I went, as usual, to the North Country in the Autumn; passed
some two extremely disconsolate months,--for all things distress
a wretched thin-skinned creature like me,--in that old region,
which is at once an Earth and a Hades to me, an unutterable
place, now that I have become mostly a _ghost_ there! I saw
Ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy
population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed
the _Devil's_ leading, listened namely to blustering shallow-
violent Impostors and Children of Darkness, saying, "Yes, we know
_you,_ you are Children of Light!"--and so has fallen all out at
elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its _potatoes_
is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking
suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis
indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,--say into
the Medea's-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid _dissolution;_
whether into new _youth,_ into sound healthy life, or into
eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know! Daniel
O'Connell stood bodily before me, in his green Mullaghmart Cap;
haranguing his retinue of Dupables: certainly the most _sordid_
Humbug I have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and
his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the
miseries that can befall a Nation.
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