"Save just a trace of silver sand Marks where the water meets the land."
Muffling the boatmen's oars for a moment, we can realise that indescribable solemnity with which silent nature hushes everything. Even the countless streams that have lost their way across the highlands, in their hurry to join the Lakes, seem to cease from babbling. But following the sinuous Long Range when we reach the still water beneath the Eagle's Nest, Nadanullar, is the psychological moment to awaken the echoes that eternally haunt the frowning eyry. A bugle-call sounded here is taken up by the barricades of rock, and is repeated even ten times over. Small wonder that the fairy hosts are credited with passing it along their lines! The mountains take up their dying tones of sweet sounds, and answer it one to the other until the ear can no longer follow it through space. The ferns and rich foliage of the mountain side trail their long fingers in the water, and cluster and quicken among the crevices of the rocks. Recently the Laureate visited Ireland for the first time; hitherto this land of poetry had been to him but "the damnable country" of the politician. He came, he saw, but Killarney conquered; and he, like all others who have gazed upon its beauty, renders tribute where it rightly belongs. "Damnable" is not the adjective to apply to a heavenly land, of which he truly says:--
"Such varied and vigorous vegetation I have seen no otherwhere; and when one has said that, one has gone far towards awarding the prize for natural beauty. But vegetation, at once robust and graceful, is but the fringe and decoration of that enchanting district. The tender grace of wood and water is set in a frame-work of hills--now stern, now ineffably gentle, now dimpling with smiles; now frowning and rugged with impending storm; now muffled and mysterious with mist, only to gaze out on you again with clear and candid sunshine. Here the trout leaps; there the eagle soars; and there beyond the wild deer dash through the arbutus coverts, through which they have come to the margin of the lake to drink, and, scared by your footstep or your oar, are away back to crosiered bracken or heather covered moorland. But the first, the final, the deepest and most enduring impression of Killarney is that of beauty unspeakably tender, which puts on at times a garb of grandeur and a look of awe, only in order to heighten by passing contrast the sense of soft insinuating loveliness. How the missel thrushes sing, as well they may! How the streams and runnels gurgle, and leap, and laugh! For the sound of journeying water is never out of your ears; the feeling of the moist, the fresh, the vernal, is never out of your heart. My companion agreed with me, that there is nothing in England or Scotland as beautiful as Killarney--meaning by Killarney its lakes, its streams, its hills, its vegetation; and if mountain, wood, and water--harmoniously blent--constitute the most perfect and adequate loveliness that nature presents, it surely must be owned that it has all the world over no superior."