seclusion.' Then I
thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows
looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under
sun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long melodious
hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or
would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, what
flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut,
what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for
silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering
galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds
and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such a
hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among
the Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts
and birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionless
on the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown
peasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ
crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So still
he lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind
and low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet,
lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in
those long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the
spirit of Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia
Dio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate
sole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e
nuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would
be lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes and
mountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract word
like Pantheism. Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of that
brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon and
stars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, and
all creatures, are bound together with the soul of man.

Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo
was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation
of the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt
the aesthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they
could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and
attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terri