M———— House.
In the various modes of penance invented by the various penance mongers of pious austerity, did you ever hear the travelling in an Irish postchaise enumerated as a punishment, which by far exceeds horse-hair shirts and voluntary flagelation?
My first day’s journey from Dublin being as wet a one as this moist climate and capricious season ever produced, my berlin answered all the purposes of a shower bath, while the ventillating principles on which the windows were constructed, gave me all the benefit to be derived from the breathy influence of the four cardinal points.
Unable any longer to sit tamely enduring the “penalty of Adam, the season’s change,” or to sustain any longer the “hair-breadth ’scapes,” which the most dismantled of vehicles afforded me, together with delays and stoppages of every species to be found in the catalogue of procrastination and mischance, I took my seat in a mail coach which I met at my third stage, and which was going to a town within twenty miles of Bally————. These twenty miles, by far the most agreeable of my journey, I performed as we once (in days of boyish errantry) accomplished a tour to Wales—on foot.
I had previously sent my baggage, and was happily unincumbered with a servant, for the fastidious delicacy of Monsieur Laval would never have been adequate to the fatigues of a pedestrian tour through a country wild and mountainous as his own native Savoy. But to me every difficulty was an effort of some good genius chasing the demon of lethargy from the usurpations of my mind’s empire. Every obstacle that called for exertion was a temporary revival of latent energy; and every unforced effort worth an age of indolent indulgence.
To him who derives gratification from the embellished labours of art, rather than the simple but sublime operation of nature, Irish scenery will afford little interest; but the bold features of its varying landscape, the stupendous attitude of its “cloud capt” mountains, the impervious gloom of its deep embosomed glens, the savage desolation of its uncultivated heaths, and boundless bogs, with those rich veins of a picturesque champaigne, thrown at intervals into gay expansion by the hand of nature, awaken in the mind of the poetic or pictoral traveller, all the pleasures of tasteful enjoyment, all the sublime emotions of a rapt imagination. And if the glowing fancy of Claude Loraine would have dwelt enraptured on the paradisial charms of English landscape, the superior genius of Salvator Rosa would have reposed its eagle wing amidst those scenes of mysterious sublimity, with which the wildly magnificent landscape of Ireland abounds. But the liberality of nature appears to me to be here but frugally assisted by the donations of art. Here agriculture appears in the least felicitous of he! aspects. The rich treasures of Ceres seldom wave their golden heads over the earth’s fertile bosom; the verdant drapery of young plantations rarely skreens out the coarser features of a rigid soil, the cheerless aspect of a gloomy bog; while the unvaried surface of the perpetual pasturage which satisfies the eye of the interested grazier, disappoints the glance of the tasteful spectator.
Within twenty miles of Bally———— I was literally dropt by the stage at the foot of a mountain, to which your native Wrekin is but a hillock. The dawn was just risen, and flung its gray and reserved tints on a scene of which the mountainous region of Capel Cerig will give you the most adequate idea.
Mountain rising over mountain, swelled like an amphitheatre to those clouds which, faintly tinged with the sun’s prelusive beams, and rising from the earthly summits where they had reposed, incorporated with the kindling æther of a purer atmosphere.
All was silent and solitary—a tranquility tinged with terror, a sort of “delightful horror,” breathed on every side.—I was alone, and felt like the presiding genius of desolation!
As I had previously learned my route, after a minute’s contemplation of the scene before me, I pursued my solitary ramble along a steep and trackless path, which wound gradually down towards a great lake, an almost miniature sea, that lay embosomed amidst those stupendous heights whose rugged forms, now bare, desolate, and barren, now clothed with yellow furze and creeping underwood, or crowned with misnic forests, appeared towering above my head in endless variety. The progress of the sun convinced me that mine must have been slow, as it was perpetually interrupted by pauses of curiosity and admiration, and by long and many lapses of thoughtful reverie; and fearing that I had lost my way (as I had not yet caught a view of the village, in which, seven miles distant from the spot where I had left the stage, I was assured I should find an excellent breakfast,) I ascended that part of the mountain where, on one of its vivid points, a something like a human habitation hung suspended, and where I hoped to obtain a carte du pays: the exterior of this hut, or cabin, as it is called, like the few I had seen which were not built of mud, resembled in one instance the magic palace of Chaucer, and was erected with loose stones,