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LEINSTER
another narrow stretch of blue water (lightly crested,
perhaps, with foam) from the long smooth whiteness
of what we call at Portmarnock the Velvet Strand.
Surely earth has not many things to show more fair.
Yet when you climb the hill (a tram will take the
infirmer) and first see eastward over the wide blue,
then, gradually ascending, get sight of Dublin Bay's
southern shore with the Wicklow Mountains behind
it, and finally of Dublin itself, lying between beauty
and beauty—beauty of sea, beauty of plain, beauty of
mountain, beauty of azure, of purple, of green—then,
I think, the southward view will seem to you richer
in variety and incident. For the mountains make a
great mass of round huddling shoulders, their lower
slopes tree-clad; but nothing in the world is more
dainty than the line of peaked summits which, string-
ing out from the main mass, carries the eye delighted
with their chiselled shapes from peak to peak down-
ward to the sea. And away west, past this mountain
mass, Ireland stretches broad and fertile, well timbered,
well watered, a country of park and champaign, fertile
to luxuriance.
Beauty is all about you too; for the hill from mid-
summer on is purple with heath, and the purple is
set off by gold of the autumn-flowering furze which
grows in little round trim bushes. Lord Howth's
demesne is one of the oldest and most charming