The "Pillar-Saints."

These people were also called "Stylites" (Greek, stylos, a column) and "Air-Martyrs," and were a very remarkable class of ascetics, living chiefly in Syria, who, with a view to separating themselves more completely from the earth and their fellow-men, took up their abode on the tops of pillars, upon which they remained during the rest of their lives.

The earliest and most celebrated, called Simeon the Stylite, had been a monk, and had lived in the beginning of the fifth century in extreme seclusion.

Finally he withdrew to a place forty miles from Antioch, where he built a pillar, on the top of which he took up his abode, with his neck loaded with chains. From this pillar he removed to several others in succession, each higher than the preceding one, until he attained a height of sixty feet. He died on this last pillar, A.D. 460, aged seventy-two years.

Simeon the Stylite had many followers, the most celebrated of whom was named Daniel: he erected his pillar on the shores of the Bosphorus, four miles from the city of Constantinople, and maintained his mode of life for thirty-three years, in a most trying climate, sometimes being covered with snow and ice. He lived until the year 494.

In Syria there were many "Pillar-Saints;" but in the West, Daniel was the solitary representative.

Tennyson has written a poem called "St. Simeon Stylites," which is in brief the story of the saint, his philosophy, his impulses, and his hopes, as told by himself:--