on the three shelves few, leaning different
ways. His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a
wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed: a bed all enclosed in
dark boards, a broad perpendicular board along the foot, reaching the
ceiling, a horizontal board at the side over which he got into bed,
another narrower one like it at the ceiling for fringe and curtain, and
another perpendicular one hiding the pillow, making the clean bed within
a very shady and cosy little den, on the wall of this den being another
smaller Christ and a little picture. On the perpendicular board at the
foot hung two white garments, and over a second chair at the bed-side
another: all very neat and holy. He was a large stern man, blond as
corn, but with some red, too, in his hairy beard; and appalling was the
significance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity of
those saffron cheeks. I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence for
this man; but I had it, certainly. Many of the others, it is clear, had
fled: but not he: and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross,
holding one real as the other--he alone among many. For Christianity was
an _elite_ religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing
from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within
their reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's,
it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.

It was my way to plant at the portal the big, carved chair from the
chancel on the hot days, and rest my soul, refusing to think of
anything, drowsing and smoking for hours. All down there in the plain
waved gardens of delicious fruit about the prolonged silver thread of
the river Isle, whose course winds loitering quite near the foot of the
monastery-slope. This slope dominates a tract of distance that is not
only vast, but looks immense, although the horizon is bounded by a
semicircle of low hills, rather too stiff and uniform for perfect
beauty; the interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed lands
which were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by
vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne,
orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all
embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the
village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played
there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's o