The strangers contemplated for a considerable time the broken mass of its dark exterior, and the high steeple, supported by beautiful gothic arches. They entered the broad nave, but, like the rest of the ruin, it was wrapt in one undistinguishing hue; and the majesty of darkness succeeded to the deep and misty forms of twilight.

"Darkness," said the younger stranger, after a silence of some minutes, "is decidedly the source of the true sublime."

"And light," replied the Commodore, "of beauty: light is life, the source of forms and motions: darkness is death: I abhor it."

"And I love it, I love the uncertainty of this mysterious dimness (for instance), where every thing is guessed,. and nothing known; where at every doubtful step,

"Solemn and slow the shadows blacker fall, And all is awful listening gloom around."

A deep sigh, heard near and distinct, answered as he spoke.

"Did you sigh?" he asked quickly. "No: did not you?" was the reply. "Not I. Yet some one sighed most assuredly."

""Tis the wind among the ruins," said the Commodore, carelessly.

"No, the air is breathless. It was a human, perhaps a super-human inspiration."

"That is physically impossible: respiration is organization: spirits have none. But do you believe in superhuman agency?"

"I believe, and I deny nothing.-I resign myself passively to events, moral and physical, as they occur. This, I fancy, was the original intention of providence with respect to man; which made him dark, and left him so; the child of ignorance, and its victim."

"Then why endow him with faculties, which impel him to enquiry, and

force him into action, which lead him to dispel his darkness, and rise above his nature?"

"Hush! there again! I am certain I heard the heavings of a short convulsive respiration. 'Tis most singular!" "The place affects you. We will return, and view it by daylight."

"No," said Mr. De Vere, seating himself on a fragment of the ruin: "this is to me positive enjoyment."

As he spoke, the dispersion of a dense cloud, which had long scowled over the darkened landscape, and which now broke into fleecy vapour, displayed the broad bright moon, rising in splendour above the roofless ruin. A sheet of light fell upon the nave, which the strangers occupied, but left in shadow the lateral aisles, which formed a pillared arcade on either side. Parts of the ruin remained black and massive, while the shrine of the holy relic stood illuminated; and broken rays and silver

points glittered on the projected tracery of the arches and twisted pillars, which supported the canopy of the royal tomb.

The imagination of the younger traveller was busied in conjecturing which part of the building had been the choir, which the refectory, which the dormitory, when the Commodore observed: "Fanaticism raised these walls, and fanaticism destroyed them.* Their foundation recalls a degraded epoch of the human mind, when bigotry bribed its way to heaven, and purchased salvation with the fruits of that violence and injustice which risked it. These monkish potentates, these sanctified violators

*What the holy rage of the first reformers left undone, Cromwell's soldiers completed. Even the monument of the Earl of Thomond, in Queen Elizabeth's time, erected in the Ca thedral of the city of Limeric, could not escape their fury, though none in this country deserved more from England.

Antiquities of Ireland.

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in all ages and regions, are alike contemptible-their holy alliances and system of spoliation-their building of churches and breaking of treaties, combine the vices of fraud and hypocrisy, and rob ambition of its glory, and majesty of its respect.

"Still," said De Vere, "I like a religion of forms, a tangible religion, as I beheld it in Spain, where I was once half tempted to turn monk; a religion mingled with intrigue and credulity, passionate and pious, the ready agent of love and devotion." He sighed profoundly, and asked: "Is not this the twenty-fifth of August ?”

"I believe so," was the reply.

""Tis a curious coincidence: on this day, at this hour, seven years ago, my birth-day too, the day I came of age, being in Galicia in Spain, chance led me to the site of a Moorish ruin adjoining the cloisters of the church of the celebrated convent of Nuestra Senora de