’Marban was no ordinary hermit; he was a sympathetic naturalist, a true poet, and his brother who came to see him, and whose visit gave rise to the colloquy, was a king.  I hope I am not wronging Marban, but the island is so beautiful that I cannot but think that he was attracted by its beauty and went there because he loved Nature as well as God.  His poem is full of charming observations of nature, of birds and beasts and trees, and it proves how very false the belief is that primitive man had no eyes to see the beauties of the forest and felt no interest in the habits of animals or of birds, but regarded them merely as food.  It pleases me to think of the hermit sitting under the walls of his church or by his cell writing the poem which has given me so much pleasure, including in it all the little lives that cams to visit him—­the birds and the beasts—­enumerating them as carefully as Wordsworth would, and loving them as tenderly.  Marban!  Could one find a more beautiful name for a hermit?  Guaire is the brother’s name.  Marban and King Guaire.  Now, imagine the two brothers meeting for a poetic disputation regarding the value of life, and each speaking from his different point of view!  True that Guaire’s point of view is only just indicated—­he listens to his brother, for a hermit’s view of life is more his own than a king’s.  It pleases me to think that the day the twain met to discourse of life and its mission was the counterpart of the day I spent on the island.  My day was full of drifting cloud and sunshine, and the lake lay like a mirror reflecting the red shadow of the island.  So you will understand that the reasons Marban gave for living there in preference to living the life of the world seemed valid, and I could not help peering into the bushes, trying to find a rowan-tree—­for he speaks of one.  The rowan is the mountain-ash.  I found several.  One tree was covered with red berries, and I broke off a branch and brought it home, thinking that perchance it might have come down to us from one planted by Marban’s hand.  Of blackthorns there are plenty.  The adjective he uses is “dusky.”  Could he have chosen a more appropriate one?  I thought, too, of “the clutch of eggs, the honey and the mast” that God sent him, of “the sweet apples and red whortleberries,” and of his dish of “strawberries of good taste and colour.”

’It is hard to give in an English translation an idea of the richness of the verse, heavily rhymed and winningly alliterated, but you will see that he enumerates the natural objects with skill.  The eternal summer—­the same in his day as in ours—­he speaks of as “a coloured mantle,” and he mentions “the fragrance of the woods.”  And seeing the crisp leaves—­for the summer was waning—­I repeated his phrase, “the summer’s coloured mantle,” and remembered: 

  “Swarms of bees and chafers, the little musicians of the world—­
  A gentle chorus.”

“The wren,” he says, “is an active songster among the hazel boughs.  Beautifully hooded birds, wood-peckers, fair white birds, herons, sea-gulls, come to visit me.”  There is no mournful music in his island; and as for loneliness, there is no such thing in