Charles Battell Loomis

“ If a man gets ten dollars a week in New York and lives in a crowded Harlem flat for which he pays at least five dollars a week, is he as well off as this Irishman, in his native land, with all the fresh air in the world, fowls and fresh eggs, and butter of his wife's making, and one of the loveliest views imaginable before him? ”

“ Close up the sap holes and keep in the sap, for the sap is the life blood of Ireland, and we in America have learned how to make sugar out of many things—even out of beets—and we no longer need the Irish young man. ”

“ As half way down the mountain I turned and looked back at the spire against the somber hills (for it had begun to rain) I wished that my camera would take them for me, but I knew that snapshots of hills are like literary snapshots—inadequate. ”

“ NO one can be in Ireland long without realizing that when sturdy, practical John Bull forcibly married dreamy Hibernia, with her artistic temperament, it was a very foolish marriage, and as a good American I could have predicted trouble from the very start. John Bull is accustomed to be obeyed at the drop of the hat, and Hibernia, for all her dreaminess, is a lady of spirit and will not become a willing slave. ”

“ Look at Shakespeare, the last Catholic that England had, as you might say, and look at his work with its artistry, its absence of dogmatism, and then look at Protestant and tiresome Wordsworth and Protestant and didactic Tennyson. Spenser was a great artist. Spenser was a Catholic. Catholicism emancipates the artistic side of a man's nature, puritanism seals it up, dams it, condemns him to preach sermons.
"The Irish are the most artistic people on the face of the earth when Protestantism has not been allowed to stamp their idealism out of them." ”

“ The river Lee runs through the center of Cork, and at evening it is a favorite place for fishing, also for learning to swim on dry land.
The fishermen seem to fish for the love of casting, and the little boys swim on the pavement—two pursuits as useless as they are pleasant. Over the bridge the fishermen leaned, and cast their lines in anything but pleasant places—for the river is malodorous—and the little boys stood on benches and dived to the pavement, where they spat and then went through the motions of swimming. ”

“ Friends in America had told me that I'd not fare very well in Ireland except in the large towns. I would like to ask at what small hotel—New York or Chicago or Philadelphia—I would get as well cooked or as well served a dinner as was brought to me in Londonderry for three shillings and sixpence.
If one is looking for Waldorf magnificence and French disguises he'll not find them here unless it is at Dublin, but if one is blessed with a good appetite and is willing to put up with plain cooking I fancy he will do better here than at like hotels at home. ”

“ Green Coat Hospital, Cork
One likes to indulge in a bit of sentiment sometimes, and I stood and waited to hear the bells of Shandon that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee. I had left the Lee to the fishermen and the make-believe swimmers, but the bells would sound sweetly here under the tower that held them.
A minute passed, and then another, and then I heard music—music that called forth old memories of days long since dead. How it pealed out its delight on the (icy) air of night. And how well I knew the tune:
"Down where the Wurzburger flows." ”

“ And here let me make a few remarks about Irish weather in general. You are out walking in a fine "mizzle," that penetrates ordinary cloth with the utmost ease, and you meet a countryman to whom you observe "Not very pleasant." "Oh, it's a bit soft, but it's pleasant enough." What a blessing it is to be easily satisfied.
You strike a day without sun and positively chilly, and the natives assure you it is fine, that they had awful weather last week, but that, according to the barometer, the weather is going to be steady for awhile. ”

“ Again I thought of Shandon bells, and the romantic song, "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows," and leaving the Lee still flowing I sought my hotel.
I would like to make a revolutionary statement, that is more often thought than uttered, but before I make it, I would like to say that there are two classes of travelers: those who think there is nothing in Europe that compares with similar things in America, and those who think there is nothing in America that can hold a candle to similar things in Europe. ”

“ McManus is an ardent believer in a glorious future for Ireland when she shall have shaken off the shackles that bind her, and as a good American, I wrote in his guest book, "May Ireland come to her own before I die." ”

“ Having thus stated my position, let me go on to say, that I am perfectly willing to admit that this or that bit of scenery in France, or Switzerland, or England, or Ireland, lays over anything of the sort I ever saw in America, if I think it does, and I am equally willing to say, that America has almost unknown bits that are far better than admired and poet-ridden places in Europe.
Twin Lakes in Connecticut is one of them, and Killarney is a poet-ridden place.
Why, even in Ireland there are places just as lovely as Killarney, but they have not been written up, and so no one goes to visit them. ”

“ Ireland needs every able-bodied man to help carry on the work there is to do—a work that the Gaelic League is doing so much to foster.
The Gaelic League with its fostering of the artistic spirit that is dormant in the Irish nature, and that already finds expression in the weaving of rugs and in [Pg 170] embroidery and in bookbinding and the making of stained glass, and the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, with its introduction of modern scientific methods of farming, its model hospitals and schoolhouses and dwellings—these movements are waking great interest among the younger people. ”

“ One needs to live long among the Irish peasants to get at their folklore. They are invariably agreeable to strangers, as Michael has shown himself to have been to me, and are more than willing to talk about America and the sorrows of Ireland, but if the subject of fairy folk is broached they seem to be anxious to change the subject. ”

