One glance, however, before you go, you
will vouchsafe at the village tree--that stalworth elm. It has not grown
an inch these hundred years. It does not look a day older than it did
fifty years ago, _I_ can tell you. There he stands the same; and yet a
stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless,
busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to
the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and
affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race. Thou hast a
story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds
would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the
moaning reeds.
The palmy days of Chapelizod were just about a hundred years ago, and
those days--though I am jealous of their pleasant and kindly fame, and
specially for the preservation of the few memorials they have left
behind, were yet, I may say, in your ear, with all their colour and
adventure--perhaps, on the whole, more pleasant to read about, and dream
of, than they were to live in. Still their violence, follies, and
hospitalities, softened by distance, and illuminated with a sort of
barbaric splendour, have long presented to my fancy the glowing and
ever-shifting combinations upon which, as on the red embers, in a
winter's gloaming, I love to gaze, propping my white head upon my hand,
in a lazy luxury of reverie, from my own arm-chair, while they drop,
ever and anon, into new shapes, and silently tell their 'winter's
tales.
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