along the shores, seeing Castle Cara and Castle Burke as I passed;
but Church Island is nearly eight miles from here, and I don't know if I
should have been man enough to pull the fisherman's boat so far, so I
put the gray horse into the shafts and went round by road.

'Church Island lies in a bay under a rocky shore, and the farmer who
cuts the grass there in the summer-time has a boat to bring away the
hay. It was delightful to step into it, and as the oars chimed I said to
myself, "I have Marban's poem in my pocket--and will read it walking up
the little path leading from his cell to his church." The lake was like
a sheet of blue glass, and the island lay yellow and red in it. As we
rowed, seeking a landing-place under the tall trees that grow along the
shores, the smell of autumn leaves mingled with the freshness of the
water. We rowed up a beautiful little inlet overhung with bushes. The
quay is at the end of it, and on getting out of the boat, I asked the
boatman to point out to me what remained of Marban's Church. He led me
across the island--a large one, the largest in the lake--not less than
seven acres or nine, and no doubt some parts of it were once cultivated
by Marban. Of his church, however, very little remains--only one piece
of wall, and we had great difficulty in seeing it, for it is now
surrounded by a dense thicket. The little pathway leading from his cell
to the church still exists; it is almost the same as he left it--a
little overgrown, that is all.

'Marban was no ordinary hermit; he was a sympathetic naturalist, a true
poet, and his brother who came to see him, and whose visit gave rise to
the colloquy, was a king. I hope I am not wronging Marban, but the
island is so beautiful that I cannot but think that he was attracted by
its beauty and went there because he loved Nature as well as God. His
poem is full of charming observations of nature, of birds and beasts and
trees, and it proves how very false the belief is that primitive man had
no eyes to see the beauties of the forest and felt no interest in the
habits of animals or of birds, but regarded them merely as food. It
pleases me to think of the hermit sitting under the walls of his church
or by his cell writing the poem which has given me so much pleasure,
including in it all the little lives that cams to visit him--the birds
and the beasts--enumerating them as carefully as Wordsworth would, and
loving them as tenderly. Marban! Could one fi