Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life.  Like that throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our apparent life.  From the very gray of her morning, the children of Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world, we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven.  So the same note rings and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world.  If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this:  To restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel.  We shall first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world.  If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name:  Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.

II.

The great stone monuments.

Westward from Sligo—­Town of the River of Shells—­a tongue of land runs toward the sea between two long bays.  Where the two bays join their waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring sheer upwards, rugged and formidable.  Within the shadow of the mountain is hidden a wonderful glen—­a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green gloom.  It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of the mountain.

Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a memorial of golden-haired Maeve.  From the dead queen’s pyramid a view of surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley and hill.  The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above.  It is full of throbbing silence and peace.  Across blue fields of ocean, and facing the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves beneath them and the green of the uplands above.

The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their immeasurable blue.  Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and brown.  The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more translucent in the southern distance.