to their priests, gathered round, and Glendalough was filled with the multitude of believers. Those were the days whichSt.Columba sang when in far-off Iona he remembered his own sweet land: “From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eye when I turn to Erin—to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the monks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.”FromSt.Kevin toSt.Lawrence O’Toole, Glendalough was the home of saints. When the Norman came, in the twelfth century, there was a bishop there. The hills were dotted with the hermitages of anchorets, and above the seven churches rose the round tower in imperishable strength. To-day there is left only the dreariness and loneliness of the desert. The hills that once were covered with rich forests of oak are bare and bleak; the cathedral is in ruins; the churches are crumbling walls and heaps of stones; the ground is strewn with fragments of sculptured crosses and broken pillars; and amid this wreck of a world are mingled in strange confusion the tombs of saints and princes and the graves of peasants. Still stands the round tower in lonely majesty, like a sentinel of heaven, to watch for ever over the graves of God’s people. What a weight of awe falls upon us amid these sacred monuments! We speak not, and scarcely breathe. An unknownpower draws us back into the dread bosom of the past. The freshness of life dies out of us; we grow to the spot, and feel a kinship with stones which re-echoed the footsteps of saints, which resounded with the voice of prayer. It seems almost a sacrilege to live when the great and the good lie dead at our feet.But why stop we here? Is not Ireland covered with ruins as reverend and as sad as these? Throughout the land they stand“As stands a lofty mind,Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,Or holding dark communion with the cloud.”What need of history’s blood-stained page to tell the sad story of Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s woes? O’Connell never spoke as speak these roofless cathedrals, these broken walls and crumbling arches, these fallen columns and shattered crosses. The traveller who in Jerusalem beholds the weary and worn children of Israel sitting in helpless grief amid the scattered stones of Solomon’s Temple, need not be told how the enemies of the Holy City compassed her about; how the sword and famine and the devouring flame swallowed up the people; how her walls were broken down, her holy of holies profaned, her priests slaughtered, her streets made desolate, until not a stone was left upon a stone.The massacres of Wexford and Drogheda; the confiscation in a single day of half the land of Ireland; the driving her people into the ports of Munster to be shipped to regions of pestilence and death; the expulsion of every Catholic from the rich fields of Ulster; the exile of the whole nation beyond the Shannon; the violated treaty of Limerick, are but episodes in thistragedy of centuries. Even the Penal Code, the most hideous and inhuman ever enacted by Christian or pagan people, tells but half the story.That the Irish Catholic had for centuries been held in bondage by a law which violated every good and generous sentiment of the human heart, I knew. He could not vote, he could not bear witness, he could not bring suit, he could not sit on a jury, he could not go to school, he could not teach school, he could not practise law or medicine, he could not travel five miles from his home; he could own nothing which he might not be forced to give up or renounce his faith; he could not keep or use any kind of weapon, even in self-defence; his children were offered bribes to betray him; he could not hear Mass, he could not receive the sacraments; in his death-agony the priest might not be near to console him. All this I knew, and yet I had never realized the condition to which such inhuman legislation must reduce a people. That this Code, which Montesquieu said must have been contrived by devils, and which Burke declared to be the fittest instrument ever invented by man to degrade and destroy a nation, had failed to accomplish its fiendish purpose, I also knew. The Irish people, deprived of everything, and almost of the hope of ever having anything in this world, remained superior to fate. With a fidelity to religious conviction without example in the history of the world, they retained the chastity, the unbroken courage, the cheerful temper and generous love which had always distinguished them; and that in travelling among them I should find it more and more impossible to doubt of this was butwhat I had expected. But the generous, pure, and simple character of the people only made the impression which I received of the frightful wrongs and sufferings which have been and are still inflicted upon them the more painful.There is not in the civilized world another country where the evils of tyranny and misrule are so manifest. One cannot help but feel that Ireland does not belong to the Irish. It is not governed in their interest; it is not made to contribute to their welfare or happiness. They are not taken into account by its rulers; their existence is considered accidental; a fact which cannot be ignored, but which it is hoped time, with famine, poverty, and petty persecution such as the age allows, will eliminate. The country belongs to a few men who have no sympathy with the mass of the people, who do not even desire to have any. They are for the most part the descendants of needy adventurers who, under Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William of Orange, obtained as a reward of their servility or brutality the confiscated lands of Ireland; or if they belong to the ancient families, they inherit their wealth from ancestors who owed it to a double apostasy from God and their country. It was these men, and not England, who enacted the Irish Penal Code. They are the traditional enemies of Ireland, sucking out her lifeblood and trampling in contempt upon her people. They have filled the land with mourning and death, with the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan; they have freighted the ships which have borne the Irish exiles to every land under heaven; they have within our own memory crowded her highways with homeless and starvingmultitudes; have pushed out her people to make room for sheep and cattle; in ten years have taken from her three millions of her children. My heart grew sick of asking to whom the domains through which I was passing belonged. It seemed to me that the people owned nothing, that thepaucis vivitur humanum genuswas truer here than ever in ancient Rome. The very houses in which the Irish peasantry live tell the sad tale that in their own country they are homeless. Like the Israelites in Egypt, they must stand with loins girt and staff in hand, ready to move at a moment’s warning. If the little hut shelter them for a season, it is enough; for another year may find them where rolls the Oregon or on the bitter plains of Australia. Ask them why they build not better houses, plant not trees and flowers, to surround with freshness and beauty that family-life which to them is so pure