Until it becomes a tidal river, which does not happen till the huge pillar of smoke that announces Newcastle comes in sight, the Tyne in ordinary seasons is a broad and shallow stream, with occasional deep and quiet pools dreaming in shadowy places. Below Warden its banks are open on either side to the far-away hills, and it has but a bare, starved look among these level and almost naked shores. Yet it is a rich, fertile, and famous country, through which now flows this "water of Tyne." Hexham, renowned for its market-gardens, is close at hand. Its roofs peer out of a wide circle of trees, and above them all, massive and conspicuous, stands sentinel the broad square tower of the Abbey Church. "The heart of all England" is a designation which was long ago claimed for their town by the Hexham folk. Just as Boston is held to be the hub of the universe, so Hexham was declared to be the centre of our right little, tight little island. Hence radiated such Gospel light and such imperfect learning as illumined these wild northern parts in Saxon times. Mr. Green has said of St. Wilfred, whom he calls Wilfrith of York, that his life was made up of flights to Rome and returns to England, which is but a churlish description of a great career; for St. Wilfred, the most magnificent and wealthy ecclesiastic of his period, not only restored York and built the church at Ripon, but erected here at Hexham an abbey and a cathedral of which Richard, the Prior, who assisted to restore it from its ruins, wrote:--"It surpassed in the excellence of its architecture all the buildings of England; and, in truth, there was nothing like it at that time to be found on this side of the Alps." The time to which Prior Richard refers was the latter portion of the seventh century. Wilfred, who was trained at Lindisfarne, visited France and Italy in his youth, and came back full of great architectural ideas. There were then, it is probable, no stone churches in England. At any rate, the first five churches of stone were York, Lincoln, Ripon, Withern, and Hexham; of which Wilfred certainly built three. Never had bishop a vaster diocese. Wilfred, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Hexham, had supreme ecclesiastical control over a district which--during his lifetime, and when he was in misfortune--was divided by Theodore of Tarsus into the four bishoprics of York, Hexham, Withern, and Lindisfarne. Of Wilfred's cathedral of Hexham nothing remains but the underground oratory, built about 674. The church was fired by incursive Danes in 875. Three centuries later the canons of Hexham piously went to work to rebuild and restore; but then the unruly Scots made a raid into England, taking Hexham on their way, and not only destroyed the restored buildings, but slaughtered the townsfolk, and burned to death two hundred children whom they found at school.