MUCKROSS ABBEY AND INNISFALLEN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 136, 10 December 1875, Page 8

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND IN NISF ALLEN.

Charles Wausen Stoddard has "done" the town of Killarney, and gives his impressions thereof in last Sunday's ' Chronicle.' fie thus speaks of Tnnisfallen and MUCKROSS AT3BKT. The monks have been at rest these hundred years ; the roof has fallen to decay, and in the open nave the grass has spread like a, carpet under foot, and the ferns hang like ragged tapestries from the chinks in the wall. I doubt if there is any rain more charminothan this; it is not extensive ; it is simply complete and satisfying. The trees reach in through the ungloved windows and shake boughs -with the sapplings that are sprouting within — very proper and very pretty sapplings, that grow close to the high altar and have reason to ho spruce and fair to see. That dim cloister at Muckross, how it haunts me ! There is a great yew tree growing out of the heart of it and covering the whole with a green roof of leaves. The light that steals into this cloister is so soft and sentimental — shall I use the word ? — that one easily imagines the rooks to be the ghost of the old monks complaining at the sacrilegious trespass of mere sight-seers, such as myself, for instance. The various tenantless, and now untenable chambers are pointed out by the custodian j but he hurries you from ruin to ruin so that you g-et but a GLIMPSE OF THE CLUSTERED CROSSES tn the yard where the dead lie, and the rooks scold at you with hoarse voices for your worldly and careless intrusion. Muckross Abbey is like a petrified sight ! It is the sweetest and the somberest, and the most heartrending ruin imaginable. It is like a torn volume of a sacrad history, or broken statue of a saint ; there is not enough of it to console you in the loss of that which is gone forever ; there is too much of it remaining to permit you to forget the magnitude of your loss. The flutter and the fall of leaves in the gusts of warm sovth wind ; a cloister full of shadows ; a chapel crowded with weeds breast-high ; a refectory haunted of bees and blos-soms ; a crumbling tower, with the ivy folded about it like a mantle, and a cloud of rooks clamoring overhead — suuh is the Abbey as I remember it after hours and hours of wholesome loafing that made me familiar with almost every stone in it. I\ T NISFALL.KN. Swcot Imiisfailcn, fare the well ! A verdant island with a ruined monastery scattered over it ; . winding paths skirt the irregular shores. Every tree grows here, and evex-y charm of nature seems reproduced in little somewhere within its wave washed borders. There have been battles here l and monks massacred, hut how long it seems ! Now there cannot ■ be found a more peaceful retreat ; and with the lap of its waves in r my ears, and photos of its myriad fluttering leaves and the rustle l of the hoof the sheep that feed here, I think of the day, twelve ' hundred years ago, when St. Finian founded his abbey, and I : wonder if he realized then that he was building for the moment, ;is i it were, ) Sweet Inni^fallen. fare the well ; May calm and sunshine long 1 be thine. How fair thou art let others tell, 7 While but to feel how fair bo mine I t That is Tom, again ; forgive me. I sleep with tho " Melodies " t under my pillow these nights. Perhaps Ido like Killarney better f than I thought ; but I might like it better than Idoif it were not i so solemn. Ireland is the saddest, the most tearful, the loneso1 mest spot on the face of tho globe ; at least I am beginning to 5 think so.

A new parasol lias been invented, having an outside rod which crosses the main shaft aboixt an inch above the fastening of the ribs at the gathers. When closed and used for a walking-stick, the parasol is simply an ingeniously-contrived pair of tongs, and enables a fashionably-dressed lady to pick up a handkerchief or other small article without stooping*.