hat of a little
office in New York, and a desk, and rows of empty seats; and
another Irishman, lecturing to those empty seats . . . . but to
all humanity, really . . . . from the ranks of which his
companions should come to him presently; he would hold back the
hosts of darkness alone, waiting for their coming. And I cannot
think of this latter picture but it seems to me as if:

Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime,
The hero time, spacious and girt with gold,
For he had heard this earth was stained with crime.

With loud hoof-thunder, clangor, ring and rhyme,
With chariot-wheels flame-trailing where they rolled,
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.

I saw his eyes, how darkening, how sublime,
With what impatient pity and power ensouled;
(For he had heard this earth was stained with crime!)

Song on his lips--I heard the chant and chime.
The stars themselves danced to in days of old:--
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.

Love sped him on to out-speed the steeds of Time:
No bliss for him, and this world left a-cold,
Which, he had heard, was stained with grief and crime.

Here in this Iron Age's gloom and grime
The Ford of Time, the waiting years, to hold,
Cuculain came . . . . and from the Golden prime
Brought light to save this world grown dark with crime....

Well; from the schools of Findian and his disciples missionaries
soon began to go out over Europe. To preach Christianity, yes;
but distinctly as apostles of civilization as well. Columba left
Ireland to found his college at Iona in 563; and from Iona,
Aidan presently went into Northumbria of the Saxons, to found his
college at Lindisfarne. Northumbria was Christianized by these
Irishmen; and there, under their auspices, Anglo-Saxon culture
was born. In Whitby, one of their foundations, Caedmon arose to
start the poetry: a pupil of Irish teachers. At the other end
of England, Augustine from Rome had Christianized Kent; but no
culture came in or spread over England from Augustine and Kent
and Rome; Northumbria was the source of it all. You have only
to compare _Beowulf,_ the epic the Saxons brought with them from
the continent, with the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf, or with
such poems as _The Phoenix,_ to see how Irishism tinged the minds
of these Saxon pupils of Irish teachers with, as Stopford Brooke
says, "a