and so sweet; they will answer you that they may not, they dare not. The slightest evidence of comfort would attract the greedy eye of the landlord; the rent would be raised, and he who should presume to give such ill-example would soon be turned adrift. The great lord wants cabins which he can knock down in a day to make room for his sheep and cattle; he wants arguments to prove that the Irish people are indolent, improvident, an inferior race, unfit for liberty. I know that there are landlords who are not heartless. The people will tell you more than you wish to hear of the goodness of Lord Nincompoop, of the charity of Lord Fiddlefaddle. The intolerable evil is that the happiness or misery of a whole people should be left to the chance of an Irish landlord not being a fool and yet havinga heart. To any other people who had suffered from an aristocracy the hundredth part of what has been borne by the Irish, the very name of “lord” would carry with it the odium of unutterable infamy; among any other people the state of things which, in spite of all the progress that has been made, still exists in Ireland, would breed the most terrible and dangerous passions. For my own part, I could not look upon the castles and walled-in parks which everywhere met my view without feeling my heart fill with a bitterness which I could rarely detect in those with whom I spoke. What it was possible to do has been done to hide the land itself from the eyes of the people. Around Dublin you would think almost every house a prison, so carefully is it walled in. The poor, who must walk, are shut in by high and gloomy walls which forbid them even the consolation of looking upon the green hills and plains which surround that city. In the same way the landlords have taken possession of the finest scenery of the island. If you would see the Powerscourt waterfall, you must send your card to the castle and graciously beg permission. People who have no cards are not supposed to be able to appreciate the beauty of one of the most picturesque spots in Ireland. At the entrance to the Devil’s Glen the traveller is stopped by huge iron gates, symbolical of those which Milton has described as grating harsh thunder on their turning hinges; and when he thinks he is about to issue forth again into the upper air, suddenly other gates frown upon him to remind him of thelasciati ogni speranza voi ch’entrate, of Dante. Mr. Herbert has taken possession of half theLakes of Killarney, and exacts a fixed toll from all who wish to see what ought to be as free to all as the air of heaven. If ten thousand dollars added to his annual income be a compensation for such meanness, he is no doubt content. It is on the demesne of this gentleman that lies the celebrated ruin of Muckross Abbey. It stands embosomed in trees on a green slope, overlooking the Lower Lake, and commanding one of the loveliest views to be had anywhere. The taste of “the monks of old” in selecting sites for their monasteries was certainly admirable. A church was erected on this spot at a very early date, but was consumed by fire in 1192. The abbey and church, the ruins of which are now standing, were built in 1340, by one of the MacCarthys, Princes of Desmond, for Franciscan monks, who still retained possession of them at the time of Cromwell’s invasion. A Latin inscription on the north wall of the choir asks the reader’s prayers for Brother Thadeus Holen, who had the convent repaired in the year of our Lord 1626. That such a place should have remained in the possession of the monks for more than a century after the introduction of Protestantism is of itself enough to show to what extent the Catholic monuments of Ireland had escaped the destroyer’s hand previous to the incursion of the Cromwellian vandals. The ruins of Muckross Abbey have successfully withstood the power of Time’s effacing finger. The walls, which seem to have been built to stand for ever, are as strong to-day as they were five hundred years ago; and to render the monastery habitable nothing would be required but to replace the roof.The library, the dormitories, thekitchen, the cellars, the refectory with its great fire-place, seem to be patiently waiting the return of the brown-robed sons ofSt.Francis; and in the corridors the silence, so loved of religious souls, is felt like the presence of holy spirits. In the centre of the court-yard there is a noble yew-tree, planted by the monks centuries ago. Its boughs droop lovingly over the roofless walls to shelter them from the storm. In the church the dead are sleeping, and among them some of Ireland’s princes. In the centre of the choir a modern tomb covers the vault where in ancient times the MacCarthys Mor, and later the O’Donoghue Mor of the Glens, were interred. These are the opening lines of the lengthy epitaph:“What more could Homer’s most illustrious verseOr pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearseThan what this monumental stone containsIn death’s embrace, MacCarthy Mor’s remains?”This abbey, like most of the other sacred ruins of Ireland, is now used as a Catholic cemetery. No Protestant is buried here. Mr. Herbert, however, has got possession of it, and has secured the entrance with iron gates, which open only to golden keys. The living who enter here pay this needy gentleman a shilling, the dead half a crown. Elsewhere we find the same state of things. Even the most sacred relics of Ireland are in the hands of Protestants. It is not easy to find a more interesting collection of antiquities than that of the museum of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin; but the pleasure which we experience in contemplating these evidences of the ancient civilization of the Irish people is mingled with pain when we see that even their holiest relics have been taken from them and given to those who have no sympathy with the struggles andtriumphs with which these objects are associated. We have here, for instance, the “Sweet-sounding” bell ofSt.Patrick, together with its cover or shrine, which is a fine specimen of the art of the goldsmith as it flourished in Ireland before the Norman invasion. Here, too, is preserved the famous “Cross of Cong,” upon which is inscribed the name of the artist by whom it was made for Turlough O’Conor, father of Roderick, the last native king of Ireland. No finer piece of work in gold is to be found in any country of Western Europe. Those who examine it will be able to form an opinion of the state of the metallurgic and decorative arts in Ireland before she had been blessed by English civilization. Another object of even greater interest is a casket of bronze and silver which formerly enclosed a copy of the Gospels that belonged toSt.Patrick. The leaves of this, the most ancient Irish manuscript, have become agglutinated through age, so that they now form a solid mass. Another manuscript, almost as ancient and not less famous, is a Latin version of the Psalms which belonged toSt.Columba. This is the copy which is said to have led to the exile of the saint and to the founding of his monastery. This was the battle-book of the O’Donnells, who in war always bore it with them as their standard.One