acar and guide, as per order, were waiting for us, when we had breakfasted next morning, and we set forth for the gap of dunloe. entering upon the main road, we seemed to be in a drying-ground of immense proportions, with its perpetual posts and endless clothes-lines, extending along the wayside for miles. but it proved to be a continuation of that faithless messenger, the atlantic telegraph, on its way between valencia and the rail. passing the ruins of aghadoe, church, castle, and tower, and shortly afterwards those of killaloe, we cross the river latme, over a charming old bridge, and get views of the great tomies mountain, and also of macgillicuddy's reeks. miles, our guide, a most intelligent and civil one, here told us the story, or rather one of the stories, concerning the latter mountains.
it seems that mr. macgillicuddy, a gentleman of extensive estates in this neighbourhood, went to visit some friends in england, and took with him an irish servant, more prone to patriotism than truth. whatever he saw among the saxons was just nothing at all, at all, to what might be seen in ireland. in short, he would have been a most appropriate attendant upon that hibernian, who, being asked why he wept at sight of greenwich hospital, replied with sorrowful emotion, “ah, sure, the buildings there remind me of mee dear father's stables!”
now it befel that the english gentleman, possessing a large extent of rich meadow land, took especial delight in his hay-stacks, and his valet, sympathising with his master's vanity (as all good valets should), soon led the irishman to look at the stack-yard, expecting to see him mightily astonished; but paddy, having gazed around with the most sublime indifference, coolly said, “it's a nice bit o' grass you've brought home here for present use; now let us have a peep at the ricks.”
“ricks!” exclaimed the englishman, “why these be they.”
“well, then,” says paddy, “i'll just tell ye: there's about enough hay in this stack-yard to make the bands for thatching my master's ricks. happen” (this he added as though he wished to be liberal, and to pay his companion a compliment), “there might be a couple of yards or so to spare.”
you may imagine that when, in the following year, the english valet came with his master to return the visit at killarney, he was not long before he requested his irish friend to favour him with a view of the haystacks. to be sure he would, with all the pleasure in life, and sorry he was to be prevented by circumstances (over which, he might have added, he had every control) from making the inspection before evening. accordingly, in the dusk and gloom of twilight, he took the englishman forth, and showed him, dim in the distance, this lofty mountain range. “there are our ricks,” said he.
in that belief the astonished stranger slept; and ever since that time men call these hills macgillicuddy s reeks!
mr. miles, in the next place, made our fingers to itch, eyes to strain, and mouths to water, as he told of red deer among the mountains, and of woodcocks in their season, twenty couple to be bagged per diem. thus conversing, we drew near to the gap, and to the cottage of mrs. moriarty, née kearney, and grand-daughter of the beautiful kate. but it is by no means a case of
“o matre pulchrâ filia pulchrior!”
and we did not hesitate to decline the proffered draught of goat's milk and whiskey, although we implicitly believed mrs. m.'s assertion, that, if we drank it, we should want nothing more throughout the remainder of the day.
here, too, we overtook a car from tralee, laden with pretty girls and a few young men (how we hated the latter for being in such high spirits, thought them vulgar snobs when they laughed, and coarsely familiar whenever they spoke!)—not from any rapidity of pace on our part, but because the tralee horses judiciously jibbed at anything like a rise in the road; and then off jumped the pretty girls, like doves from eave to earth, but being, in their peculiar grace and pleasant coo, immeasurably superior to pigeons.
at the entrance to the gap, the scene was a most lively and attractive one. here the cars are sent back, as the journey through the pass must be made on ponies or afoot, and there was quite a merry little congress of visitors, guides, cars, and steeds. at length, the procession started, and a very picturesque one,—voici!
the gap of dunloe is a wild ravine, a defile through the mountains (on the right are the reeks, and on the left the tomies, glena, and the purple mountain), which, rising on either side, dark, stern, and sterile, with no great interval between, impart a solemn grandeur to the pass. the river loe flows beneath the huge blocks of stone which have fallen from the rocks above—heard, but not seen, except in the small lakes which occur at intervals, and which, still and gloomy, add much to this impressive scene. one of these is called the serpent's lake, because st. patrick, having caught the last snake in ireland, put it into a big box (for reasons best known to himself), and flung it into this pool.
the most striking thing we saw as we went through the gap were some snow-white goats on the lofty summit of the purple mountain; for the latter really is of a distinct purple tint (not from heather, but from the colour of the stone); and the contrast in the sunlight was very beautiful.
