Through the rough copse wheel thou with hasty stride,
I choose to saunter o’er the grassy plain,
Sure, when the separation has been tried,
That we, who part in love, shall meet again.
Thus, as we approached towards Rathfarnham, we should ask them to admire that noble classic gateway on the river’s side, which leads into the deserted park of the Loftus family, and which in its present state, clothed with ivy and hastening to decay, cheats the imagination with its appearance of age, and looks an arch of triumph of old Rome. We would then lead them into this noble abandoned park, still in its desolation rich in the magnificence of art and nature; then we would take a meditative look at its general features and at those of the grim yet grand and characteristic castellated mansion which with so much cost it was formed to adorn; and we should ask our companions, why has so much beauty and magnificence been thus abandoned? Here in its silent hall we could still show them original marble busts of Pope and Newton by Roubilliac; and, in the drawing-room, pictures painted expressly for it on the spot by the fair and accomplished hand of Angelica Kaufmann. But the interest of those objects would after all be somewhat a saddening one, and we should return to our cheerful river with renewed pleasure, to relieve our spirits with a view of objects more enlivening. Such an object would be that old mill near Rathfarnham, where paper was first manufactured in Ireland about two centuries since. It was on the paper so made that Usher’s Primordia was printed, and the Annals of the Four Masters were written. The manufacturer was a Dutchman—but what matter? At the Bridge of Templeoge we should probably make another short divergence, to take a look at the old park and mansion of the Talbots and Domvilles; and here, beneath a majestic grove of ancient forest trees, we should show our companions the largest bank of violets that ever came under our observation. But the limits allotted to this article will not permit us to describe or even name a twentieth part of the objects or scenes of interest and beauty that would present themselves in quick succession; and we shall only say a few words on one more—the glorious Glanasmole, or the Valley of the Thrush, in which the Dodder has its source. Reader, have you ever seen this noble valley? Most probably you have not, for we know but few that ever even heard of it; and yet this glen, situated within some six or seven miles of Dublin, presents mountain scenery as romantic, wild, and almost as magnificent, as any to be found in Ireland. In this majestic solitude, with the lovely Dodder sparkling at our feet, and the gloomy Kippure mountain with his head shrouded in the clouds two thousand four hundred feet above us, we have a realization of the scenery of the Ossianic poetry. It is indeed the very locality in which the scenes of some of these legends are laid, as in the well-known Ossianic romance called the Hunt of Glanasmole; and monuments commemorative of the celebrated Fin and his heroes, “tall grey stones,” are still to be seen in the glen and on its surrounding mountains. We could conduct our readers to the well of Ossian, and the tomb of Fin’s celebrated dog Bran, in which, perhaps, the naturalist might find and determine his species by his remains. The monument of Fin himself is on a mountain in the neighbourhood, and that of his wife Finane, according to the legends of the place, gives name to a mountain over the glen, called See-Finane. But there are objects of even greater interest to the antiquary and naturalist than those to be seen in Glanasmole, namely, the three things for which, according to some of these old bardic poems, the glen was anciently remarkable, and which were peculiar to it: these were the large breed of thrushes from which the valley derived its name, the great size of the ivy leaves found on its rocks, and the large berries of the rowan or mountain ash, which formerly adorned its sides. The ash woods indeed no longer exist, having been destroyed to make charcoal above eighty years since, but shoots bearing the large berries are still to be seen, while the thrush continues in his original haunt in the little dell at the source of the river on the side of Kippure, undisturbed and undiminished in size, and the giant ivy clings to the rocks as large as ever; we have seen leaves of it from seven to ten inches diameter. We should also state, that to the geologist Glanasmole is as interesting as to the painter, antiquary, or naturalist, as our friend Dr Schouler will show our readers in some future number of our Journal.
But we must bring our walk and our gossip to a conclusion, or our friends will tire of both, if they are not so already. Let us, then, rest at the little primitive Irish Christian church of Killmosantan, now ignorantly called St Anne’s, seated on the bank of the river amongst the mountains; and having refreshed ourselves with a drink from the pure fountain of the saint, we shall return in silence to the place from which we started, and bid our kind companions a warm farewell.
P.
NOTICE OF A SINGULAR BOOK ON FOSSIL REMAINS.
Most of our readers must have heard of the wonderful discoveries of Cuvier respecting the extinct animals of a former world, and of the sagacity with which that profound anatomist disclosed the history of races, of whose existence the only evidence we possess depends upon the preservation of a few bones or fragments of skeletons. The same subject, which in the hands of genius has afforded such brilliant discoveries, has also afforded wide scope for credulity, and even imposture. The bones of the larger races of extinct animals were formerly believed alike by the learned and the vulgar to be those of giants. Even as late as the seventeenth century, learned anatomists believed that the bones of the extinct elephant belonged to a gigantic race of men. In the year 1577, some bones of the elephant were disinterred near the town of Lucerne, in Switzerland; the magistrates sent them to a professor of anatomy, who decided that they belonged to the skeleton of a giant, and the citizens were so delighted with the discovery that they adopted a giant as the supporter of the arms of their town, an honour which he still retains. In the same century, some bones of the elephant found in Dauphiny were exhibited in different parts of Europe as the remains of the general of the Cimbri who invaded Rome, and who was defeated by the consul Marius some time before the commencement of the Christian era. In this case, however, the mistake was not allowed to pass unnoticed, and the surgeons and physicians of Paris entered into a lengthened discussion respecting the nature of the bones; and the works written on this subject, if collected, would form a small library.