cannot contemplate the exquisite workmanship and precious material of these book-shrines without being struck by the extraordinary care with which the ancient Irish preserved their manuscripts. These sacred relics bear testimony at once to their religious zeal and to their love of learning. They carry us back to the time when Ireland was the home of saints anddoctors; when from every land those who were most eager to serve God and to improve themselves flocked to her shores, to receive there the warm welcome which her people have ever been ready to give to the stranger who comes among them with peaceful purpose. Those were the days of her joy and her pride; the glorious three centuries during which she held the intellectual supremacy of the world; during which her sons were the apostles of Europe, the founders of schools, and the teachers of doctors. Never did a nation give more generously of its best and highest life than Ireland in that age. These emblems of her faith and her science are in the hands of her despoiler.The great schools of Lismore and Armagh are no more. No more in the streets of her cities are heard all the tongues of Europe, which at matin hymn and vesper song lose themselves in the unity and harmony of the one language of the church. They who were eager to teach all men were forbidden to learn. Knowledge was made impossible, and they were reproached with ignorance. But the end is not yet. In contemplating the past we must not forget the present, nor the future which also belongs to Ireland. The dark clouds which so long have wrapped her like a shroud are breaking. In the veins of her children the full tide of life is flowing, warm and strong, as in the day when Columba in his wicker-boat dared the fury of the waves, or Brian drove the Dane into the sea, or Malachi wore the collar of gold. They are old and yet young; crowned with the glories of two thousand years, they look with eyes bright with youthful hope to a future whose splendor shall make the past seem as darkness.
Thevery thought of a journey to distant lands is invigorating. We throw off the dust of old habits, quit the routine of daily life, shut out the customary thoughts of business, and, with hearts that in some mysterious way seem suddenly to have grown younger, turn towards other worlds. Even the uncertainty which is incident to travel has a peculiar charm. The love we bear our country and friends grows warmer and assumes unwonted tenderness when we leave them, not knowing whether it will be given us to look upon them again; and as the distance widens, the bonds of affection are drawn closer. Amid strange faces we reflect how sweet it is to dwell with those who love us; a thousand thoughts of home and friends come back to us, the heart is humanized, and we resolve to become more worthy of blessings for which we have been so little grateful. Indeed, I think that the chiefest pleasure of travel is in the thought and hope of communicating to others our own impressions of all the lovely things we see.
Who would care to look on blue mountains, or ocean sunset, or green isles, if he might never speak of their beauty, never utter the deep feelings which they awaken? All strong emotion, whether of joy or sorrow, seeks to express itself. Nature is beautiful only when we associate it with God or man. No greater torment can be imagined than to think and feel, and yet to live alone for ever with that whichhas no thought or feeling. I remained in Ireland too short a time to be able to form well-founded opinions or to reach just conclusions concerning the present condition or the future prospects of the country. I was compelled to travel hurriedly, and therefore observed superficially; and in my haste I doubtless often failed to remark what was most worthy of attention. At least, I approached the sacred island with reverence. Whatever I might see, I knew that my feet were upon holy ground, and that I was in the midst of the most Catholic people on earth; I felt that if sympathy could give insight or reveal beauty, I should not look in vain.
And now, with the liberty and quickness of thought, passing the vast expanse of ocean, I shall place myself at Oban, on the western coast of Scotland, opposite the island of Mull; for though we are not here on Irish soil, yet this whole region is so full of Irish memories and Irish glories that we may not pass it in silence. The scenery is sombre, bleak, and wild. It is not lovely nor yet sublime, though there is about it a kind of gloomy and desolate grandeur; and, indeed, this is the general character of all scenery in the Scotch Highlands. It is rugged, harsh, and waste. It does not invite to repose. Amid these barren moors and fog-covered hills we are chilled, driven back upon ourselves. We involuntarily move on, content with a passing glance at dark glens and lochs fromwhose waters crags and peaks lift their heads and frown in stern defiance. The gloomy tales of murder and treachery, of war and strife, and the ruined castles which tell of battles of other days, deepen the impressions made by nature’s harsh aspect. Even in summer the air is heavy with mist and fog. A day rarely passes without rain, and in the middle of August the traveller finds himself in an atmosphere as damp, cold, and dreary as that of London in November. Before us is the dark sea of the Hebrides, from whose sullen waters a hundred naked and desert islands rise in rough and jagged outlines. As we sail through the narrow straits of this archipelago, we see nothing but barren rocks, covered with black fog. There is no grass, there are no pleasant landscapes, no cultivated fields. We hear only the moaning of the waves, the howling wind, and the hoarse cry of the sea-bird. Nothing could be less beautiful or less attractive; and yet it is in this wild sea and among these rocky islands that we find the sacred spot from which Scotland and northern England received religion and civilization. During the summer a boat leaves Oban every morning to make the tour of the island of Mull, taking Staffa and Iona in the route. The steamer stops at Staffa to permit tourists to visit the Cave of Fingal, of which so much has been written. This cave, which is about seventy feet high and forty feet in width, with a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, opens into the ocean on the southern coast of the little island of Staffa. Its front and sides are formed of innumerable columns of basaltic rock, precisely similar to those which are found in the Giant’s Causeway. They are perfectly symmetrical, andone is almost tempted to think they must have been shaped by the hand of man. But, apart from this peculiarity, the only thing which struck me as very remarkable in this celebrated cave is the mighty surge of the ocean, whose angry waves, rushing into this gloomy vault, dash against its everlasting columns, and, with wild and furious roar that reverberates along the high arch in tones of thunder, are driven back, to be followed by others, and still others. And so all day long and through the night, from year to year, this concert of the waves far from human ears chants God’s awful majesty and infinite power.