frank insisted upon seeing an eagle, and continually pointed to the precipices above, believing that he descried the king of birds. miles did condescend to say that one of the objects to which frank drew our attention was not so very unlike at a distance, but that the resemblance was lost as you approached the reality—a piece of rock not less than twenty feet high. at last we actually beheld a very large bird soaring towards us with considerable dignity. frank was delighted; and when miles uttered the dissyllable “raven,” i certainly thought he would have hit him. there are eagles in this neighbourhood beyond a doubt (though frank surveyed it with an incredulous and sarcastic air); but they are not very likely to be much at home when bugles are playing and cannons roaring from morn to dewy eve.
emerging from the gap, we were “to save a mile, and see the best of the scenery,” and to effect this, we were taken over a country, which is, i dare say, a pleasant one for mrs. moriarty's goats, but to bipeds in boots (and one must be neat, you know, with so many pretty girls about), is by no means of an agreeable character. to derive consolation from the calamities of others is humiliating, but natural; “il y a toujours quelque chose,” says the french cynic, “qui nous ne déplait point dans les malheurs d'autrui;” and i found, i am ashamed to say, considerable refreshment in surveying the distress of a portly old gentleman, who, impinging a good deal on the craggiest parts, “larded the lean earth as he walked along,”
“and panted hard,
as one who feels a nightmare in his bed,
when all the house is mute.”
i saw from the knolls and undulations, which diversified the surface of his enormous shoes, that his pilgrims progress had a good deal to do with bunyan's, although his adjurations were not of that pious kind, which would have issued from the lips of the “preaching tinker,” and the deities, to whom he referred in his affliction, were, principally, zounds and jingo.
but we soon found a truer solace in the view of coom dhuv, the black valley, and in listening to the roar of its mountain streams, which, rising and falling upon the breeze, sounded as though some monster train bore giants over the hills, at express speed, with gog and magog for guard and stoker!
lo! the dark valley darkens, and its foaming waterfalls seem to whiten beneath the low black clouds; and we stay not to visit the logan stone, which a child may move, but nothing under an earthquake could dislodge; but hasten, by lord brandons cottage, to the upper lake, where, a boat awaiting us, we embark for roknaines island.
here, before a glowing fire, a fresh-caught salmon, cut into steaks, was broiling on arbutus skivers; and the founder of the feast, an irish gentleman, whom we brought from the shore in our boat, hospitably invited us to postpone our luncheon until his guests arrived. hungry, and anxious to proceed, we declined his courteous offer; but we should not have done so, had we been aware that he was awaiting the delightful party from tralee. alas, just as we had commenced our repast, and the boat so preciously freighted was descried in the distance, our pluvial fears were realised,
“and, in the scowl of heaven, each face
grew dark as we were speaking.”
it was piteous to see those girls come ashore, with the gentlemen's overcoats enveloping their fairy forms, and protecting their best bonnets; and i never experienced so strong a desire in my life to be transformed into a gig-umbrella.
suddenly the weather brightened, but not so the prospects of the pretty pic-nic. there was a brief colloquy between master and men, sounds of surprise and disappointment, not loud but deep, and then a general laughter, but dismally artificial; for the knives, and the plates, and the wine, and the bread, everything, in fact, except the salmon, just ready in its hot perfection, had been sent to the wrong island!
thither, to our grim despair, went forth the belles from tralee; and, by the bones of st. lumbago of sciatica, i could have plunged into the flood, and followed in their lee, had i not been cognisant of a certain “alacrity in sinking,” which prevents the simultaneous removal of both my legs from the bottom. what would i not have given, to have changed places with the coxswain! i should have felt proud and happy as he who steered the immortal seven at henley, or as edgar the peaceable, when, keeping his court at chester, and having a mind to go by water to the monastery of st. john baptist, he was rowed down the dee in a barge by eight kings, himself sitting at the helm. 1
we mourned awhile, but the spirit of youth endures not to sorrow long. it bends low, but it will not break. it rises again in all its freshness after a glass of bitter beer, or just a mouthful of whiskey; and we soon looked our affliction in the face like men, and played the nightingale upon our empty bottles. i have studied somewhat sedulously to imitate, with a moistened cork upon glass, “de nightingirl, de lark, de trush” (as the ever-to-be-retained von joel hath it), and the performance was so successful, that two finches perched, attentively, within a yard of our heads, while the boatmen listened as admiringly as the australian diggers to the english lark; 2 and a newly-mar-ried couple, deliciously embowered above us, conversed as they sat on the green, and said, that “they had never quite believed the assertion that ireland had no nightingales.” but frank, unhappily, dispelled all these allusions, by trying his unpractised hand, and by educing such irregular and feeble chirpings, as would have disgraced a superannuated sparrow, or a tom-tit, hopelessly wrestling with an aggravated form of diphtheria.
