ess of the
northern seas.

The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on
its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of
its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon
to the sea.

Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern
hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red
sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against
the Atlantic.

Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its
foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace; around the silver
sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush
forever, murmuring the music of eternity.

Such is this land of Eire, very old, yet full of perpetual youth; a
thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness;
too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in
unconquerable life,--the youth and life and gladness that thrill through
earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front
of Spring.

For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of
time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon
the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly
vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat; the smell of the
earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dandelions star all
our pastures; and on the green ruggedness of every hillside, or along
the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet
mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies
throughout all the land, are strewn dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy
tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with fresh life.

Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the
darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy
with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger-tips of
every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous
song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the
woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself
forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land
between th