What lies behind all this, who knows exactly? but certainly those dwellers on the outermost verge of Europe always had vague yet glorious rumours of a land beyond the sea—a land in truth whose flotsam and jetsam, strange nuts and weeds, the ocean current casts from time to time on their shores. And heaven knows, that this Western people, since Columbus brought promise into fulfilment and imagining into sure knowledge, have found in the west there a haven, a refuge from the miseries into which they were born. America has been a strange and often a sinister realization of the Fortunate Islands—yet conceive of Ireland's history for the past century without America to lean on, to look to for help. Its streets have not been paved with gold, no easily-won sustenance has been there: yet to the fisher folk and farmers it has offered the fulfilment of desire, the enlargement of aspiration; and the course that St. Brendan first charted, though it is more frequented now than could be wished, though it leads often enough to unhappy wreckage, has yet been to Ireland a blessed road.
HOLY ISLAND, LOUGH DERG
No man who visits this Atlantic seaboard of Ireland but must feel something of what Archbishop Healy's eloquence hints at—the sense of an open gateway beyond the sun-track through which imagination is beckoned towards its own goal. There is a soothing and restful influence from those vast spaces of the west. And even landward it follows you. We crossed the neck of the Dingle Peninsula to the pretty and prosperous town of Tralee, and all eastern Kerry merging into Limerick stretched away to right of us, a wide rolling expanse of land well divided into fields for tillage. Our course lay still on north-east to Listowel, crossing the tract of land which divides Tralee Bay from the Shannon's broad estuary; all about us, the country was spacious, yet well inhabited, set thick with trim little farmhouses: there was much traffic on the roads, of horse and man—and of asses: I saw there what is not common, two donkeys driven abreast in a little cart, stepping very smart down a long hill. There was plenty of room for the people, yet the people were there—on the land, living by the land, with the large air of the Atlantic blowing in across them. Next day, since the trains were not running, we had to proceed by motor to Limerick, and we simply ran north to the Shannon shore at Tarbert and followed the river to Limerick for a matter of forty miles, stretch by stretch, a broad sea lane for vessels, but alas! no vessels there: hardly a sail on the waters; though battleships can lie at Foynes, thirty miles in from Loop Head.
There is much to pause over on that route: Glin, where the hereditary Knights of Glin, an offshoot of the Desmond Geraldines, have maintained themselves, for a matter of seven centuries, even through the "pacifications" of Elizabeth's reign: Askeaton, many miles farther on, a chief seat of the main Desmond line, and in Ireland—so rich in ruins, so poor in buildings that have escaped destruction—there are few finer ruins than the Desmond Castle here, and the Franciscan Abbey. Still nearer Limerick, at Carrigagunnel, you see the landmark of another power, for this castle was built by the O'Briens of Thomond and it stood over against Bunratty on the Clare bank, another great fortress.—Yet a mere catalogue is without interest, and here is no space to trace the interlocking fortunes and conflicts of Norman noble, Irish chief, and Cromwellian soldier.
Let me concentrate on one spot, one group of memories. Above the little town of Foynes is a small house on a hill, now beautifully surrounded by plantations of shrubs and flowers; it was the home of a lady known to the Irish people at home and abroad, for her work in improving the lot of steerage passengers on emigrant ships, and also for her writings in prose and verse; yet known better as the true child of a notable father, William Smith O'Brien, Protestant, landlord, aristocrat, rebel, and felon by the law. She was one who felt and loved the beauty of Ireland—not only what one may call the scenic beauty of such places as Killarney, but the essential spacious beauty of those fertile valleys, those wide skies.
"Men come and go by this great river," she wrote, "and the revelation of its beauty is not made to them fully, often not at all; but let one live by it and it is the most beautiful place in the whole world.... But to-night it was no hidden beauty. I went down by the river in the evening. It was full, the tide just past the turn, and sweeping down the great mass of water at an extraordinary pace, and yet, though the whole river was swinging along at many miles an hour, the surface was a marvellous mirror. The glowing masses of furze on the island, a quarter-mile away, were so near and distinct in the wave, one could almost stretch out a hand to gather them. Every cloud and every shade of light and colour in the sky was again in the river, but far more intense. At my feet and twenty yards down and across the channel was a dense black cloud reflected, its crenellated edge cut sharp against the reflection of silver, blue, grey, and intense white light stretching far away westward. I stood, as the old books used to say, 'entranced', and still the river swept down, and still the furze and the wonderful green and the dark cloud-bar were, as it were, under my hand, and the glorious 'gates of the Shannon', as the Elizabethans called this Foynes, were opened to heaven's light beyond my touch."
From the road just beyond Foynes towards Limerick, you shall see a round hill topped by a ruin and the tokens of a graveyard. There in the high windy burial-place of her choice she lies, this lover of Ireland and of the Shannon, Charlotte Grace O'Brien. And for the last word in this little book, I, her near kinsman, whose main ties are with other provinces, shall set down another passage of her writings, which is curiously revealing of Munster. For behind Knockpatrick you may see a few miles farther off another low hill which is topped by a well-marked mound, and on the mound a great mass of shattered masonry stands, "like a black clenched fist thrust against the western heavens". That is Shanid, the original stronghold of the southern Geraldines: "Shanid aboo", was their war-cry.
To this place Charlotte O'Brien, who loved flowers hardly less even than other live things, came to look for a reported rare plant—"The Virgin Mary's Thistle", "so-called because the leaves are all blotched and marbled with white stains, and legend made it a sacred plant bearing for ever stains of the Blessed Virgin's milk".