1 rapin, vol. i. p. 106.
2 see the exquisite description in it is never too lute to
mend, p. 359.
the trees, beneath whose melancholy boughs we had our meal and music, had been disgracefully hacked! and more foul copies of “the initials” were to be found here (with woodcuts, calf, lettered) than in all mr. mudie's library. if i had my will, i would teach those trenchant snobs, who, wherever they go, dishonour england, to sing their “through the wood, laddie,” to a much more doleful tune, made fast for a few hours in the stocks; or i would endeavour so far to revive in their breasts (if they have any breasts), that druidical veneration for baal, which once prevailed in ireland, and which would induce them to cut themselves with their knives, and to worship the trees instead of whittling them. or, in illustration of another druidical tenet, metempsychosis, it would be gratifying to see their transmigration into woodpeckers, condemned for ever, like the bird in the fable, to seek their food between bark and bole.
we would fain have lingered among these pleasant isles, green with their abundant foliage, and contrasting admirably with the stern hills, towering over them, and so encircling this upper lake, that you see no place of egress, until you are close upon it. as for comparing it with the other lakes, or with derwent-water, as the fashion is,1 it ever appears to me the most ungrateful folly, to depreciate or to extol one scene of beauty by commending or condemning another; and when a man begins with, “ah, but you should see so-and-so,” or “i assure you, my dear fellow, this is dreadfully inferior to what-d'ye-call-it,” i always most heartily wish him at the locality which he affects to admire. what nasty, niggardly, uncomfortable minds there are in this bilious world! how many men, who, forgetting that excellent round-hand copy, “comparisons are odious,” are never happy but in detecting infelicities, and only strong when carping at weaknesses. show them a pretty girl,—“she wants animation,” or “she wants repose,”—“she is overdressed,” or “her clothes, poor thing, must have been made in the village, and put on with a fork.”
1 any one who takes delight in such comparisons may consult
forbes's ireland, vol. i., p. 229, or mr. curwen, whose
conclusion is, “killarney for a landscape, windermere for a
home.”
“you should see the youngest miss thingembob.” tell them of a good day's covert-shooting you have had in my lord's preserves,—out comes a note from their friend the duke, who has beaten you by sixteen woodcocks. trot out your new hunter, and “oh, yes, he's a nice little horse, but will never carry you with those forelegs. you must come over and look at an animal i've just got down from tattersall's, by snarler out of a humbug mare, and well up to twenty stone, sir.”
it would perplex even these censorious gentlemen to find any fault with the long range (which has nothing to do with sir william armstrong's guns,—except that the cannon rock at the entrance and the gun rock by brickeen island have some resemblance to artillery)—that beautiful river, which leads from the upper to the middle and lower lakes. to float between its banks of dark grey stone, from which the green trees droop their glossy foliage, though, like the alpine tannen,
“rooted in barrenness, where nought below
of soil supports them;”
and the purple heath and the royal osmund, “half fountain and half tree,” lean over the brimming waters, to greet the lily and the pale lobelia, was a dream of happiness such as the laureate dreamed, when—
“anight his shallop, rustling thro'
the low and bloomed foliage, drove
the fragrant glistening deeps, and clove
the citron-shadows in the blue.”
you enter the long range at colmans eye, and shortly afterwards come to colmans leap. this colman, once upon a time, was the lord of the upper lake, and, instead of following the example of his namesake, who, as a saint and peacemaker, assisted st. patrick in converting ireland to christianity, spent most of his time in quarrelling with the o'donoghue, and in provoking him to single combat. being in a minority at one of these divisions, it appeared to him a prudential course to “hook it,” and, closely pursued by his adversary, he took this celebrated jump over the river, which goes by the name of colmans leap. the guides show you his footprints on the rock, and they narrate, moreover, that the o'donoghue, being a little out of condition (dropsical, perhaps, from his long residence under water), came up to the stream a good deal blown, and would not have it at any price.
now we pass by the mountain of the eagles nest, a glorious throne for the royal bird, and listen, at the station of audience, to the marvellous, manifold echoes of the bugler's music, as he wakes the soul and the scene with his “tender strokes of art,”—now wild and spirit-stirring, as though kings hunted in some distant forest, and now dying, so sweetly, so softly, that we know not when they cease, but listen
“pensively,
as one that from a casement leans his head,
when midnight bells cease ringing suddenly,
and the old year is dead.”
