I have always had an especial fondness for islands. When, in earlier days, Fancy fashioned some favorite abode, it was often in the aspiration of Moore, “Oh! had we some green little Isle of our own!” I am inclined to think there is something in Nature to sanction this preference. Perhaps the safety of an insular situation from border inroad, and the wild foray, might have given it pre-eminence in feudal or barbarous times. A strange illusion seemed to linger around it, in days of yore: “We, islanders,” said Camden, “are lunares—or the moon’s men.”
The tuneful king of Israel considered the praise of the Creator incomplete, until “the multitude of the Isles,” should swell that chorus. The islands are required to “keep silence,” when an eloquent prophet was about to declare a message from Jehovah. The apostle, to whom the dread future unveiled itself, “was in the island that is called Patmos,” when he saw in a vision the “the heavens wrapped together like a scroll, and the dead, small and great, stand before God.”
Heathen mythology sang to her disciples of the “isles of the blessed.” Classic Greece fixed the birth-place of her deity of the seven-stringed lyre in wave-girdled Delphos, and bade her most beautiful goddess from the foam of the sea.
Modern Poetry has not forgotten to invoke the island-spirits. Shakspeare lifts the magic wand of Prospero in a strange, wild isle, full of
“Sweet sounds and airs that give delight, and hurt not.”
He makes another less lofty character propose “to sow the kernels of a broken islet in the sea, that they may bring forth more islands.” The patriotism of Milton beheld in his own native clime, the chief favorite of Neptune:
“this isle,
The greatest and the best of all the main,
He quarters to his blue-haired deities.”
The Bard of the Seasons still further glorified it, as the