the civil war, he added a new condition, which bore cruelly upon a soul so passionately attached to country and kindred. The confessor condemned his penitent to perpetual exile from Ireland!"

Exile from Ireland! Did Columba hear the words aright? Exile from Ireland! What! See no more that land which he loved with such a wild and passionate love! Part from the brothers and kinsmen all, for whom he felt perhaps too strong and too deep an affection! Quit for aye the stirring scenes in which so great a part of his sympathies were engaged! Leave Ireland!

Oh! it was more hard than to bare his breast to the piercing sword; less welcome than to walk in constant punishment of suffering, so that his feet pressed the soil of his worshipped Erinn!

But it was even so. Thus ran the sentence of Molaise : “perpetual exile from Ireland!"

Staggered, stunned, struck to the heart, Columba could not speak for a moment. But God gave him in that great crisis of his life the supreme grace of bearing the blow and embracing the cross presented to him. At last he spoke, and in a voice agitated with emotion he answered: "Be it so; what you have commanded shall be done."

From that instant forth his life was one prolonged act of penitential sacrifice. For thirty years-his heart bursting within his breast the while-yearning for one sight of Ireland -he lived and labored in distant Iona. The fame of his sanctity filled the world; religious houses subject to his rule arose in many a glen and isle of rugged Caledonia; the gifts of prophecy and miracle momentously attested him as one of God's most favored apostles: yet all the while his heart was breaking; all the while in his silent cell Columba's tears flowed freely for the one grief that never left him-the wound that only deepened with lengthening time-he was away from Ireland! Into all his thoughts this sorrow entered. In all his songs-and several of his compositions till remain to usthis one sad strain is introduced. Witness the following, which, even in its merely literal translation into the English,

retains much of the poetic beauty and exquisite tenderness of the original by Columba in the Gaelic tongue :

What joy to fly upon the white-crested sea; and watch the waves break upon the Irish shore !

My foot is in my little boat; but my sad heart ever bleeds!

There is a gray eye which ever turns to Erinn; but never in this life shall it see

Erinn, nor her sons, nor her daughters!

From the high prow I look over the sea; and great tears are in my eyes when I turn to Erinn

To Erinn, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the clerks sing like the birds:

Where the young are so gentle, and the old are so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed!

Young traveller! carry my sorrows with you; carry them to Comgall of eternal life! Noble youth, take my prayer with thee, and my blessing: one part for Irelandseven times may she be blest-and the other for Albyn.

Carry my blessing across the sea; carry it to the West. My heart is broken in my breast!

If death comes suddenly to me, it will be because of the great love I bear to the Gael! It was to the rugged and desolate Hebrides that Columba turned his face when he accepted the terrible penance of Molaise. He bade farewell to his relatives, and, with a few monks who insisted on accompanying him whithersoever he might go, launched his frail currochs from the northern shore. They landed first, or rather were carried by wind and steam, upon the little isle of Oronsay, close by Islay; and here for a moment they thought their future abode was to be. But when Columba, with the early morning, ascending the highest ground on the island, to take what he thought would be a harmless look towards the island of his heart, lo! on the dim horizon a faint blue ridge the distant hills of Antrim! He averts his head and flies downwards to the strand! Here they cannot stay, if his vow is to be kept. They betake them once more to the currochs, and steering further northward, eventually land upon Iona, thenceforth, till time shall be no more, to be famed as the sacred isle of Columba! Here landing, he ascended the loftiest of the hills upon the isle, and "gazing into the

This poem appears to have been presented as a farewell gift by St. Columba to some of the Irish visitors at Iona, when returning home to Ireland. It is deservedly classed amongst the most beautiful of his poetic compositions,

distance, found no longer any trace of Ireland upon the horizon." In Iona accordingly he resolved to make his home. The spot from whence St. Columba made this sorrowful survey is still called by the isles-men in the Gaelic tongue, Carn-cul-ri-Erinn, or the Cairn of Farewell-literally, The back turned on Ireland.

Writers without number have traced the glories of Iona.* Here rose, as if by miracle, a city of churches; the isle became one vast monastery, and soon much too small for the crowds that still pressed thither. Then from the parent isle there went forth to the surrounding shores, and all over the mainland, off-shoot establishments and missionary colonies (all under the authority of Columba), until in time the Gospel light was ablaze on the hills of Albyn; and the names of St. Columba and Iona were on every tongue from Rome to the utmost limits of Europe!