Nine miles south of Staffa lies Iona,St.Columba’s blessed isle. “We were now,” wrote Dr. Johnson one hundred years ago, “treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”
It was in 563, more than thirteen hundred years ago, that Columkille, a voluntary exile from Erin,which he loved with more than woman’s tenderness, landed upon this island. Twelve of his Irish monks had accompanied him, resolved to share his exile. Others soon followed, drawn by the fame of his sanctity, and in a little while Columkille and his apostles issued forth from Iona to carry the religion of Christ to the pagans who dwelt on the surrounding islands and on the mainland of Scotland; and from this little island the light of faith spread throughout the Caledonian regions. All the churches of Scotland looked to it as the source whence they had received God’s choicest gifts, and for two hundred years the abbots who succeededSt.Columba held spiritual dominion over the whole country. The Scottish kings chose Iona as their burial-place, in the hope of escaping the doom foretold in the prophecy:
“Seven years before that awful dayWhen time shall be no more,A watery deluge will o’ersweepHibernia’s mossy shore;The green-clad Isla, too, shall sink,While with the great and goodColumba’s happy isle shall rearHer towers above the flood.”
“Seven years before that awful dayWhen time shall be no more,A watery deluge will o’ersweepHibernia’s mossy shore;The green-clad Isla, too, shall sink,While with the great and goodColumba’s happy isle shall rearHer towers above the flood.”
“Seven years before that awful day
When time shall be no more,
A watery deluge will o’ersweep
Hibernia’s mossy shore;
The green-clad Isla, too, shall sink,
While with the great and good
Columba’s happy isle shall rear
Her towers above the flood.”
In an age of ferocious manners and continual war this holy and peaceful isle, far removed from scenes of strife and blood, might well be regarded not only as the fit resting-place of the dead, but as the happiest home of the living.
Even to-day, in its loneliness and desolation, there is a calm, sweet look about it that makes one linger as loath to quit so sacred a spot. But the simple, great ones of old are gone; their bones lie buried beneath our feet.
“To each voyagerSome ragged child holds up for sale a storeOf wave-worn pebbles.…How sad a welcome!Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir,Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.”
“To each voyagerSome ragged child holds up for sale a storeOf wave-worn pebbles.…How sad a welcome!Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir,Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.”
“To each voyager
Some ragged child holds up for sale a store
Of wave-worn pebbles.…
How sad a welcome!
Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir,
Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.”
A few poor fishermen with their families dwell upon the island. They are all Protestants. After the Reformation, the Calvinistic Synod of Argyll handed over all the sacred edifices of Iona to a horde of pillagers, who plundered and destroyed them. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these ruins were given up to the ignorant inhabitants of the island, who turned the cathedral into a stable, used the church of the convent of canonesses as a quarry, and broke and threw into the sea nearly all of the three hundred and sixty crosses which formerly covered the island.
As late as 1594 the three great mausoleums of the kings were to be seen, with the following inscriptions:
Tumulus regum Scotiæ,Tumulus regum Hiberniæ,Tumulus regum Norwegiæ.
Tumulus regum Scotiæ,Tumulus regum Hiberniæ,Tumulus regum Norwegiæ.
Tumulus regum Scotiæ,
Tumulus regum Hiberniæ,
Tumulus regum Norwegiæ.
But these have also disappeared, and nothing remains but the site. Here were buried forty-eight kings of Scotland, four kings of Ireland, and eight kings of Norway; and it is even said that one of the kings of France found here a last resting-place. Macbeth closes the line of Scottish kings who were buried in Iona. His successor, Malcolm Canmore, chose the Abbey of Dunfermline as the royal cemetery. Shakspere does not fail to send Duncan’s body to Iona:
“Rosse.Where is Duncan’s body?Macduff.Carried to Colmekill,The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,And guardian of their bones.”
“Rosse.Where is Duncan’s body?Macduff.Carried to Colmekill,The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,And guardian of their bones.”
“Rosse.Where is Duncan’s body?
Macduff.Carried to Colmekill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.”
There are still many tombs in this cemetery, most of which are covered with slabs of blue stone upon which figures are sculptured in relief. Here a bishop or an abbot, in cope and mitre, holds the pastoral staff of authority, and by his side lies some famous chieftainin full armor. On one of these slabs the traveller may behold the effigy of Angus MacDonald, Scott’s Lord of the Isles, and the contemporary of Robert Bruce.
