the victorious mingles with the plaintive; the black waters shimmering by the home of Raleigh, and those sacred shades, the wizard woods of Kilcolman, that, with useful and shadowed beauty, closed in about the visions of the dying Spenser."
Contemplating in another essay the extent of the unexplored regions of Irish literature, he exclaims:
"What a tract of imaginative grandeur, lying away dim, sublime and gloomy, like the isle 0' Brazil of popular legend, Irish writers of poetry have left untouched in portions of the early religious history of Ireland! Lough Dearg, with so much of what is mightiest and most lasting in relation to the heart and soul floating dimly about it, is an instance. Calderon, the Catholic, soars into this region for the poetic; but the Purgatorio del San Patricio, though Shelley dug the finest image in the 'Cenci' from it, is only a scratch on the surface of an auriferous soil."
In the ranks of Australian scholarship no name stands higher than that of Dr. W. E. Hearn, a county Cavan man, and a distinguished alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin. Selected at the age of twenty-eight, by a committee presided over by Sir John Herschel, to fill the chair of history and political economy in the newly-founded University of Melbourne, Dr. Hearn has for more than thirty years been one of the chief bulwarks of that institution, and one of the great intellectual forces of the southern continent. "The Government of England," "Plutology," and "The Aryan Household," are three works from his pen, displaying an erudition which has won for them a recognised position as text-books on the subjects of which they treat, in European seats of learning. His colleague. Professor McCoy, is a Dublin man, and was chosen at the same time by Sir John Herschel to occupy the
