Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IN THE GATES OF THE NOIITH. INTRODUCTION. I knew a man who delighted much to express himself with a certain amplitude and statelincss of diction, and rejoiced greatly when his words seemed to Btrike the ear with a sound like the measured tread of marching men. Once, in his sonorous manner, lie wrote some large sentences concerning Irish History in general, of the relations of Irish heroic legend with the same, and of both with our country's still obscure, uncertain, and untravelled future?sentences which I propose to use here by way of preface or prelude to the heroic, romantic, and semi-historic Irish tale which I am about to tell. It is one which, perhaps, if I do not hope too much, may be found prophetic as well as commemorative, and to belong as much to the future as to the past. There is, he writes, a pleasure in watching the reclamation of desert land?the choking moisture drained away, the sour peat mingled with sand, the stones collected into heaps, the making of roads, and the building of fences, and, in the end, the sight of cornfields where the snipe shrieked, and herds of kine where the morass quaked. There is a pleasure in watching the dispersion of darkness before the rising sun, the darkness melting slowly into the silver twilight, the twilight ripening gradually into the golden day. There is a pleasure in watching with the scientist the subsidence and concentration of some vastprimordial chaos into a shape of celestial beauty, fulfilling its part in some sidereal system, rolling through space around iis sun, clear and determinate, a world and a star. But there is a pleasure deeper, keener, more human, and more sublime, felt by one who contemplates out of the savage and semi-casual collisions of hostile tribes the slow growth of a noble...
Synopsis
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