In the centre of the graveyard stands the ruin of a chapel which was built at the close of the eleventh century bySt.Margaret of Scotland, and dedicated toSt.Oran, the first Irish monk who died in Iona after the landing ofSt.Columba. Near by is the ancient Irish cross which is said to mark the spot whereSt.Columba rested on the eve of his death, when he had walked forth to take a last view of his well-beloved island. A little farther north lies the cathedral, ruined and roofless, with its square tower, which is the first object to attract the eye of the pilgrim as he approaches the sacred isle. Iona is but three miles in length and about two miles wide. Unlike the islands by which it is surrounded, it has a sandy beach, which slopes to the water’s edge, and its highest point is but little over three hundred feet above the level of the sea. The ruins all lie on the eastern shore, and are but a few paces from one another. Some little care is taken of them, now that the facilities of travel have turned the attention of travellers to this former home of learning and religion. The chapel of the nunnery is no longer used as a cow-house, nor the cathedral as a stable, as in the time of Dr. Johnson’s visit. Nevertheless, many interesting relics which he saw have since disappeared. Still, enough remains to awaken emotion in the breasts of those whom the thought of noble deeds and heroic lives can move. In treading this sacred soil, and walking among the graves of kings and princes of the church, surrounded by broken walls andcrumbling arches which once sheltered saints and heroes, we are lifted by the very genius of the place into a higher world. The present vanishes. The past comes back to us, and throws its light into the dim and awful future. How mean and contemptible seem to us the rivalries and ambitions of men! This handful of earth, girt round by the sea, holds the glories of a thousand years. All their beauty is faded. They are bare and naked as these broken walls, to which not even the sheltering ivy clings. The voice of battle is hushed; the song of victory is silent; the strong are fallen; the valiant are dead, and around forgotten graves old ocean chants the funeral dirge. Monuments of death mark all human triumphs. And yetSt.Columba and his grand old monks are not wholly dead. To them more than to the poet belongs thenon omnis moriar. Their spirit lives even in us, if we are Christians and trust the larger hope. What heavenly privilege, like them, to be free, and in the desert and ocean’s waste to find the possibility of the diviner life; like them, to be strong, leaning upon God only! The very rocks they looked upon seem to have gained a human sense; in the air is the presence of unseen spirits, and the waves approach gently as in reverence for the shore pressed by their feet. To have stood, though but for a moment and almost as in a dream, amid these sacred shrines, is good for the soul. It is as if we had gone to the house of one who loved us, and found that he was dead. The world seems less beautiful, but God is nearer and heaven more real.
We have lingered too long among the ruins of Iona. Our ship puffs her sail, and we must go; but our faces are still turned towards theblessed isle; the cathedral tower rises sadly over the bleak shore, and in a little while the rough and rock-bound coast of the Ross of Mull takes the vision from our eyes. And now I am in Ireland. Landing at Belfast, I went south to Dublin; thence to Wicklow, where I took a jaunting-car and drove through the Devil’s Glen, to Glendalough, through Glenmalure and the Vale of Avoca, and back to Wicklow.
Returning to Dublin, I went southwest to the Lakes of Killarney, passing through nearly the entire extent of the island from east and west. Having made the tour of the lakes and visited Muckross Abbey and Ross Castle, I went to Cork, where I took the train for Youghal, on the Blackwater. I sailed up this beautiful river to Cappoquin, near Lismore. From this point I visited the Trappist monastery of Mt. Melleray. Again taking a jaunting-car, I drove over the Knockmeledown Mountains into Tipperary, along the lovely banks of the river Suir, into Clonmel, thence to Cashel, to Holy Cross Abbey and to Thurles. Returning to Cork, I of course visited Blarney Castle, and then, sailing down the noble sea-avenue that leads to Queenstown, went aboard the steamer which was to bring me home again.
In Rome, it has been said, none are strangers. So much of what is greatest and best in the history of the human race centres there that all men instinctively identify themselves with her life and are at home. In Ireland a Catholic, no matter whence he come, forgets that he is in a foreign land; and in proportion to the love with which he cherishes his faith is the sympathy that draws him to the people whohave clung to it through more suffering and sorrow than have fallen to the lot of any other. More than other races they have loved the church; more than others they have believed that, so long as faith and hope and love are left to the heart, misery can never be supreme. The force with which they realize the unseen world leaves them unbroken amid the reverses and calamities of this life. They are to-day what they were in ages past—the least worldly and the most spiritual-minded people of Europe.
They live in the past and in the future; cling to memories and cherish dreams. The ideal is to them more than the real. Their thoughts are on religion, on liberty, honor, justice, rather than upon gold. They fear sin more than poverty or sickness. When the mother hears of the death of her son, in some distant land, her first thought is not of him, but of his soul. Did he die as a Catholic should die, confessing his sins, trusting in God, strengthened by the sacraments? When he left her weeping, her great trouble was the fear lest, in the far-off world to which he was going, he should forget the God of his fathers, the God of Ireland’s hope; and when in her dreams she saw him back again, her heart leaped for joy, not that he was rich or famous, but that the simple faith of other days was with him still.