“ The Lakes of Killarney are so beautiful that they are worthy of the pen of a poet, but the pen of a poet does not make any lake more beautiful, and I am quarreling because so many people refuse to believe the evidence of their own senses, and take their natural beauties at the say so of another. ”

“ The mother is a Sinn Feiner, an idealist of the idealists. She believes that Irishmen ought to withdraw from Parliament. She urges her son, who is in Parliament, to resign, to boycott England, to get his brother members of Parliament to come home and form a National Council in Dublin. She doesn't believe in war, but she hates England with an animosity that is positively amusing to one whose forbears fought England and had done with the fight long ago. She won't speak to her daughter, who believes in working for home rule in season and out of season in London. ”

“ Most of their time is spent training canaries, for there's little else for them to do in the country districts. But the priests; sure a man says, 'Oh, Jimmy's no good at all at all. Let's make a priest of him.'"
"It's folly you're talking," says the one who spoke for the priests. "There's not a finer body of men in Ireland than the priests."
"Oh," says the other, with Irish wit, "there's white sheep in every fold, I'll admit, but if Ireland was free from political and religious domination, she'd be able to stand upright and she wouldn't need home rule." ”

“ What Ireland needs is to forget her troubles and her political disabilities and work. An Irish workingman in Ireland is the laziest man alive. When he goes to America or Canada or Australia and is released from priestly authority he's a hard worker and a success, [Pg 136] but Paddy in the fields is always looking for saints' days—and finding them—and when he finds them he takes a holiday."
I am silent because I really know so little about it, but next day I meet another Protestant and I say to him, "I suppose it's Rome rule that is killing Ireland?" ”

“ He said that a man who had returned not long since told him that Ireland was hopelessly behind the times, and I told him, for his comfort, that to take one instance in which Ireland was up to date, the tram service in Dublin was far ahead of that of New York, both in the elegance of its rolling stock, its cheapness, and the civility of its employes. He was much amused at the idea of horse cars in New York. (Electric cars play an important part in all the large Irish cities, and a ride on the top of one to Howth, a lovely suburb of Dublin, is worth every bit of the eight cents it costs) . ”

“ But at the close of the drive I found a comfortable inn and a most agreeable dinner of fresh caught fish, and that mutton that we never seem to get in America, and I still felt that the climb was worth the wetting.
But the weather never ceases to astonish me. Dull gray skies at home [Pg 59] would depress me, but here I am thankful for dull gray skies if they only stop leaking long enough to enable me to do my accomplished task of walking or driving.
But real rain has no terrors for countryman or city man in Ireland. ”

“ Even the alleys are sweet and clean, and where the people keep their pigs is a mystery to me. I snapped one, but he was being driven hither and thither after the manner of Irish pigs, and may not have lived in Rathmullan at all.
Here in the town of Donegal while the houses are not of Philadelphia neatness, they show evidence of housewifely care, and if there is abject poverty it is carefully concealed. (I have been a week in Ireland and I have not seen a beggar or a drunken man, although I have kept my eyes moving rapidly.) ”

“ I was unfortunate enough not to meet a Galway woman, an ignorant peasant, who saw a vision that shaped itself around a ruined castle.
She said to my informant (one of the leaders in the Gaelic revival) that while she was looking at the castle one day a band of young gentlemen on horseback and strangely dressed came riding up to the castle, and in the windows of it were many handsome women, gayly dressed and with their hair brushed up from their foreheads, and they were laughing and talking. ”

“ One thing in America had interested Father David—the Thaw trial—and he wanted to know if Thaw would be hanged.
One day the only American news in the [Pg 122] 'Derry papers was to the effect that Evelyn Thaw thought of going on the stage.
Not our art, or our literature, or our suppression of the boss, but the Thaw trial, is the thing that has made a deep impress on Great Britain and Ireland, and everywhere I am asked to give an opinion.
The Thaw trial was a matter of moment to the good old man, with his incubators and his steam saw and his absence of personal vanity. ”

“ In Ireland the sun takes on Irish ways, and is just a little dilatory. It always means to set, and it always does set in time to avoid being out in the dark, but it's "an unconscionably long time a dying." ”

“ McManus has a bungalow on top of Mount Charles, and at his feet lie seven counties. They have a way of throwing counties at your feet in this part of Ireland that makes the view superb. The furthermost land that is his to look at on a clear day lies a hundred miles to the south.
Such a view ought to stimulate a man to noble thoughts, and I was not surprised to learn that McManus is a member of the Sinn Fein (Shinn Fane) Society (it means, "Ourselves Alone") , [Pg 51] what one might call bloodless revolutionists, although it comprises much of the best blood and the youngest blood in Ireland. ”

“ The Irish are such good cooks that we in the east (of America) have been employing them for two generations. Let us not forget that.
We entered the dining-room and had an appetizing soup and then the Irish potatoes (oh, such Irish potatoes!) and anything tenderer or better cooked than the chicken it would have been hard to find. We looked at each other and decided that we would not go on to Port Salon next day, but would spend another night in Rathmullan, and we said so to the maid. ”