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.

Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.

The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full