"This man, whom we have seen so passionate, so irritable, so warlike and vindictive, became little by little the most gentle, the humblest, the most tender of friends and fathers. It was he, the great head of the Caledonian Church, who, kneeling before the strangers who came to Iona, or before the monks returning from their work, took off their shoes, washed their feet, and after having washed them, respectfully kissed them. But charity was still stronger than humility in that transfig. ured soul. No necessity, spiritual or temporal, found him indifferent. He devoted himself to the solace of all infirmities, all misery, and pain, weeping often over those who did not weep for themselves.

"The work of transcription remained until his last day the occupation of his old age, as it had been the passion of hist

* "We are now," said Dr. Johnson, "treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions; whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion... Far from me and from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona. - Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides.

youth; it had such an attraction for him, and seemed to him. so essential to a knowledge of the truth, that, as we have already said, three hundred copies of the Holy Gospels, copied by his own hand, have been attributed to him."

But still Columba carried with him in his heart the great grief that made life for him a lengthened penance. "Far from having any prevision of the glory of lona, his soul," says Montalembert, "was still swayed by a sentiment which never abandoned him-regret for his lost country. All his life he retained for Ireland the passionate tenderness of an exile, a love which displayed itself in the songs which have been preserved to us, and which date perhaps from the first moment of his exile. 'Death in faultless Ireland is better than life without end in Albyn.' After this cry of despair follow strains more plaintive and submissive.

"But it was not only in these elegies, repeated and perhaps retouched by Irish bards and monks, but at each instant of his life, in season and out of season, that this love and passionate longing for his native country burst forth in words and musings; the narratives of his most trustworthy biographers are full of it. The most severe penance which he could have imagined for the guiltiest sinners who came to confess to him, was to impose upon them the same fate which he had voluntarily inflicted on himself-never to set foot again upon Irish soil! But when, instead of forbidding to sinners all access to that beloved isle, he had to smother his envy of those who had the right and happiness to go there at their pleasure, he dared scarcely trust himself to name its name; and when speaking to his guests, or to the monks who were to return to Ireland, he would only say to them, 'you will return to the country that you love.'"

At length there arrived an event for Columba full of excruciating trial-it became necessary for him to revisit Ireland! His presence was found to be imperatively required at the general assembly or convocation of the princes and prelates of the Irish nation, convented A. D. 573, by Hugh the Second. *

* Aedh (pronounced Aeh), son of Anmire the First

At this memorable assembly, known in history as the great Convention of Drumceat, the first meeting of the States of Ireland held since the abandonment of Tara, there were to be discussed, amongst other important subjects, two which were of deep and powerful interest to Columba: firstly, the relations between Ireland and the Argyle or Caledonian colony ; and secondly, the proposed decree for the abolition of the Bards.

The country now known as Scotland was, about the time of the Christian era, inhabited by a barbarous and warlike race called Picts. About the middle of the second century, when Ireland was known to the Romans as Scotia, an Irish chieftain, Carbri Riada (from whom were descended the Dalraids of Antrim), crossed over to the western shores of Alba or Albyn, and founded there a Dalaraidan or Milesian colony. The colonists had a hard time of it with their savage Pictish neighbors; yet they managed to hold their ground, though receiving very little aid or attention from the parent country, to which nevertheless they regularly paid tribute. At length, in the year 503, the neglected colony was utterly overwhelmed by the Picts, whereupon a powerful force of the Irish Dalraids, under the leadership of Leorn, Aengus, and Fergus, crossed over, invaded Albany, and gradually subjugating the Picts, reëstablished the colony on a basis which was the foundation eventually of the Scottish monarchy of all subsequent history. To the reestablished colony was given the name by which it was known long after, Scotia Minor; Ireland being called Scotia Major.

In the time of St. Columba, the colony, which so far had continuously been assessed by, and had duly paid its tribute to, the mother country, began to feel its competency to claim independence. Already it had selected and installed a king (whom St. Columba had formally consecrated), and now it sent to Ireland a demand to be exempted from further tribute. The Irish monarch resisted the demand, which, however, it was decided first to submit to a national assembly, at which the Scottish colony should be represented, and where it might plead its case as best it could. Many and obvious considerations pointed to St. Columba as the man of men to plead the