mits around
him dwelling and worshipping in caves, as they had done ages before in
Egypt and Syria; while he fixed, again and again, the site of his convent
and his minster in some secluded valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, like
Vale Crucis in North Wales. But his minster stood often not among rocks
only, but amid trees; in some clearing in the primeval forest, as Vale
Crucis was then. At least he could not pass from minster to minster,
from town to town, without journeying through long miles of forest. Do
you think that the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never haunted
his imagination as he built? He would have cut down ruthlessly, as his
predecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which Thor
and Odin had been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which still
darker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of Eastern
Europe. But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped in those
groves; and the glamour of them was upon him still. He peopled the wild
forest with demons and fairies: but that did not surely prevent his
feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening loneliness. His ancestors
had held the oaks for trees of God, even as the Jews held the Cedar, and
the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara pine is not only, botanists tell
us, the same as the Cedar of Lebanon: but its very name--the
Deodara--signifies nought else but "The tree of God."

His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God. It may be that
as the monk sat beneath their shade with his Bible on his knee, like good
St. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his ancestors were right.

To understand what sort of trees they were from which he got his
inspiration: you must look, not at an average English wood, perpetually
thinned out as the trees arrive at middle age. Still less must you look
at the pines, oaks, beeches, of an English park, where each tree has had
space to develop itself freely into a more or less rounded form. You
must not even look at the tropic forests. For there, from the immense
diversity of forms, twenty varieties of tree will grow beneath each
other, forming a close-packed heap of boughs and leaves, from the ground
to a hundred feet and more aloft.

You should look at the North American forests of social trees--especially
of pines and firs, where trees of one species, crowded together, and
competing with equal advantages for the air and light, form themselves
into