But over that ancient England covered with its alternating fens and forests, and grimy Saxon hamlets, and Celtic companies of huts, there streams presently a new civilizing influence. It is in the shape of Christian monks[5] sent by Pope Gregory the Great, who land upon the island of Thanet near the Thames mouth (whereabout are now the bustling little watering places of Ramsgate and Margate), and march two by two--St. Augustine among them and towering head and shoulders above the rest--bearing silver crosses and singing litanies, up to the halls of Ethelbert--near to the very site where now stands, in those rich Kentish lands, the august and beautiful Cathedral of Canterbury. There, too, sprung up in those earlier centuries that Canterbury School, where letters were taught, and learned men congregated, and whence emerged that famous scholar--Aldhelm,[6] of whom the great King Alfred speaks admiringly; who not only knew his languages but could sing a song; a sort of early Saxon Sankey who beguiled wanderers into better ways by his homely rhythmic utterance. I think we may safely count this old Aldhelm, who had a strain of royal blood in him, as the first of English ballad-mongers. From the north of England, too, there was at almost the same date, another gleam of crosses, coming by way of Ireland and Iona, where St. Columba,[7] commemorated in one of Wordsworth’s Sonnets, had established a monastery. We have the good old Irish monk’s lament at leaving his home in Ireland for the northern wilderness; there is true Irish fervor in it:--“From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eyes when I turn to Erin--to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the clerks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle, and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.”