Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid;
And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid.
In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free.
Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.”
I stood in Glendalough, by the lake
“Whose gloomy shore
Skylark never warbles o’er.”
The sun was just sinking to rest behind St. Kevin’s Hill, covered with the purple heather-bloom. There was not a sound in the air, but all the mountains and the valley held their breath, as if the spirits of the monks of old were felt by them in this hour, in which, in the ages gone, the song of prayer and praise rose up to God from the hearts of believing men, and all the plain and the hillsides
were vocal with sweet psalmody. Here, a thousand years ago and more, a city grew up, raised by the power of holiness. To St. Kevin flocked men who sought the better way, and the Irish people, eternally drawn to religion and to their priests, gathered round, and Glendalough was filled with the multitude of believers. Those were the days which St. Columba sang when in far-off Iona he remembered his own sweet land: “From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eye when I turn to Erin—to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the monks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.”
From St. Kevin to St. Lawrence O’Toole, Glendalough was the home of saints. When the Norman came, in the twelfth century, there was a bishop there. The hills were dotted with the hermitages of anchorets, and above the seven churches rose the round tower in imperishable strength. To-day there is left only the dreariness and loneliness of the desert. The hills that once were covered with rich forests of oak are bare and bleak; the cathedral is in ruins; the churches are crumbling walls and heaps of stones; the ground is strewn with fragments of sculptured crosses and broken pillars; and amid this wreck of a world are mingled in strange confusion the tombs of saints and princes and the graves of peasants. Still stands the round tower in lonely majesty, like a sentinel of heaven, to watch for ever over the graves of God’s people. What a weight of awe falls upon us amid these sacred monuments! We speak not, and scarcely breathe. An unknown