The life that is to be is more than that which is. The coldest heart is warmed by this strong faith. In the midst of this simple and pure-hearted people, so poor and so content, so wronged and so patient, so despised and so noble, one realizes the divine power of religion. Whithersoever our littlesystems of thought may lead us, whatsoever mysteries of nature they may reveal, nothing that they can give us could compensate for the loss of honest faith and child-like trust in God. Whatever may be, this is the best. Better to die in a hovel, yearning for God and trusting to him, than without hope “to walk all day, like the sultan of old, in a garden of spice.” The first and deepest impression made upon me in travelling through Ireland was that it is a country consecrated by unutterable suffering. The shadow of an almost divine sorrow is still upon the land. Each spot is sacred to some sad memory. Ruined castles tell how her proudest families were driven into exile or reduced to beggary; roofless cathedrals and crumbling abbeys proclaim the long martyrdom of her bishops and priests; tenantless cottages and deserted villages speak of the multitudes turned upon the road to die, or, with weary step, to seek shelter in a foreign land. We pass through desolate miles of waste lands that might be reclaimed, through whole counties that have been turned into sheep and cattle pastures, through towns once busy, now dead; and John Mitchel’s cry of anguish, when last year, in triumphal funeral march, he went to meet the electors of Tipperary, strikes upon the ear: “My God, my God, where are my people?”
Go to the abandoned ports of Wexford, of Youghal, of Waterford, of Galway, and you will be told of ships, freighted with human souls, that sailed away and never returned. It seemed to me on those silent shores that I could still hear the wail of countless mothers, wringing their hands and weeping for the loss of children whom acruel fate had torn from them. Was ever history so sad as Ireland’s? Great calamities have befallen other nations—they have been wasted by war and famine, trodden in the dust by invading barbarians; but their evils have had an end. In Ireland the sword has never wearied of blood. “The wild deer and wolf to a covert may flee,” but her people have had no refuge from famine and danger. Without home and country, they have stood for centuries with the storm of fate beating upon their devoted heads, and in their long night of woe some faint glimmer of hope has shone out, only suddenly to disappear, leaving the darkness blacker. True were the poet’s words of despair:
“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”
“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”
“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’
“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,
But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.
Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;
With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,
And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’
Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”
Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;
And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.
Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;
And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.
In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.
Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”
I stood in Glendalough, by the lake
“Whose gloomy shoreSkylark never warbles o’er.”
“Whose gloomy shoreSkylark never warbles o’er.”
“Whose gloomy shore
Skylark never warbles o’er.”
The sun was just sinking to rest behindSt.Kevin’s Hill, covered with the purple heather-bloom. There was not a sound in the air, but all the mountains and the valley held their breath, as if the spirits of the monks of old were felt by them in this hour, in which, in the ages gone, the song of prayer and praise rose up to God from the hearts of believing men, and all the plain and the hillsideswere vocal with sweet psalmody. Here, a thousand years ago and more, a city grew up, raised by the power of holiness. ToSt.Kevin flocked men who sought the better way, and the Irish people, eternally drawn to religion and to their priests, gathered round, and Glendalough was filled with the multitude of believers. Those were the days whichSt.Columba sang when in far-off Iona he remembered his own sweet land: “From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eye when I turn to Erin—to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the monks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.”
FromSt.Kevin toSt.Lawrence O’Toole, Glendalough was the home of saints. When the Norman came, in the twelfth century, there was a bishop there. The hills were dotted with the hermitages of anchorets, and above the seven churches rose the round tower in imperishable strength. To-day there is left only the dreariness and loneliness of the desert. The hills that once were covered with rich forests of oak are bare and bleak; the cathedral is in ruins; the churches are crumbling walls and heaps of stones; the ground is strewn with fragments of sculptured crosses and broken pillars; and amid this wreck of a world are mingled in strange confusion the tombs of saints and princes and the graves of peasants. Still stands the round tower in lonely majesty, like a sentinel of heaven, to watch for ever over the graves of God’s people. What a weight of awe falls upon us amid these sacred monuments! We speak not, and scarcely breathe. An unknownpower draws us back into the dread bosom of the past. The freshness of life dies out of us; we grow to the spot, and feel a kinship with stones which re-echoed the footsteps of saints, which resounded with the voice of prayer. It seems almost a sacrilege to live when the great and the good lie dead at our feet.
But why stop we here? Is not Ireland covered with ruins as reverend and as sad as these? Throughout the land they stand
“As stands a lofty mind,Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,Or holding dark communion with the cloud.”
“As stands a lofty mind,Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,Or holding dark communion with the cloud.”
“As stands a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,
All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,
Or holding dark communion with the cloud.”
What need of history’s blood-stained page to tell the sad story of Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s woes? O’Connell never spoke as speak these roofless cathedrals, these broken walls and crumbling arches, these fallen columns and shattered crosses. The traveller who in Jerusalem beholds the weary and worn children of Israel sitting in helpless grief amid the scattered stones of Solomon’s Temple, need not be told how the enemies of the Holy City compassed her about; how the sword and famine and the devouring flame swallowed up the people; how her walls were broken down, her holy of holies profaned, her priests slaughtered, her streets made desolate, until not a stone was left upon a stone.
The massacres of Wexford and Drogheda; the confiscation in a single day of half the land of Ireland; the driving her people into the ports of Munster to be shipped to regions of pestilence and death; the expulsion of every Catholic from the rich fields of Ulster; the exile of the whole nation beyond the Shannon; the violated treaty of Limerick, are but episodes in thistragedy of centuries. Even the Penal Code, the most hideous and inhuman ever enacted by Christian or pagan people, tells but half the story.
