ent, giving
no heed to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild disorder, or,
the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a wave of the sea,
and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand. Whatever the outcome,
both sides thought of the wild surge of will and valor in that hour as
the crowning event of their lives.

Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and religious
schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less fervor, to
invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the northern Ards;
at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland sea; at Saul, where the
first Messenger won his first convert; at Devenish Island amid the
waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in the plain of Louth; at
Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the
oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the central marshes, and many another ancient
seat of learning, the way of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness.
Latin had been taught since the early days of the Message; the native
tongue of Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems
of St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils were
taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome. Nor were
the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the Augustans and
the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish schools; and to
these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks, more especially--as was
natural--the Greek Fathers, the religious philosophers, and those who
embodied the thought and controversies of the early Christian centuries.
To Greek, Hebrew was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were
known in their proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of
Uatac was pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his
island school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of
the Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the east
of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of Iona in the
northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and secular, as well as
Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks. The learned man discusses
the astronomical sys