The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale
traveller, all the pleasures of tasteful enjoyment, all the sublime emotions of a rapt imagination. And if the glowing fancy of Claude Loraine would have dwelt enraptured on the paradisial charms of English landscape, the superior genius of Salvator Rosa would have reposed its eagle wing amidst those scenes of mysterious sublimity, with which the wildly magnificent landscape of Ireland abounds. But the liberality of nature appears to me to be here but frugally assisted by the donations of art. Here agriculture appears in the least felicitous of he! aspects. The rich treasures of Ceres seldom wave their golden heads over the earth’s fertile bosom; the verdant drapery of young plantations rarely skreens out the coarser features of a rigid soil, the cheerless aspect of a gloomy bog; while the unvaried surface of the perpetual pasturage which satisfies the eye of the interested grazier, disappoints the glance of the tasteful spectator.     

       Within twenty miles of Bally———— I was literally dropt by the stage at the foot of a mountain, to which your native Wrekin is but a hillock. The dawn was just risen, and flung its gray and reserved tints on a scene of which the mountainous region of Capel Cerig will give you the most adequate idea.     

       Mountain rising over mountain, swelled like an amphitheatre to those clouds which, faintly tinged with the sun’s prelusive beams, and rising from the earthly summits where they had reposed, incorporated with the kindling æther of a purer atmosphere.     

       All was silent and solitary—a tranquility tinged with terror, a sort of “delightful horror,” breathed on every side.—I was alone, and felt like the presiding genius of desolation!     

       As I had previously learned my route, after a minute’s contemplation of the scene before me, I pursued my solitary ramble along a steep and trackless path, which wound gradually down towards a great lake, an almost miniature sea, that lay embosomed amidst those stupendous heights whose rugged forms, now bare, desolate, and barren, now clothed with yellow furze and creeping underwood, or crowned with misnic forests, appeared towering above my head in endless variety. The progress of the sun convinced me that mine must have been slow, as it was perpetually interrupted by pauses of curiosity and admiration, and by long and many lapses of thoughtful reverie; and fearing that I had lost my way (as 
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