It lies in the middle of the Irish Sea, at about equal distances from
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Seen from the sea it is a lovely
thing to look upon. It never fails to bring me a thrill of the heart as
it comes out of the distance. It lies like a bird on the waters. You
see it from end to end, and from water's edge to topmost peak, often
enshrouded in mists, a dim ghost on a grey sea; sometimes purple against
the setting sun. Then as you sail up to it, a rugged rocky coast, grand
in its beetling heights on the south and west, and broken into the
sweetest bays everywhere. The water clear as crystal and blue as the sky
in summer. You can see the shingle and the moss through many fathoms.
Then mountains within, not in peaks, but round foreheads. The colour of
the island is green and gold; its flavour is that of a nut. Both colour
and flavour come of the gorse. This covers the mountains and moorlands,
for, except on the north, the island has next to no trees. But O, the
beauty and delight of it in the Spring! Long, broad stretches glittering
under the sun with the gold of the gorse, and all the air full of the
nutty perfume. There is nothing like it in the world. Then the glens,
such fairy spots, deep, solemn, musical with the slumberous waters, clad
in dark mosses, brightened by the red fuchsia. The fuchsia is everywhere
where the gorse is not. At the cottage doors, by the waysides, in the
gardens. If the gorse should fail the fuchsia might even take its place
on the mountains. Such is Man, but I am partly conscious that it is Man
as seen by a Manxman. You want a drop of Manx blood in you to see it
aright. Then you may go the earth over and see grander things a thousand
times, things more sublime and beautiful, but you will come back to
Manxland and tramp the Mull Hills in May, long hour in, and long hour
out, and look at the flowering gorse and sniff its flavour, or lie by
the chasms and listen to the screams of the sea-birds, as they whirl and
dip and dart and skim over the Sugar-loaf Rock, and you'll say after
all that God has smiled on our little island, and that it is the fairest
spot in His beautiful world, and, above all, that it is _ours_.