though less fair by far, remain. It
is to these Southampton looks to-day, south and east, as of old over
how many thousand miles of blue water.

CHAPTER XVIII

BEAULIEU AND CHRISTCHURCH

While I was in Southampton, I made up my mind to visit a place which I
had all my life desired to see, but which I had never yet set eyes
upon, I mean Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest. To this end I set out
early one morning, by steamboat, across Southampton Water, and landed
at Hythe, whence I had only to cross the eastern part of Beaulieu
Heath, a walk of some five miles, to find myself where I would be.

The day was fair, the tide at the flood; in the woods, across the
water, I could see where Netley Abbey, another Cistercian house,
younger than Beaulieu, once lifted up its voice in ceaseless praise of
God, the Maker of all that beauty in which it stood, scarcely spoiled
even now by the amazing energy of the modern world. It was then with a
light heart that I set out by a byway under Furze Down, and so across
the open heath, coming down at last through the woods to the ruins of
the abbey and the river of Beaulieu.

There can be no more delicious spot in the world. St Bernard loved the
valleys as St Benedict the hills, and as St Bernard was the refounder
of the Cistercian Order to which Beaulieu belonged, it, like Waverley,
Tintern, Netley, and a hundred others in England, was set in one of
those delicious vales in which I think England is richer than any other
country, and which here, in England of my heart, seem to demand rather
our worship than our praise.

Beaulieu Abbey had always interested me. In the first place it was one
of the greatest, though not the earliest, houses in England of the
Cistercian Order, that reform of the Benedictines begun as William of
Malmesbury bears witness by an Englishman, Stephen Harding, sometime a
monk of Sherborne. And then it was the only religious house within the
confines of the New Forest. It seems that in the year 1204, just a year
after he had given the manor of Faringdon in Berkshire to St Mary of
Citeaux, and established there a small house of Cistercian monks, King
John founded this great monastery of St Mary of Beaulieu for the same
Order, making provision for not less than thirty brethren, and giving
it Faringdon for a cell. John endowed the house with some six manors
and several churches, gave it a golden chalice, and many cattle, as
well as corn and wine and money, and