Meanwhile Alcuin, who had been master to most of these illustrious men, ceased not to cherish the hope that he might be suffered to return to his native land. “The searcher of hearts knows,” he writes, “that I neither came thither, nor do I continue here for the love of gold, but only for the necessities of the Church.” Like a true Englishman his heart clung to his old home, to the memory of his quiet cell at York, where he had studied Horace and Homer, undisturbed by other sound than the waving of the branches as they were shaken by the genial morning breeze, a sound which, he says, did but stir his mind the more to meditation. The flowery meadows and murmuring streams of England, the smiling garden of his monastery full of its May apple blossoms or its July roses, and the abundance of birds singing in the Yorkshire woods, all these find a place in the sweet verses in which the English exile paints the beloved scenes in the midst of which he had passed his childish days;[87] and all the brilliancy of Charles’s court could not compensate to his mind for the loss of home. In 790 he was, therefore, permitted to revisit England, but two years later he was recalled by urgent messages from the emperor, who desired that he should attend the Council of Frankfort held to condemn the heresy of Elipandus. Alcuin felt himself obliged to obey the summons, but he did not bid farewell to York without testifying the regret with which he tore himself from its peaceful retirement. “I am yours in life and in death,” he writes to his brethren, “and it may be that God will have pity on me, and suffer that you should bury in his old age, him whom in his infancy you brought up and nourished.” Charlemagne, however, having regained possession of his favourite scholar, was not to be induced a second time to give him up; the utmost that poor Alcuin could obtain was permission to retire from the court to some monastery within the Frankish dominions. Fulda was too far distant from the royal residence, and the death of Ithier, abbot of St. Martin’s of Tours, in 796, enabled the emperor to appoint Alcuin as his successor.