Let who will say, if he pleases, that the stars are as many worlds like the earth we inhabit; I grant it for one moment; but then, how potent and wise must He be who makes worlds as numberless as the grains of sand that cover the sea-shore, and who, without any trouble, for so many ages governs all these wandering worlds as a shepherd does a flock of sheep?

The oxeyes are so numberless in one long reach of meadow that a white drapery, which every breeze folds or unfolds, seems to have been cast as light as sea-foam upon the illimitable forest of stems.

Their works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.