Columcille is the first example in the saddened page of Irish history of the exiled Gael grieving for his native land and refusing to be comforted, and as such he has become the very type and embodiment of Irish fate and Irish character. The flag in bleak Gartan, upon which he was born, is worn thin and bare by the hands and feet of pious pilgrims, and "the poor emigrants who are about to quit Donegal for ever, come and sleep on that flag the night before their departure from Derry. Columcille himself was an exile, and they fondly hope that sleeping on the spot where he was born will help them to bear with lighter heart the heavy burden of the exile's sorrows."[19] He is the prototype of the millions of Irish exiles in after ages-- "Ruined exiles, restless, roaming, Longing for their fatherland,"[20] and the extraordinary deep roots which his life and poetry have struck into the soil of the North was strikingly evidenced this very year (1898) by the wonderful celebration of his centenary at Gartan, at which many thousands of people, who had travelled all night over the surrounding mountains, were present, and where it was felt to be so incongruous that the life of such a great Irish patriot, prince, and poet, in the diocese, too, of an O'Donnell, should be celebrated in English, that--probably for the first time in this century--Irish poems were read and Irish speeches made, even by the Cardinal-Primate and the Bishop of the diocese. Of Columcille's life on the craggy little island of Iona, of his splendid labours in converting the Picts, and of the monastery which he established, and which, occupied by Irish monks, virtually rendered Iona an Irish island for the next six hundred years, there is no need to speak here, for these things belong rather to ecclesiastical than to literary history. Columcille himself was an unwearied scribe, and delighted in poetry. Ample provision was made for the multiplication of books in all the monasteries which he founded, and his Irish life tells us that he himself wrote "three hundred gifted, lasting, illuminated, noble books." The life in the Book of Lismore tells us that he once went to Clonmacnois with a hymn he had made for St. Ciaran, 'for he made abundant praises for God's household, as said the poet, "Noble, thrice fifty, nobler than every apostle, The number of miracles [of poems] are as grass, Some in Latin, which was beguiling, Others in Gaelic, fair the tale."'