66 FOURTH PEKIOD. A. D. 590 TO 1049.
For its quietness and purity,
For heaven's angels that come and go
Under every leaf of the oaks,
I love my beautiful Derry.
My Derry, my fair oak grove, My dear little cell and dwelling, O God, in the heavens above ! Let him who profanes it be cursed. Beloved are Durrow and Derry, Beloved is Raphoe the pure, Beloved the fertile Drumhome, Beloved are Sords and Kells ! But sweeter and fairer to me The salt sea where the sea-gulls cry When I come to Derry from far, It is sweeter and dearer to me — • Sweeter to me." l
In 563, the forty -second year of his age, Columba, prompted by a passion for travelling and a zeal for the spread of Chris tianity,2 sailed with twelve fellow-apostles to the West of Scot land, possibly on invitation of the provincial king, to whom he was related- by blood. He was presented with the island of Hyy commonly called lona? near the Western coast of Scotland, about fifty miles West from Oban. It is an inhospitable island, three miles and a half long and a mile and a half broad, partly cultivated, partly covered with hill pasture, retired dells, morass
1 Montalembert, III. 112. This poem strikes the key-note of father Prout's more musical " Bells of Shandon which sound so grand on the river Lee."
2 "Pro Christo peregrinare volens" says Adamnan (p. 108), who knows nothing of his excommunication and exile from Ireland in consequence of a great bat tle. And yet it is difficult to account for this tradition. In one of the Irish Keltic poems ascribed to Columba, he laments to have been driven from Erin by his own fault and in consequence of the blood shed in his battles. See Montalembert, III. 145.
3 This is not an adaptation to Columba's Hebrew name (Neander), but a corruption of li-shona, i. e. the Holy Island (from li, the Keltic name for island, and hona or shona, sacred). So Dr. Lindsay Alexander and Cunningham. But Reeves (L c. Introd., p. cxxx.) regards loua as the genuine form, which is the feminine adjective of lou (to be pronounced like the English Yeo). The island has borne no fewer than thirty names.
2 18. ST. COLUMBA AND THE MONASTERY OF IONA. 67
and rocks, now in possession of the Duke of Argyll, numbering about three hundred Protestant inhabitants, an Established Presbyterian Church, and a Free Church. The neighboring island of Staffa, though smaller and uninhabited, is more inter esting to the ordinary tourist, and its FingaPs Cave is one of the most wonderful specimens of the architectural skill of na ture; it looks like a Gothic cathedral, 66 feet high, 42 feet broad, and 227 feet long, consisting of majestic basalt columns, an arched roof, and an open portal towards the ocean, which dashes in and out in a constant succession of waves, sounding solemn anthems in this unique temple of nature. Columba and his fellow-monks must have passed it on their missionary wanderings; but they were too much taken up with heaven to look upon the wonders of the earth, and the cave remained comparatively unknown to the world till 1772. Those islands wore the same aspect in the sixth century as now, with the exception of the woods, which have disappeared. Walter Scott (in the "Lord of the Isles") has thrown the charm of his poetry over the Hebridean archipelago, from which proceeded the Christianization of Scotland.1
By the labors of Columba and his successors, lona has become one of the most venerable and interesting spots in the history of Christian missions. It was a light-house in the darkness of heathenism. We can form no adequate conception of the selfdenying zeal of those heroic missionaries of the extreme North, who, in a forbidding climate and exposed to robbers and wild beasts, devoted their lives to the conversion of savages. Columba and his friends left no monuments of stone and wood ; nothing
O
is shown but the spot on the South of the island where he landed,
1 "No two objects of interest," says the Duke of Argyll (Tona, p. 1) "could be more absolutely dissimilar in kind than the two neighboring islands, Staffa and lona: — lona dear to Christendom for more than a thousand years; — Staffa known to the scientific and the curious only since the close of the last century. Nothing but an accident of geography could unite their names. The number of those who can thoroughly understand and enjoy them both is probably very