That the Irish Catholic had for centuries been held in bondage by a law which violated every good and generous sentiment of the human heart, I knew. He could not vote, he could not bear witness, he could not bring suit, he could not sit on a jury, he could not go to school, he could not teach school, he could not practise law or medicine, he could not travel five miles from his home; he could own nothing which he might not be forced to give up or renounce his faith; he could not keep or use any kind of weapon, even in self-defence; his children were offered bribes to betray him; he could not hear Mass, he could not receive the sacraments; in his death-agony the priest might not be near to console him. All this I knew, and yet I had never realized the condition to which such inhuman legislation must reduce a people. That this Code, which Montesquieu said must have been contrived by devils, and which Burke declared to be the fittest instrument ever invented by man to degrade and destroy a nation, had failed to accomplish its fiendish purpose, I also knew. The Irish people, deprived of everything, and almost of the hope of ever having anything in this world, remained superior to fate. With a fidelity to religious conviction without example in the history of the world, they retained the chastity, the unbroken courage, the cheerful temper and generous love which had always distinguished them; and that in travelling among them I should find it more and more impossible to doubt of this was butwhat I had expected. But the generous, pure, and simple character of the people only made the impression which I received of the frightful wrongs and sufferings which have been and are still inflicted upon them the more painful.
There is not in the civilized world another country where the evils of tyranny and misrule are so manifest. One cannot help but feel that Ireland does not belong to the Irish. It is not governed in their interest; it is not made to contribute to their welfare or happiness. They are not taken into account by its rulers; their existence is considered accidental; a fact which cannot be ignored, but which it is hoped time, with famine, poverty, and petty persecution such as the age allows, will eliminate. The country belongs to a few men who have no sympathy with the mass of the people, who do not even desire to have any. They are for the most part the descendants of needy adventurers who, under Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William of Orange, obtained as a reward of their servility or brutality the confiscated lands of Ireland; or if they belong to the ancient families, they inherit their wealth from ancestors who owed it to a double apostasy from God and their country. It was these men, and not England, who enacted the Irish Penal Code. They are the traditional enemies of Ireland, sucking out her lifeblood and trampling in contempt upon her people. They have filled the land with mourning and death, with the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan; they have freighted the ships which have borne the Irish exiles to every land under heaven; they have within our own memory crowded her highways with homeless and starvingmultitudes; have pushed out her people to make room for sheep and cattle; in ten years have taken from her three millions of her children. My heart grew sick of asking to whom the domains through which I was passing belonged. It seemed to me that the people owned nothing, that thepaucis vivitur humanum genuswas truer here than ever in ancient Rome. The very houses in which the Irish peasantry live tell the sad tale that in their own country they are homeless. Like the Israelites in Egypt, they must stand with loins girt and staff in hand, ready to move at a moment’s warning. If the little hut shelter them for a season, it is enough; for another year may find them where rolls the Oregon or on the bitter plains of Australia. Ask them why they build not better houses, plant not trees and flowers, to surround with freshness and beauty that family-life which to them is so pure and so sweet; they will answer you that they may not, they dare not. The slightest evidence of comfort would attract the greedy eye of the landlord; the rent would be raised, and he who should presume to give such ill-example would soon be turned adrift. The great lord wants cabins which he can knock down in a day to make room for his sheep and cattle; he wants arguments to prove that the Irish people are indolent, improvident, an inferior race, unfit for liberty. I know that there are landlords who are not heartless. The people will tell you more than you wish to hear of the goodness of Lord Nincompoop, of the charity of Lord Fiddlefaddle. The intolerable evil is that the happiness or misery of a whole people should be left to the chance of an Irish landlord not being a fool and yet havinga heart. To any other people who had suffered from an aristocracy the hundredth part of what has been borne by the Irish, the very name of “lord” would carry with it the odium of unutterable infamy; among any other people the state of things which, in spite of all the progress that has been made, still exists in Ireland, would breed the most terrible and dangerous passions. For my own part, I could not look upon the castles and walled-in parks which everywhere met my view without feeling my heart fill with a bitterness which I could rarely detect in those with whom I spoke. What it was possible to do has been done to hide the land itself from the eyes of the people. Around Dublin you would think almost every house a prison, so carefully is it walled in. The poor, who must walk, are shut in by high and gloomy walls which forbid them even the consolation of looking upon the green hills and plains which surround that city. In the same way the landlords have taken possession of the finest scenery of the island. If you would see the Powerscourt waterfall, you must send your card to the castle and graciously beg permission. People who have no cards are not supposed to be able to appreciate the beauty of one of the most picturesque spots in Ireland. At the entrance to the Devil’s Glen the traveller is stopped by huge iron gates, symbolical of those which Milton has described as grating harsh thunder on their turning hinges; and when he thinks he is about to issue forth again into the upper air, suddenly other gates frown upon him to remind him of thelasciati ogni speranza voi ch’entrate, of Dante. Mr. Herbert has taken possession of half theLakes of Killarney, and exacts a fixed toll from all who wish to see what ought to be as free to all as the air of heaven. If ten thousand dollars added to his annual income be a compensation for such meanness, he is no doubt content. It is on the demesne of this gentleman that lies the celebrated ruin of Muckross Abbey. It stands embosomed in trees on a green slope, overlooking the Lower Lake, and commanding one of the loveliest views to be had anywhere. The taste of “the monks of old” in selecting sites for their monasteries was certainly admirable. A church was erected on this spot at a very early date, but was consumed by fire in 1192. The abbey and church, the ruins of which are now standing, were built in 1340, by one of the MacCarthys, Princes of Desmond, for Franciscan monks, who still retained possession of them at the time of Cromwell’s invasion. A Latin inscription on the north wall of the choir asks the reader’s prayers for Brother Thadeus Holen, who had the convent repaired in the year of our Lord 1626. That such a place should have remained in the possession of the monks for more than a century after the introduction of Protestantism is of itself enough to show to what extent the Catholic monuments of Ireland had escaped the destroyer’s hand previous to the incursion of the Cromwellian vandals. The ruins of Muckross Abbey have successfully withstood the power of Time’s effacing finger. The walls, which seem to have been built to stand for ever, are as strong to-day as they were five hundred years ago; and to render the monastery habitable nothing would be required but to replace the roof.
