Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity,
Mourning for her child at home.”

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage.  The poetical “Life of St. Patrick,” too, is full of fine, wild, natural imagery.  The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic foot-print on a rock from which he sprang into heaven.  The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy.  But in the prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations.  And again, when Patrick is described, as the after apostle, raising the dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings.  And so in many ways the freshness and individuality is lost with time.  The larger saints swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were supplied by an ever ready imagination; and, like the stock of good works laid up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any defect was to be supplied.  So it was that, after the first impulse, the progressive fire of a saint rolled on like a snow-ball down a mountain-side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend, appropriate or inappropriate, sometimes real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.

One more illustration—­one which shall serve as evidence of what the really greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as possible or probable, and which they could relate (on what evidence we do not know) as really ascertained facts.  We remember something of St. Artselm:  both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably the ablest man of his time alive in Europe.  Here is a story which he tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran.  The saint with thirty of his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless pagan prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears of the prince himself.  Things took their natural course.  Disobedience provoked punishment.  A guard of soldiers was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated.  The scene of the execution was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves and the wild birds.

“But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the church in the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by divine providence to preserve the bodies of his saints from profanation.  The trunk of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head, and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them and buried them, and last of all buried himself.”