From a steel engraving
Cormac's Chapel, Rock of Cashel
Ffranckfort is not a splendid place, but it is homelike and beautiful. Is it peace or stagnation which broods over a spot like this? Do these people live or merely vegetate? To a man who has passed his years where the pulses of life beat the strongest it seems at first like stagnation, as though these woods must suffocate as they crowd so closely around the outer enclosure, ever advancing towards the house,—indeed one great tree in its haste or intentness to get here has fallen, and now projects over moat and wall and far into the enclosure, where its branches peer about them. Yet when one has been here a space there is a "peace, be still" over it all, a sense of brooding, that is very calming to one's spirit.
Everything belongs to the long ago except our auto, which I order out of sight, round the corner, with a command to stay there until it is wanted and not intrude this twentieth century upon the sixteenth. But we cannot remain for ever, and the car, shortly summoned, glides forth and rolls us off and away, through the great gateway and over the bridge of the moat and so off into the aisles of the forest whose trees closing in around it hide the old hall from view as though by the dropping of a curtain, and again I ask, is it peace and contentment, or stagnation, to abide in Ffranckfort Castle?
I think it was Bayard Taylor who, in his early life, desired the seclusion of an island in some far off southern sea, there to dwell in close communion with nature, there to look from nature up to nature's God,—but as his years advanced and his sands of life ran towards a finish, that desire changed to one which would place him where the pulses of life beat the strongest, and his last words were, "Oh, for more of this stuff called Life!"
The shadows of night and the falling rain make it dark as we reach once more our quarters in Birr where a bright fire in our sitting-room is, to say the least, attractive, and where the discussion pro and con as to the merits of "Mr. Dooley's Hotel" are revived. "Beastly" comes from behind Boyse's book where he sits reading deep down in an arm-chair; but here is a cosey little room, easy chairs and a bright fire, a dinner-table attractively spread and an attractive dark-eyed lassie waiting to serve us. May I never encounter worse than that on my pilgrimage through life.