A white calm fell. The boat lay like a leaf on a silent pool. There was nothing between that dim wilderness and the vast sweeping blackness filled with quivering stars, but the coracle, that a wave could crush. At times, I doubt not, there must have been weaker brethren among these simple and devoted Culdees of Iona, though in Colum's own day there was probably none (unless it were Oran) who was not the visible outward shrine of a pure flame. Thinking of such an one, and not without furtive pagan sympathy, I wrote the other day these lines, which I may also add here as a further side-light upon that half-Pagan, half-Christian basis upon which the Columban Church of Iona stood. Balva the old monk I am called: when I was young, Balva Honeymouth. That was before Colum the White came to Iona in the West. She whom I loved was a woman whom I won out of the South. And I had a good heaven with my lips on hers and with breast to breast. Balva the old monk I am called: were it not for the fear That the soul of Colum the White would meet my soul in the Narrows That sever the living and dead, I would rise up from here, And go back to where men pray with spears and arrows. Balva the old monk I am called: ugh! ugh! the cold bell of the matins--'tis dawn! Sure it's a dream I have had that I was in a warm wood with the sun ashine, And that against me in the pleasant greenness was a soft fawn, And a voice that whispered "Balva Honeymouth, drink, I am thy wine!" As I write,[7] here on the hill-slope of Dûn-I, the sound of the furtive wave is as the sighing in a shell. I am alone between sea and sky, for there is no other on this bouldered height, nothing visible but a single blue shadow that slowly sails the hillside. The bleating of lambs and ewes, the lowing of kine, these come up from the Machar that lies between the west slopes and the shoreless sea to the west; these ascend as the very smoke of sound. All round the island there is a continuous breathing; deeper and more prolonged on the west, where the open sea is; but audible everywhere. The seals on Soa are even now putting their breasts against the running tide; for I see a flashing of fins here and there in patches at the north end of the Sound, and already from the ruddy granite shores of the Ross there is a congregation of seafowl--gannets and guillemots, skuas and herring-gulls, the long-necked northern diver, the tern, the cormorant. In the sunblaze, the waters of the Sound dance their blue bodies and swirl their flashing white hair o' foam; and, as I look, they seem to me like children of the wind and the sunshine, leaping and running in these flowing pastures, with a laughter as sweet against the ears as the voices of children at play.