systems of thought may lead us, whatsoever mysteries of nature they may reveal, nothing that they can give us could compensate for the loss of honest faith and child-like trust in God. Whatever may be, this is the best. Better to die in a hovel, yearning for God and trusting to him, than without hope “to walk all day, like the sultan of old, in a garden of spice.” The first and deepest impression made upon me in travelling through Ireland was that it is a country consecrated by unutterable suffering. The shadow of an almost divine sorrow is still upon the land. Each spot is sacred to some sad memory. Ruined castles tell how her proudest families were driven into exile or reduced to beggary; roofless cathedrals and crumbling abbeys proclaim the long martyrdom of her bishops and priests; tenantless cottages and deserted villages speak of the multitudes turned upon the road to die, or, with weary step, to seek shelter in a foreign land. We pass through desolate miles of waste lands that might be reclaimed, through whole counties that have been turned into sheep and cattle pastures, through towns once busy, now dead; and John Mitchel’s cry of anguish, when last year, in triumphal funeral march, he went to meet the electors of Tipperary, strikes upon the ear: “My God, my God, where are my people?”
Go to the abandoned ports of Wexford, of Youghal, of Waterford, of Galway, and you will be told of ships, freighted with human souls, that sailed away and never returned. It seemed to me on those silent shores that I could still hear the wail of countless mothers, wringing their hands and weeping for the loss of children whom a
cruel fate had torn from them. Was ever history so sad as Ireland’s? Great calamities have befallen other nations—they have been wasted by war and famine, trodden in the dust by invading barbarians; but their evils have had an end. In Ireland the sword has never wearied of blood. “The wild deer and wolf to a covert may flee,” but her people have had no refuge from famine and danger. Without home and country, they have stood for centuries with the storm of fate beating upon their devoted heads, and in their long night of woe some faint glimmer of hope has shone out, only suddenly to disappear, leaving the darkness blacker. True were the poet’s words of despair:
“There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men,
But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again.
Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever;
With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go,
And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’
Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain;
And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.