Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN
THE GAP OF DUNLOE
IV
ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS [Footnote: From "Reminiscences of a Journalist." By special
arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884. Mr. Congdon was, for many years, under
Horace Greeley, a leading editorial writer for the New York "Tribune."]
BY CHARLES T. CONGDON
It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and
rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines
which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere
gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to
the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the
Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many
a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much
for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I
had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the
recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern
History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty
great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in
commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his
friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was
content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most
unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of
memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger
from a far distant shore, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his
tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things
have been forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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