certain imaginative passion, a love of natural beauty,
and a reckless wildness curiously mingled with an almost
scientific devotion to metrical form."

Ireland meanwhile was the heart of a regular circulation of
culture. Students poured in from abroad, drawn by the fame of
her learning; we have a poem in praise of generous Ireland from
an Anglo-Saxon prince who spent his exile there in study. Irish
teachers were at the court of Charlemagne; Irish teachers
missionarized Austria and Germany. When the Norsemen discovered
Iceland, they found Irish books there; probably Irish scholars
as well, for it has been noted (by Matthew Arnold) that the
Icelandic sagas, unlike any other Pre-Christian Teutonic
literature, bear strong traces of the Celtic quality of Style.
They had their schools everywhere. You hear of an Irish bishop
of Tarentum in the latter part of the seventh century; and a
hundred years later, of an Irish bishop of Salzburg in Austria.
This was Virgil--in Irish, Fergil, I imagine a native name of
Salzburg: a really noteworthy man. He taught, _at that time,_
that the world is a globe, and with people living at the
antipodes; for which teaching he was called to order by the
Pope: but we do not hear of his retracting. Last and greatest
of them all was Johannes Scotus Erigena, who died in 882: a very
bright particular star, and perhaps the one of the largest
magnitude between the Neo-Platonists and the great mystics of
later times, who came long after the new manvantara had dawned.
He is not to be classed with the Scholastics; he never
subordinated his philosophy to theology; but approached the
problems of existence from a high, sane, and Theosophic
standpoint: an independent and illuminated thinker. He taught
at the court of Charles the Bald of France; and was invited to
Oxford by Alfred in 877, and died abbot of Malmesbury five years
later,--having in his time propounded many tough nuts of
propositions for churchmen to crack and digest if they could.
As, that authority should be derived from reason, and not, as
they thought, vice versa; and that "damnation was simply the
consciousness of having failed to fulfill the divine purpose,"--
and not, as their pet theory was, a matter of high temperature of
eternal duration. The following are quotations from his work _De
Divisione Naturae;_ I take them from M. de Jubainville's _Irish
Mythological Cycle,_ where they are given as summing up Erigena's
philosoph