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| SECLUDED SPOT IN PHOENIX PARK. -Nothing so enchants the traveller who visits Dublin as the infinate variety of beauty spots in its majestic public pleasure ground, the Phoenix Park. He can find there a thousand places in which the work of Dame Nature has been improved upon - as regards discipline and grouping - by the cunning hand of the landscape gardener; but he can also find hundreds of shady retreats, where he can be, to all intents and purposes, alone with her work, as much as if he were in the heart of some semi-tropical wilderness. God has been very bounteous to Ireland as regards her natural gifts, but man, in the words of Edmund Burke, one of her greatest sons, has been, for ages, conspiring to counteract, in her case, the beneficient intention of the great creator, when the Almighty breath first quickened her into life. The beauties of Phoenix Park are exclusively the production of God, in the first place, and Irishmen in the next. The tourist shown in the picture sees nothing but the charms of the Phoenix in his surroundings, where he stands. There is a rural stillness and restfulness in the scene; but, a few hundred yards in any direction, will bring him upon scenes and groups full of wakefulness and animation and the sight of many scarlet uniforms will show him "red specks of British power in Ireland." |
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