"HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 1514, 9 November 1912, Page 5 (Supplement)

"HOW IRELAND TAKES THE EYE."

Although green is a dominating tint in Irish landscapes, and may as-well as any other hue bo taken as the national colour, yet Ireland is a land not only green, but purple and red-gold, a land of much variety and intensity of colour, even where deficient in grandeur or elaboration of outline. Her landscapes are purple, with many square miles of heather-covered moor and intensity of colour, even where dedigo by cloud shadows, and repeated often J in tho sky when the rain-cloucls are piled in serried masses. There is purple also in tho abundant thistles, in the knapweed, the loosestrife, and the dyes of the country women's , skirts. Green— green, bottle- j green, sage-green, blue-green meets the _ eyo in the velvet mosses of the bogs, in , meadows, turfy banks, and fern-choked ; glens, in the many fields of cabbage, the large-leaved drooping ash trees, the treelike gorse, in the clean sea water, off the rock-bound coasts, and in the sea-green marble of C'onuemara. Red-gold and russet are present in most of the landscapes and in the hair of the Keltic people. In the shallow estuaries, the oily water is unable to break into billows, owing to the floating wreaths of red-gold seaweed. | The tussocks of the bogs and the banks j of the rivers are yellow and red with j sedgy grasses and stunted rushes. lie russet sorrel grows in great abunoance, . the bracken in the autumn, winter, and spring ranges from the colour of ripe maize, through red-gold to red-brown, and gives these tints to vast spaces of undulating tableland or the whole ranges of lulls. Through the black bogs flow streams of clear chestnut-brown water margined with creamy foam, is though the country, ian with beer. Red-gold, green, and purple, are tho dominating colours of Ireland ; but them is also the grey of her limestone rocks, granite boulders, cliffs, and mountains, the unvarying grey of the stone walls which in most parts, do not so much replace the hedges of England, as reinforce them against tho wind ; grey in the tnick-h.nred donkeys, the hooded crows, and the Hocks of geese which are never absent, from the . villages and the surrounding meadows and moors. There are also geese of the purest j white, and creamy-white is the prevailing j tint among tho sheep that dot the hill- . sides and of the exquisite mantle thrown over hedges and thickets when the hawthorn is in bloom. Everywhere the cottages and the inhabitants of the poor in town or country are white as whitewashcan make them. In autumn, winter, and spring, white gulls are to be seen on every loch and inlet of the sea, on fields which have been manured, on the foul rivers that flow through towns, and among the ships in the harbours, great and small. There is the white sea-foam all round the coast; a creamy or bluish-white appears in the chalk cliffs of Antrim, marked as with giant writing by paralleled rows of black flints. Then there is pale gold in summer and autumn in the fields of oats and rye, and at all times in the thatch that roofs the white cottages; in the abundant honeysuckle of the hedgerows: in the hair and beards of the Danish population on tho coasts and islands—From "Views and Reviews." by Sir Harry Johnston. K.C. 13.