Under The Violets
Under the violets blue and sweet,
Where low the willow droops and weeps
Where children tread with timid feet
When twilight o'er the forest creeps
She sleeps—my little darling sleeps.
Breathe low and soft, O wind! breathe low
Where so much loveliness is laid;
Pour out thy heart in strains of woe,
O bird! that in the willow's shade
Sing'st till the stars do pale and fade.
It may be that to other eyes,
As in the happy days of old,
The sun doth every morning rise
O'er mountain summits tipped with gold,
And set where sapphire seas are rolled;
But I am so hedged round with woe,
The glory I no more can see.
O weary heart that throbbest so!
Thou hast but this one wish—to be
A little dust beneath the tree.
I would thou hadst thy wish to-day,
And we were lying side by side
With her who took our life away
That heavy day whereon she died—
O grave! I would thy gates were wide!
From The Lamp.
An Irish Saint. [Footnote 240]
[Footnote 240: Montalembert's Monks of the West.]
It is consoling in these gloomy days to think of the time when Ireland was the Island of Saints, and gloried in the patronage of St. Patrick, St. Bridget, and St. Columbkill.
It is to a foreigner that we owe the biography of St. Columbkill—named "Columba" from the Dove of Peace, and "kill," from the many cells or monasteries that he founded. He was descended, says Montalembert, from one of those noble races in Ireland whose origin is lost in the night of ages—the Nialls or O'Donnells of Tirconnel, who were monarchs of Ireland from the sixth to the twelfth century. The child was instructed in religion by the priest who had baptized him, and the legends tell of angels who watched over him from his birth; and they say that he asked familiarly of his guardian angel if all the angels were as bright and young as himself. From the house of the priest he was sent to the monastery of St. Frinan at Clonard, where he studied and labored like the rest, and, though a prince, he ground the corn they ate. One of his companions, afterward a saint, was angry at the influence which Columba naturally possessed over the rest; but an angel appeared to him, and showed him the hatchet of his father, the carpenter, bidding him remember that he had only left his tools, but that Columba left a throne to enter the monastery. Clonard, says Montalembert, was vast as the monastic cities of the Thebais, and 3000 Irish students learnt there from the "Master of Saints." Among the crowds who came to learn was an aged bard, who was a Christian. He asked St. Frinan to teach him, in return for his verse, the art of cultivating the soil. Columba was a poet, and studied with the bard. One day a young girl, pursued by a robber, was murdered at their feet, and Columba foretold his death, and was renowned through the island as a saint. He was ordained a priest in 546, and became, when scarcely twenty-five, the founder of monasteries, of which thirty-seven are reckoned in Ireland alone. The most ancient of these was in the forest of Durrow, or the Field of Oaks, where a cross and well yet bear the name of Columba. It stood in Clenmalire, now in King's county; and the noble monastery, as Bede calls it, became the mother of many others; so that Dermach as well as Hy became nurseries for the hundred monasteries founded by Columba. It has been said that St. Patrick had kindled such a flame of devotion that the saints were not satisfied with monastic life without retiring to the solitude of the surrounding forests, and there, under the canopy of the vast oaks, which had for ages possessed the wilderness, they found a more silent and solemn cloister. Such had been the monastery of St. Bridget at Kildare, and such was Durrow; and in the forest of Calgachus, in his native country, Columba built Derry, in a deep bay on the sea which separates Ireland from Scotland. There he dwelt, and he would not permit one of the oaks to be felled unless it was injured by age or storms, and then it was used as fuel for the stranger or the poor. Here he wrote poems, of which, says Montalembert, only the echo has reached us. The following verses might be written by his disciples, but they are in the most ancient Irish dialect, and perhaps convey the thoughts, it not the words, of Columba: