hour of sickness and lassitude they have wrought for
me the miracle of Loretto’s Chapel, and, borne
me away from the scenes around me and the sense of
personal suffering to that wonderful land where Nature
seems still uttering, from lake and valley, and from
mountains whose eternal snows lean on the hard, blue
heaven, the echoes of that mighty hymn of a new-created
world, when “the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”
But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by
far the most numerous. Light-hearted, wrongheaded,
impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental love of
hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water
and of that gem which the fable tells us rests at
the bottom of the well, the Celtic elements of their
character do not readily accommodate themselves to
those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon.
I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of
their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content
to wait for the change that time and the attrition
of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make
in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to
reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace.
A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object
of sympathy and interest. Amidst all his apparent
gayety of heart and national drollery and wit, the
poor Irish emigrant has sad thoughts of the “ould
mother of him,” sitting lonely in her solitary
cabin by the bog-side; recollections of a father’s
blessing and a sister’s farewell are haunting
him; a grave mound in a distant churchyard far beyond
the “wide wathers” has an eternal greenness
in his memory; for there, perhaps, lies a “darlint
child” or a “swate crather” who
once loved him. The new world is forgotten for
the moment; blue Killarney and the Liffey sparkle
before him, and Glendalough stretches beneath him
its dark, still mirror; he sees the same evening sunshine
rest upon and hallow alike with Nature’s blessing
the ruins of the Seven Churches of Ireland’s
apostolic age, the broken mound of the Druids, and
the round towers of the Phoenician sun-worshippers;
pleasant and mournful recollections of his home waken
within him; and the rough and seemingly careless and
light-hearted laborer melts into tears. It is
no light thing to abandon one’s own country
and household gods. Touching and beautiful was
the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:
“Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know
the heart of the stranger, seeing that ye were strangers
in the land of Egypt.”
PATUCKET FALLS.
Many years ago I read, in some old chronicle
of the early history of New England, a paragraph which
has ever since haunted my memory, calling up romantic
associations of wild Nature and wilder man:—
“The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat
Falls of Patucket, on the Merrimac.”
It was with this passage in my mind that I visited
for the first time the Rapids of the Merrimac, above
Lowell.
