CUSTOM-HOUSE, DUBLIN, IRELAND
After passing through these regions of perpetual misery and despair, these birdless and treeless wastes, you get to regard any little bit of green as a godsend. You have, perhaps, closed your eyes to shut out the depressing melancholy of the apparently anathematized place; you cannot shut out all thoughts of the wretched and benighted men that relentless fate seems to have anchored on these more relentless shores. You have for some time past been ascending the side of a whin-spangled mountain; having reached the summit, the vehicle stops,—you look abroad, and behold the Islands of the Blest, Civitas Solis, Utopia, the New Atlantis, Paradise, what you will; otherwise, Killarney is at your feet, and you feel
“Like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific,—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
It was here that, when we sought O’Holleron [an enthusiastic Irish patriot of the party], who had suddenly disappeared, we found him with bent head, tears running down his cheeks, and sobbing. You descend from this Pisgah to the lakes, and remain for a few days, until you have exhausted your collection of exclamations, and have repeated them again in writing to your friends, when you proceed.
From here to the Liffey the country is not so brown as the region through which you have passed, but still unattractive in the extreme. It is not green, but greenish, with most of the small fields, as is the mode here, enclosed within thick walls of stone, built without mortar, and void of vegetation. Farms small (average size about six acres), tumble-down houses, no inspiring legends nor traditions, intellects dead, no past, present, nor future, nothing but the same dreary lament, in which everything participates,—the emigrant, landlord, tenant; the very clouds weep over it; hardly ever cease. At every cluster of houses, at a crossroad, the number of bare-limbed women, wearing but two garments, one of them a petticoat, coming only below the knees, makes you think of Gros’s remark, that “Irishwomen have a dispensation from the pope to wear the thick end of their legs downward.”...
Visitors here find the country so ludicrously, or rather so mournfully, different from what they have been taught to expect—the Isle of Saints; the Emerald Isle; “the land of chaste women and brave men;” the hospitable land; “a kind-hearted people;” “a people of sobriety and industry,” are some of the epithets used—that, unless sickened into silence by the humiliating reality, they think of what they have read and heard as a joke, and, to keep the tears back, joke too; and this I believe is the origin of many of the hilarious things written about Ireland.
You might think the birth of the Duke of Wellington and Oliver Goldsmith here would have raised this part of the island above the commonplace, as that of Burns did Ayr; of Shakespeare, Stratford; of Gray and Penn, Stoke Poges; of Goethe, Frankfort; or of Emerson, a few white houses upon a New England plain; but no, there are no memorials in this district at all, except the scant fragments left by the old pagan and semi-christianized natives before the land was the home of thriftlessness and whiskey. The picture is the saddest of all the sad pictures of modern retrogression, with no prospect of the advent of a mind capable of suggesting the proper remedy.
[Certainly one cannot but say, after this depressing picture by one “to the manner born,” that Ireland needs regenerating. We give next his impressions of Dublin, which are no more enlivening in tone.]