The library, the dormitories, thekitchen, the cellars, the refectory with its great fire-place, seem to be patiently waiting the return of the brown-robed sons ofSt.Francis; and in the corridors the silence, so loved of religious souls, is felt like the presence of holy spirits. In the centre of the court-yard there is a noble yew-tree, planted by the monks centuries ago. Its boughs droop lovingly over the roofless walls to shelter them from the storm. In the church the dead are sleeping, and among them some of Ireland’s princes. In the centre of the choir a modern tomb covers the vault where in ancient times the MacCarthys Mor, and later the O’Donoghue Mor of the Glens, were interred. These are the opening lines of the lengthy epitaph:
“What more could Homer’s most illustrious verseOr pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearseThan what this monumental stone containsIn death’s embrace, MacCarthy Mor’s remains?”
“What more could Homer’s most illustrious verseOr pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearseThan what this monumental stone containsIn death’s embrace, MacCarthy Mor’s remains?”
“What more could Homer’s most illustrious verse
Or pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearse
Than what this monumental stone contains
In death’s embrace, MacCarthy Mor’s remains?”
This abbey, like most of the other sacred ruins of Ireland, is now used as a Catholic cemetery. No Protestant is buried here. Mr. Herbert, however, has got possession of it, and has secured the entrance with iron gates, which open only to golden keys. The living who enter here pay this needy gentleman a shilling, the dead half a crown. Elsewhere we find the same state of things. Even the most sacred relics of Ireland are in the hands of Protestants. It is not easy to find a more interesting collection of antiquities than that of the museum of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin; but the pleasure which we experience in contemplating these evidences of the ancient civilization of the Irish people is mingled with pain when we see that even their holiest relics have been taken from them and given to those who have no sympathy with the struggles andtriumphs with which these objects are associated. We have here, for instance, the “Sweet-sounding” bell ofSt.Patrick, together with its cover or shrine, which is a fine specimen of the art of the goldsmith as it flourished in Ireland before the Norman invasion. Here, too, is preserved the famous “Cross of Cong,” upon which is inscribed the name of the artist by whom it was made for Turlough O’Conor, father of Roderick, the last native king of Ireland. No finer piece of work in gold is to be found in any country of Western Europe. Those who examine it will be able to form an opinion of the state of the metallurgic and decorative arts in Ireland before she had been blessed by English civilization. Another object of even greater interest is a casket of bronze and silver which formerly enclosed a copy of the Gospels that belonged toSt.Patrick. The leaves of this, the most ancient Irish manuscript, have become agglutinated through age, so that they now form a solid mass. Another manuscript, almost as ancient and not less famous, is a Latin version of the Psalms which belonged toSt.Columba. This is the copy which is said to have led to the exile of the saint and to the founding of his monastery. This was the battle-book of the O’Donnells, who in war always bore it with them as their standard.
One cannot contemplate the exquisite workmanship and precious material of these book-shrines without being struck by the extraordinary care with which the ancient Irish preserved their manuscripts. These sacred relics bear testimony at once to their religious zeal and to their love of learning. They carry us back to the time when Ireland was the home of saints anddoctors; when from every land those who were most eager to serve God and to improve themselves flocked to her shores, to receive there the warm welcome which her people have ever been ready to give to the stranger who comes among them with peaceful purpose. Those were the days of her joy and her pride; the glorious three centuries during which she held the intellectual supremacy of the world; during which her sons were the apostles of Europe, the founders of schools, and the teachers of doctors. Never did a nation give more generously of its best and highest life than Ireland in that age. These emblems of her faith and her science are in the hands of her despoiler.
The great schools of Lismore and Armagh are no more. No more in the streets of her cities are heard all the tongues of Europe, which at matin hymn and vesper song lose themselves in the unity and harmony of the one language of the church. They who were eager to teach all men were forbidden to learn. Knowledge was made impossible, and they were reproached with ignorance. But the end is not yet. In contemplating the past we must not forget the present, nor the future which also belongs to Ireland. The dark clouds which so long have wrapped her like a shroud are breaking. In the veins of her children the full tide of life is flowing, warm and strong, as in the day when Columba in his wicker-boat dared the fury of the waves, or Brian drove the Dane into the sea, or Malachi wore the collar of gold. They are old and yet young; crowned with the glories of two thousand years, they look with eyes bright with youthful hope to a future whose splendor shall make the past seem as darkness.