then our boat, swiftly as an arrow, shoots the rapids of the old weir bridge, and, having lingered awhile, in the pool beyond, to admire and sketch, we leave the middle lake (reserved for our morrow's excursion) on the right, and pass by the islands of dinish and brie keen to the entrance of the lower lake.
i have said nothing, and can say nothing worthily, of the trees, which grow by the waters of killarney,—oak, yew, birch, hazel holly, the wild apple, and the mountain-ash, with its berries of vivid red, growing confusedly one into the other, but en masse of faultless unity. and among them, brightest and greenest of them all, the arbutus! wherever you see it, it gleams amid the duller tints, refreshing as a child's laugh on a rainy day, or (as frank suggested) a view-halloo in the coverts of a vulpicide, or the ace of trumps in a bad hand at whist. like xerxes, we fell in love with the arbutus (herodotus and ælian say that it was “a plane tree of remarkable beauty,” but this assertion is self-contradictory, and, if it were not so, i am not, i hope, so bereft of the spirit of the nineteenth century, as to care for historical facts); and though we could not pour wine in honour of our idol, as the romans were wont to do, we drank our pale ale admiringly beneath its branches, and made a libation (principally of froth) to its roots.
and now by the lovely bay of glena, we enter the lower lake. in front of lord kenmare's cottage, to which visitors have access, 1 numerous boats are moored; and the bright green sward about this pretty rustic retreat, contrasts remarkably with the under-robes of brilliant scarlet, which are sweeping slowly over it, while, from the walks above, gay little bonnets flash among the trees, and the cock-pheasants and other ornithological specimens, now worn in the hats of englishwomen, seem to rejoice, reanimate, in their leafy homes.
1 the public are greatly indebted to lord kenmare and mr.
herbert for their indulgent liberality.
here again, opposite the sublime mountains of glena, so fairly dight from crown to foot in their summer garb of green, we awake and listen to the echoes, until “the big rain comes dancing to the” lake, and we row hastily homeward, changing places half way with the boatmen, and astonishing them considerably with an oxford “spirt.”
it was pleasant, when we reached the victoria, and had “cleaned ourselves” (as housemaids term a restoration of the toilette), to find letters from england, to hear that the good wheat was shorn and stacked, and the mowers “in among the bearded barley.” there was still a short interval, when these letters were answered, to elapse before dinner, and this i occupied in perusing the account of “the prince of wales's visit to killarney” in april, 1858.
now heaven preserve our dear young prince from that excessive loyalty, which loves to “chronicle small beer.” the historian told how “alighting from his vehicle, the prince, who seems passionately fond of walking, proceeded on foot for a mile or two, with gun in hand, firing from time to time at bird, leaf, or fissure in the rock, in the exuberance of those animal spirits, which belong to his time of life,” but which must be somewhat perilous to those of his royal mother's liege subjects, who may be wandering in the immediate vicinity. then we are informed, how that, “his royal highness and party drove on to the victoria hotel, with rather keen appetites;” how he visited “the tomb of o' sullivan, and inspected it with much gravity of demeanour,” as though to ordinary minds there was something in sepulchres irresistibly comic; how “having drunk in all the glories of this wondrous scene,” (the view from mangerton) “the prince amused himself for some time in rolling large stones into the devil's punch bowl” for the satisfaction, doubtless, of hearing them “go flop;” how when he went to church on sunday, “the venerable archdeacon read prayers, and seemed, as it were, reinvigorated by his presence,” which suggests the idea of a subsequent jig with the clerk in the vestry, or of an irish chassez down the centre aisle; and how, to make a final extract, mr. carroll, the tailor, presented his royal highness with “a whole suit of irish tweed, admirably calculated for mountain excursions, and with the texture of which, as well as the fit,—which mr. carrolls eye hit off to a nicety”—does this mean that mr. c. “took a shot” at the royal dimensions?—“the prince was much pleased.”
i remember nothing of the table d'hôte that evening, except that a cambridge man, who sat next to me, remarked of some miserable carving hard by, that “the gentleman seemed well up in comic sections;” and that a boy of seventeen, with a violent shooting-coat, and a few red bristles in the vicinity of his mouth, officiating as “vice,” and looking it, mumbled three hurried words as grace after meat, in the presence of four english clergymen, and two roman catholic priests.
