valley, oak wood and
ilex grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike
in soft-descending, soaking rain. Far and near the landscape swims
in rain, and the hillsides send down torrents through their
watercourses.

The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent and
princely solidity. It has a fine inner court, with sumptuous
staircases of slabbed stone leading to the church. This public
portion of the edifice is both impressive and magnificent, without
sacrifice of religious severity to parade. We acknowledge a
successful compromise between the austerity of the order and the
grandeur befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of its
parent foundation. The church itself is a tolerable structure of the
Renaissance--costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaningless
Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in the mediocrity of art
adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro de' Medici. Expelled from
Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in the
Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this
marble monument--the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco di
San Gallo--to their relative. It is singularly stiff, ugly, out of
place--at once obtrusive and insignificant.

A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over the
convent--boys' school, refectory, printing press, lithographic
workshop, library, archives. We then returned to the church, from
which we passed to visit the most venerable and sacred portion of
the monastery. The cell of S. Benedict is being restored and painted
in fresco by the Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigid
process of re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chambered
and very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in the
massive superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artists
adorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen
pietism. S. Mauro's vision of his master's translation to
heaven--the ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and the
angels watching on the tower walls--might even be styled poetical.
But the decorative angels on the roof and other places, being
adapted from Egyptian art, have a strange, incongruous appearance.

Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes in
search of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and even
Monte Cassino was no excepti