There are glorious, steep
slopes leading up to fair, round hills, waving with golden grain, or
green with aftermath, checked off into fields by gay, green hedges or
files of stately trees. On the slope, half way up the slope, snuggling
down at the foot of the slope, are residences of every degree of beauty.
Houses, square and solid, with wide porticos; houses rising into many
gabled peaks; houses that have swollen into all sorts of bay windows
running up to the roof, or stopping with the first story. Houses that
fling themselves up into the sky in towers and turrets, and assert
themselves to be, indeed, castles.
Queenstown comes at last, a town hung up on a steep hillside, and on the
very brow of the hill is an immense cathedral, unfinished like St. Finn
Barre's, of Cork. In these cathedrals two forms of religious belief are
slowly and expensively trying to express themselves in stone, chiselled
and cut into a thousand forms of beauty, in marbles, polished and
carved, in painted windows, in gildings and draperies of the costliest.
Looking at these costly fanes erected to be a local spot where Jehovah's
presence shall dwell, one can scarcely believe that He will dwell in the
heart of the poor who are willing to receive Him in the day of His
power.
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