I think of the lavish Irish hedges and of the strip of grass white with daisies which ran either side of the footpath. There was always a clear stream singing along the ditch. It had come down from the mountains, and was amber-brown in colour, and clear as glass; it ran over pebbles that were pure gold and silver and precious stones, now and again getting dammed around a boulder, making a leap to escape, and coming around the boulder with a swirl and a few specks of foam floating upon it. Ireland of the Streams is one of the old names for Ireland, and it is justified; for not only are there lordly rivers like the Shannon and the Blackwater, to mention but two of them, but there are innumerable little streams everywhere, undefiled--at least, as I know them--by factories. You can always kneel down of a summer's day by one, fill your two hands full and drink your fill; and that mountain water is better than any wine. You may track it, if you will, up to the mountains, where you will find it welling out, perhaps, through the fronds of a hartstongue fern, the first tiny gush of it; and you will find it widening out and almost hidden by a million flowers and plants that like to stand with their feet in water. Or you will see it, cool and deep, with golden shadows sleeping in it, slipping round little boulders and clattering over stones, in a tremendous hurry to escape from these sweet places to the noisome city, where it will lose itself in the sewer water before it finds its way to the sea.
There is no such order in an Irish as in an English landscape: none of the rich, ordered garden air which in England so delights Americans and colonials. The Irish landscape is always somewhat forlorn, wild and soft, with an impalpable melancholy upon it--this even in the fat pasture-lands of Dublin County. How much more so when the bogs spread their beautiful brown desolation over miles of country, or in the wild places where man asks for bread and Nature gives him a stone! At its most prosperous the country is always a little wild, a little mournful, a barefooted colleen with cloudy hair and shy eyes sometimes tearful, and no conventional beauty--only something that takes the heart by storm and holds it fast.