Beloved is Raphoe the pure,
Beloved the fertile Drumhome,
Beloved are Sords and Kells!
But sweeter and fairer to me
The salt sea where the sea-gulls cry
When I come to Derry from far,
It is sweeter and dearer to me —
Sweeter to me."^81
In 563, the forty-second year of his age, Columba prompted by a passion for travelling and
a zeal for the spread of Christianity,^82 sailed with twelve fellow-apostles to the West of Scotland,
possibly on invitation of the provincial king, to whom he was related by blood. He was presented
with the island of Hy, commonly called Iona,^83 near the Western coast of Scotland about fifty miles
West from Oban. It is an inhospitable island, three miles and a half long and a mile and a half broad,
partly cultivated, partly covered with hill pasture, retired dells, morass and rocks, now in possession
of the Duke of Argyll, numbering about three hundred Protestant inhabitants, an Established
Presbyterian Church, and a Free Church. The neighboring island of Staffa, though smaller and
uninhabited, is more interesting to the ordinary tourist, and its Fingal’s Cave is one of the most
wonderful specimens of the architectural skill of nature; it looks like a Gothic cathedral, 66 feet
high, 42 feet broad, and 227 feet long, consisting of majestic basalt columns, an arched roof, and
an open portal towards the ocean, which dashes in and out in a constant succession of waves,
sounding solemn anthems in this unique temple of nature. Columba and his fellow-monks must
have passed it on their missionary wanderings; but they were too much taken up with heaven to
look upon the wonders of the earth, and the cave remained comparatively unknown to the world
till 1772. Those islands wore the same aspect in the sixth century as now, with the exception of the
woods, which have disappeared. Walter Scott (in the "Lord of the Isles") has thrown the charm of
his poetry over the Hebridean archipelago, from which proceeded the Christianization of Scotland.^84
By the labors of Columba and his successors, Iona has become one of the most venerable
and interesting spots in the history of Christian missions. It was a light-house in the darkness of
heathenism. We can form no adequate conception of the self-denying zeal of those heroic
missionaries of the extreme North, who, in a forbidding climate and exposed to robbers and wild
beasts, devoted their lives to the conversion of savages. Columba and his friends left no monuments(^81) Montalembert, III. 112. This poem strikes the key-note of father Prout’s more musical "Bells of Shandon which sound
so grand on the river Lee."
(^82) "Pro Christo peregrinare volens," says Adamnan (p. 108), who knows nothing of his excommunication and exile
from Ireland in consequence of a great battle. And yet it is difficult to account for this tradition. In one of the Irish Keltic poems
ascribed to Columba, he laments to have been driven from Erin by his own fault and in consequence of the blood shed in his
battles. Montalembert, III. 145.
(^83) This is not an adaptation to Columba’s Hebrew name (Neander), but a corruption of Ii-shona, i.e. the Holy Island
(from Ii, the Keltic name for island, and hona or shona, sacred). So Dr. Lindsay Alexander and Cunningham. But Reeves (l.c.
Introd., p. cxxx.) regards Ioua as the genuine form, which is the feminine adjective of Iou (to be pronounced like the English
Yeo). The island has borne no fewer than thirty names.
(^84) "No two objects of interest," says the Duke of Argyll (Iona, p. 1) "could be more absolutely dissimilar in kind than
the two neighboring islands, Staffa and Iona:—Iona dear to Christendom for more than a thousand years;—Staffa known to the
scientific and the curious only since the close of the last century. Nothing but an accident of geography could unite their names.
The number of those who can thoroughly understand and enjoy them both is probably very small."