Lord of the Isles

“ The isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set. ”

“ But sailors, cast by strange winds upon those shores which they named the Prosperous Isles, and finding a happy people which had no gods, told how they should be happier still and know the gods and fight for the honour of the gods and leave their names writ large in histories and at the last die proclaiming the names of the gods. ”

“ But about the dawn dreams twitter and arise, and circling thrice around the Happy Isles set out again to find the world of men, then follow the souls of the sailors, as, at evening, with slow stroke of stately wings the heron follows behind the flight of multitudinous rooks; but the souls returning find awakening bodies and endure the toil of the day. ”

“ I had much upon my hands, for dear Helen was in great suffering; and so it fell out that Margaret was often with the Knight—who, indeed, is a noble and generous youth, very pure and innocent of heart—and oh, Paul, though it pierces my heart to say it, he loves her—and I think that she loves him too. It is a strange and terrible thing, this love! it is like the sword that the Lord Christ said that He came to bring on earth, for it divides loving households that were else at one together; and now I must say more—the maiden knew not before what love was ”

“ I will not promise, Lord, to yield my life to the service of men, for I love my ease too well, and I should not keep my word—so I offer my life freely into Thy hand, and let it avail that which it may avail. ”

“ For some centuries past men had been pushing eastward, and to west, vast lands lay unexplored, undreamt of, amongst them a little far-off island "set in a silver sea." Pytheas was the first explorer to bring the world news of the British Isles. ”

“ So this Isle, once called the Sacred Isle and also the Isle of Destiny, may find a destiny worthy of fulfilment: not to be a petty peasant republic, nor a miniature duplicate in life and aims of great material empires, but that its children out of their faith, which has never failed may realise this imemorial truth of man's inmost divinity, and in expressing it may ray the light over every land. Now, although a great literature and great thought may be part of our future, it ought not to be the essential part of our ideal. ”

“ As we read our island history there seems a ruddy emblazonry on every page, a hue shed from behind the visible, the soul dropping its red tears of fire over hopes for ever dissolving, noble ambitions for ever foiled. ”

“ Early in the 13th century, when Reginald of Man did homage to King John, we hear for the first time of English intervention in the affairs of Man. But it was into the hands of Scotland that the islands were ultimately to fall. During the whole of the Scandinavian period the isles were nominally under the suzerainty of the kings of Norway, but they only occasionally asserted it with any vigour. ”

“ When he was free of work, the boy loved to wander alone, and he would lie on the heather in the warm sun, with his face to the ground, drinking in the fragrant breath of the earth, and praying earnestly in his heart to the Lord, who had made the earth so fair and the sea so terrible. ”

“ Perhaps it is more like those shining Isles that the saints sought for, where the deep apple orchards are, and all the delights of Paradise. But you had to give up everything and get into a boat without oar or sails if you wanted to find Avalon or the Glassy Isle. And sometimes the saints could stand on the rocks and see those Islands far away in the midst of the sea, and smell the sweet odours and hear the bells ringing for the feast, when other people could see and hear nothing at all. ”

“ Thus the island was from the beginning a holy island. But zeal for God in their own country alone not being enough for their ardor, those men of God were early moved by the impulse of going abroad to spread the faith. Volumes might be written of their apostleship among barbarous tribes; we have room only for a few words.
They first went to the islands north of them, to the Hebrides, the Faroe Isles, and even Iceland, which they colonized before the Norwegian pirates landed there. Then they evangelized Scotland and the north of England ”

“ The Western Isles, and more especially that group lying south of the holy island of Iona, were at this time in a most prosperous condition. Together with a large tract of country on the northeast of Ireland, they formed a sort of naval empire, with the open sea as its centre. They were densely populated. The useful arts were carried to a degree of perfection unsurpassed in other European countries. ”

“ The relics of hermitages and stone basins are not the only signs of vanishing humanity to be found upon the isles. And, curious to say, that spot which of all others in settled communities is most animated, at the Enchanted Isles presents the most dreary of aspects. ”

“ It lies nearer the Continent or Main, than most of the other considerable American Isles; which Islands, as it were, guard it from the violence of the Winds, and great Atlantic Ocean, and render it fitter for the produce of the Manufacture and Trade of those parts, than any of them. ”

“ O fortunate Isles! too fair for human habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself — it will not sink into the earth—it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! ”

“ In the middle of the Irish Sea there is, as every one knows, an island which for many ages has had its own people, with their own language and laws, their own judges and governor, their own lords and kings, their own customs and superstitions, their own proverbs and saws, their own ballads and songs. ”

“ What means that longing for a better land far away in the east, entertained by the Marquesas islanders? The king of this island seems to have great power. He is the owner of all the land, and is the lord and master of all his subjects. He rules wisely, and has the affection of his people. ”

“ And David calls his carving "The Light of the World." At the top of it is a scroll, with the words thereon, "He shall send down from on high to fetch me, and shall take me out of many waters." And beneath is another scroll on which is graven, "Thou also shalt light my candle; the Lord my God shall make my darkness to be light."
The Waving of the Sword
The things that are set down here happened in the ancient days when there was sore fighting in the land; the king, who was an unjust man, fighting to maintain his realm, and the barons fighting for the law ”

“ Thus we gain an altogether fresh interest in the beautiful spots of our own islands, especially those of the wilder and more mountainous west, where the older inhabitants of the land lingered longest. Saxon conquest obliterated much in Eastern Britain, and changed more; but in the West of England, in Wales, in Scotland, and especially in legend-haunted Ireland, the hills and dales still keep memories of the ancient gods of the ancient race. ”

