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| PORTLESTER CHAPEL, DUBLIN, NO.2 -This sketch gives still another view of the interior of the Portlester Chapel, which, for some reason, appears to have attracted the particular attention of nearly all visitors to Ireland. Here we see three gentlemen, respectively old, middle-aged and young, silently gazing, with uncovered heads, on the slabs that cover the dust of men and women, who passed to their account long before the fatal wrath of Henry VIII. fell on the premier branch of the illustrious Geraldine family, of which the Fitz-Eustaces of Portlester were scions. The faces of the three visitors seem contmplative and sad, for they know that, some day, other people will stand above their dust, albeit not in the chapel of the Portlesters. A feeling of awe comes over the mind of the most callous when standing amid ruins, crowded with tombs and filled with the charnel odor inseparable from death vaults, whether ancient or modern. And yet, men, and women, too, linger in them long, held there by a mysterious fascination. "Oh, go not yet, not yet away! Let us feel that life is near our day," Killeevy! O Killeevy! The long departed seem to say, By the bonnie green woods of Killeevy! What Carleton wrote of the ghastly wooing of the "Churchyard Bride" by Sir Turlough, applies to every ancient burial place in Ireland. |
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