fell upon his knees and prayed to Mary that he might receive his
sight again. This boon was granted; but the revelation which had
come to him in blindness was not withdrawn. Meanwhile the hall of
disputation was crowded with an expectant audience. Bernardo rose
from his knees, made his entry, and ascended the chair; but instead
of the scholastic subtleties he had designed to treat, he pronounced
the old text, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

Afterwards, attended by two noble comrades, Patrizio Patrizzi and
Ambrogio Piccolomini, he went forth into the wilderness. For the
human soul, at strife with strange experience, betakes itself
instinctively to solitude. Not only prophets of Israel, saints of
the Thebaid, and founders of religions in the mystic East have done
so; even the Greek Menander recognised, although he sneered at, the
phenomenon. 'The desert, they say, is the place for discoveries.'
For the mediaeval mind it had peculiar attractions. The wilderness
these comrades chose was Accona, a doleful place, hemmed in with
earthen precipices, some fifteen miles to the south of Siena. Of his
vast possessions Bernardo retained but this--

The lonesome lodge,
That stood so low in a lonely glen.

The rest of his substance he abandoned to the poor. This was in
1313, the very year of the Emperor Henry VII.'s death at
Buonconvento, which is a little walled town between Siena and the
desert of Accona. Whether Bernardo's retirement was in any way due
to the extinction of immediate hope for the Ghibelline party by this
event, we do not gather from his legend. That, as is natural, refers
his action wholly to the operation of divine grace. Yet we may
remember how a more illustrious refugee, the singer of the 'Divine
Comedy,' betook himself upon the same occasion to the lonely convent
of Fonte Avellana on the Alps of Catria, and meditated there the
cantos of his Purgatory. While Bernardo Tolomei was founding the
Order of Monte Oliveto, Dante penned his letter to the cardinals of
Italy: _Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena populo: facta est quasi
vidua domina gentium_.

Bernardo and his friends hollowed with their own hands grottos in
the rock, and strewed their stone beds with withered
chestnut-leaves. For S. Scolastica, the sister of S. Benedict, they
built a little chapel. Their food was wild fruit, and their drink
the water of the brook. Through the day they delved, for it was in
their mind to turn