n
these strange seas to confront all terrors. And it may be a comfort to
know, in view of prevalent hypotheses, that the stock of the Anthropoids
never went through evolutions in this country. Whatever may have happened
elsewhere, the beings who first leaped upon our shores must have been
among the foremost in the developed attributes of manhood.

These isles were to the ancients what America has been to modern Europe,
and more. The apparent course of the sun seemed an invitation, and
ever-flying hope showed, in the splendour of its setting, the glories of
the Hesperides. When Pytheas of Massilia saw the Teutons in the region of
the Elbe, he rejected the view that they had migrated, in favour of the
theory that they were autochthonoi, or products of the place, for it was
inconceivable that so dreary a territory could attract rational beings. It
was otherwise as regards Ireland. The rumour of its fairness seems to have
reached Homer; to this verdant isle of Ogygia Ulysses came, and here
Calypso welcomed and wailed him.

The land must have appeared very beautiful to those first comers who had
traversed the desolate wastes and shaggy forests of the continent, but its
aspect was not altogether that of to-day. Green pastures there were, where
the wild deer browsed, and a wonderful profusion of flowers, and mountain
moors that seemed mantled in purple and gold. But there were also the
mysteries of dark forests of sombre yew, balsamic pine, and immemorial
oak, where lurked the fierce wild bull, lean wolf, and other foes of life,
now like them extinct. We dwell above their remains, for the Book of
Nature is a palimpsest where the record of a new life is written over the
dead letter of the old.

Men coming to a new home bring with them a stock of ideas, some ancestral,
some acquired on the way. They obtain others from the suggestions of their
surroundings after arrival. In the excitement of change, in the presence
of novel phenomena and new experience, the eye is made keen, the senses
are quickened, and the brain is stimulated to the utmost. The rapid
climatic variations of their insular abode must have affected those
accustomed to more constant continental atmospheres. The earliest remnants
of our literature reveal a people who were--or as, I think, who had become
in these conditions--very sensitive to the things of nature, to whom fair
objects of heaven and earth gave joy, and whose exalted imagination saw
mystery in new phe