I couldn’t help thinking that I never saw brawnier, wirier men than those young farmers who met Earl P— at his political meeting.
I remember being somewhat annoyed at having to start in a procession of gipsy vans, but glad when we got up the hill, and when Pea-blossom and Corn-flower gave them all the slip.
Then the splendid country we passed through; the blue sea away on our right; away to the left the everlasting hills! The long low shores of the Holy Isle flanked by its square-towered castle. It is high water while we pass, and Lindisfarne is wholly an island.
“Stay, coachman, stay; let us think; let us dream; let us imagine ourselves back in the days of long, long ago. Yonder island, my Jehu John, which is now so peacefully slumbering ’neath the midday sun, half shrouded in the blue mist of distance, its lordly castle only a shape, its priory now hidden from our view—
“‘The castle with its battled walls,
The ancient monastery’s halls,
Yon solemn, huge, and dark-red pile,
Placed on the margin of the isle.’
”—Have a history, my gentle Jehu, far more worthy of being listened to than any romance that has ever been conceived or penned.
“Aidan the Christian lived and laboured yonder; from his home in that lone, surf-beaten island scintillated, as from a star, the primitive rays of our religion of love.”
Jehu John (speaks): “Excuse me, sir, but that is all a kind o’ Greek to me.”
“Knowest thou not, my gentle John, that more than a thousand years ago that monastery was built there, that—
“‘In Saxon strength that abbey frowned
With massive arches broad and round,
That rose alternate row and row
On pond’rous columns short and low,
Built ere the art was known,
By pointed aisle and shafted stalk
The arcades of an alleyed walk
To emulate in stone.
On those deep walls the heathen Dane
Had poured his impious rage in vain.’