Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 3, no. 18, November, 1851Harper, Various (magazine)
History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 3, no. 18, November, 1851
Harper, Various (magazine)
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
Patience--they will all re-appear.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
A SCENE FROM IRISH LIFE.
The moorland was wide, level, and black; black as night, if you could
suppose night condensed on the surface of the earth, and that you could
tread on solid darkness in the midst of day. The day itself was fast
dropping into night, although it was dreary and gloomy at the best; for
it was a November day. The moor, for miles around, was treeless and
houseless; devoid of vegetation, except heather, which clad with its
gloomy frieze coat the shivering landscape. At a distance you could
discern, through the misty atmosphere, the outline of mountains
apparently as bare and stony as this wilderness, which they bounded.
There were no fields, no hedgerows, no marks of the hand of man, except
the nakedness itself, which was the work of man in past ages; when,
period after period, he had tramped over the scene with fire and sword,
and left all that could not fly before him, either ashes to be scattered
by the savage winds, or stems of trees, and carcases of men trodden into
the swampy earth. As the Roman historian said of other destroyers, "They
created solitude and called it peace." That all this was the work of
man, and not of Nature, any one spot of this huge and howling wilderness
could testify, if you would only turn up its sable surface. In its bosom
lay thousands of ancient oaks and pines, black as ebony; which told, by
their gigantic bulk, that forests must have once existed on this spot,
as rich as the scene was now bleak. Nobler things than trees lay buried
there; but were, for the most part, resolved into the substance of the
inky earth. The dwellings of men had left few or no traces, for they had
been consumed in flames; and the hearts that had loved, and suffered,
and perished beneath the hand of violence and insult, were no longer
human hearts, but slime. If a man were carried blindfold to that place,
and asked when his eyes were unbandaged where he was, he would
say--"Ireland!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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