Often on a clear day of sun and driving cloud I have been tempted to prefer the northward view, from the haven or above it; for even from the sea's level you can see far away past all that long, plain and low coast to the Carlingford Hills, purple and solid in their serrated ridge; and beyond, higher, fainter, and more delicate, Slieve Donard, and all the goodly company of Mourne Mountains show themselves against the sky. Nor is the foreground less lovely: the quaint old port, and, opposite it, the purple and brown ruggedness of Ireland's Eye, which is divided by 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, stringing out from the main mass, carries the eye delighted with their chiselled shapes from peak to peak downward 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.
[Illustration: THE RIVER LIFFEY AT PALMERSTON]
Beauty is all about you too; for the hill from midsummer 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 places in Ireland, and it encloses within its precincts a cromlech under which, so they tell, lies Aideen, wife of Oscar, Ossian's son, chief hero of those legendary warriors, the Fianna.
A beauty of more modern date is to be seen by those wise and fortunate folk who visit Ireland in May or June: the rocky glen overgrown with choice rhododendrons and azaleas, which the Howth family have gathered and cherished. Imagine a steep cliff, a hundred feet almost sheer, but piled with tumbled boulders, and through them, up to the very top, bush after bush of these gorgeous blossoms--crimson, scarlet, mauve, buff, yellow, and exquisite diaphanous white. I never saw rhododendrons anywhere to touch these. And while we talk of flowers, another sight you can see from Dublin in May, the like of which takes visitors to Holland--the great daffodil and tulip fields at Rush, some fifteen miles north along the coast. There, growing in among the pale sandhills and grey bent, you shall see these huge patches of trumpeting colour--acres of tulips, close ranged like soldiers on parade, all of one type, uniform in their perfection. And with that you can inspect an industry employing many workmen and workwomen throughout the year in a country where work is none too plenty.