So mused Drusilla as she stood dreamily leaning over the bulwarks of the Hurona, and gazing on the lovely shores of the Emerald Isle, all glittering in the beams of the rising sun, as the ship approached the beautiful Cove of Cork.
She had risen very early and come up on deck alone to get a quiet first view of the land. All was bustle around her, for the ship was preparing to lay to for the purpose of landing the passengers for Ireland. The tiny steamboat from the shore was already puffing and blowing its way out to the ocean leviathan to take them off.
Men, women and children, servants, porters and baggage began to throng up from below.
But Drusilla, plunged in a dream of the past, was almost unconscious of the confusion around her.
“Elysium! for certainly it is peopled with the spirits of departed heroes and sages!” she murmured to herself as the rivers of history and tradition rolled through her memory.
A caressing hand was laid upon her shoulder and a kind voice said in her ear:
“Good-morning, my child! Well, you see before you ‘Hibernia,’ ‘Erin,’ ‘Ireland,’ the ‘ould counthry!’ Now, what do you think of it?”
“Oh, uncle, it is a lovely land! Who can look upon it and not love it? And, oh! what an experience to look upon it for the first time! It is as if some beautiful creation of imagination was actually realized to the senses! To look upon her shores and think of her history, her legends and her poetry! to almost see the shades of her dead heroes, sages and minstrels!” said Drusilla, enthusiastically.
“Well, my dear, I dare say ardent young strangers like you feel all these things and see all these ghosts. But I don’t suppose the people who live in the land, or the mariners that frequent the cove, ever do. Such is the effect of novelty in your case, and of habit in theirs.”
“But can any length of habit blind one to such beauty as this? Oh, look! was ever such brilliant green herbage spread over the earth, or such heavenly blue sky above it, or such soft white clouds sailing over it? See those lovely, billowy hills! as the cloud-shadows pass over them they seem to rise and fall, like the waves of the ocean, only more gently! It reminds of something Tennyson said, What was it? Oh——