“ These are the islands whereto the souls of the sailors every night put in from all the world to rest from going up and down the seas, to behold again the vision of far-off intimate hills that lift their orchards high above the fields facing the sunlight, and for a while again to speak with the souls of old. ”

“ In the eyes of those to whom the past furnishes a perspective more fascinating even than the promise of the future, the little isle adjacent, which is itself a finely marked basaltic cone, rising over a thousand feet high and well called “Holy Island,” is even more worthy of the visits of the reflecting scholar. It holds an attraction even greater, in human interest, at least, than the wonders of geology, or the numerous witnesses to antiquity in the form of upreared stones. ”

“ The bay in which the Isles lay was quite deserted; the moorland came to the edge of the cliffs, and through a steep and rocky ravine, the sides of which were overgrown with ferns and low trees, all brushed landward by the fierce winds, a stream fell hoarsely to the sea, through deep rockpools. ”

“ You can walk now through the crowded city and never know it, for the wind from the heather will be about you [Pg 191] where you go; you can stand in the tumult of men and never hear them, for round you will be the silence of your own sea. That is the treasure of the Isle of Mist; the island has given you of its soul. You have found greater things already; you will find greater things yet again. But such as it is, it is the best gift which we of the fairy world have to give. ”

“ First, we have evidence that in those remote times when the northern half of the island had just become a home of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody regions of North America, and that its inhabitants were rude savages unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few curious arts which an after age forgot,—not devoid of a religion which at least indicated the immortality of the soul,—and much given to war. ”

“ So he turned up landward, bewailing the miss of us, but presently, before we had seen the last of him, was cheerful again and singing.
So we went on our way; and we also, we maidens, in our turn, saw those woeful images of the Isle of Queens and the Isle of Kings; and we came to the Isle of Nothing, and abode warily by our ferry, and so came away safe, and thus, as thou wottest, home to the castle to hear evil tidings of thee. ”

“ Lat., Fortunatae Insulae) , in Greek mythology a group of islands near the edge of the Western Ocean, peopled not by the dead, but by mortals upon whom the gods had conferred immortality. Like the islands of the Phaeacians in Homer (Od. viii.) or the Celtic Avalon and St Brendan’s island, the Isles of the Blest are represented as a land of perpetual summer and abundance of all good things. ”

“ We have also the curious fact of our outlying islands, such as the Shetland Isles, the Isle of Man, and the little Lundy Island, possessing each some peculiar forms which, certainly, do not exist on our principal island which has been so very thoroughly worked. ”

“ For the rest, they are but melancholy places, these Aran Isles of ours, as you and I know well, and the following pages have caught their full share—something, perhaps, more than their full share—of that gloom. That this is an artistic fault no one can doubt, yet there are times—are there not?—when it does not seem so very easy to exaggerate the amount of gloom which life is any day and every day quite willing to bestow. ”

“ An archipelago of fifty-six islands lies scattered over the water, with only half of them inhabited, but not all the rest habitable; if, like Sancho Panza, you are looking for an island, you will not find the isle of heart's desire here. ”

“ What is it that attracts strangers from every part of the world into this distant land, and has more than compensated a remote situation and a churlish soil, and given to our own Northern Isle a splendour unknown to the regions of the sun? What is it which has brought together this mighty assemblage, and united the ardent and the generous from every part of the world, from the Ural mountains to the banks of the Mississippi, on the shores of an island in the Atlantic? ”

“ Holy Island was perhaps a hundred yards long, and about half as many broad; it was covered with trees and a dense growth of rhododendrons; somewhere in the jungle was a ruined fragment of a chapel, smothered in ivy and briars, and in a little glade in the heart of the island there was a holy well. We landed, and it was obviously a sore humiliation to Philippa that not a sound was to be heard in the spell-bound silence of the island, save the cough of a heron on a tree-top. ”

“ Lifting up his voice, he invoked the Land of Ireland itself, a power higher than the gods it sheltered.
“I invoke the land of Eriu!
The shining, shining sea!
The fertile, fertile hill!
The wooded vale!
The river abundant, abundant in water!
The fishful, fishful lake!” In such strain runs the original incantation, one of those magic formulas whose power was held by ancient, and still is held by savage, races to reside in their exact consecrated wording rather than in their meaning. ”

“ Honorat, the Happy Isle (beata illa insula) , as it was once called, famous for its ancient monastery, that played so glorious a rôle in the religious history of Gaul. 1351These are the isles of Lérins, two gems of that collar of pearls thrown by God around the Mediterranean Sea, to quote St. Ambrose, where once those who would escape from the perilous charms of the world found refuge. ”

“ According to my belief, the British Islands were intended, by Him who formed them, to be one united nation, great and powerful in our little world; able to make itself respected, and to insist on peace to the farthest parts of the earth ”

“ Every thing there bore the stamp of former ages, as if the world had suddenly rolled back for several centuries; and no wonder, for the Island of the Seven Cities had been cut off from the rest of the world for several hundred years. On shore Don Fernando spent an agreeable evening at the court-house, and late at night with reluctance he re-entered the barge, to return to his vessel. ”

“ Said she who had spoken afore: Yea verily this is the Isle of Kings; but long ago are the kings dead, and yet they sit dead in the great hall of the castle yonder, as thou mayst see if thou, who art a man and a valiant warrior, durst follow up yon mountain path thereto; but we, weak women and little-hearted, durst not go anigh it; and we tremble when whiles a-nights cometh down thence the sound of clashing swords and clattering shields, and the cries of men in battle. But, praise be to the God of Love, nought cometh down from thence unto us. ”