that he would
try and make friends with it.

He kneeled down and inaugurated his new life with prayer.

Clement had not only an earthly passion to quell, the power of which
made him tremble for his eternal weal, but he had a penance to do for
having given way to ire, his besetting sin, and cursed his own brothers.

He looked round this roomy cell furnished with so many comforts, and
compared it with the pictures in his mind of the hideous place, eremus
in eremo, a desert in a desert, where holy Jerome, hermit, and the
Plutarch of hermits, had wrestled with sickness, temptation, and despair
four mortal years; and with the inaccessible and thorny niche, a hole
in a precipice, where the boy hermit Benedict buried himself, and lived
three years on the pittance the good monk Romanus could spare him from
his scanty commons, and subdivided that mouthful with his friend, a
raven; and the hollow tree of his patron St. Bavon; and the earthly
purgatory at Fribourg, where lived a nameless saint in a horrid cavern,
his eyes chilled with perpetual gloom, and his ears stunned with an
eternal waterfall; and the pillar on which St. Simeon Stylita existed
forty-five years; and the destina, or stone box, of St. Dunstan, where,
like Hilarion in his bulrush hive, sepulchro potius quam domu, he could
scarce sit, stand, or lie; and the living tombs, sealed with lead, of
Thais, and Christina, and other recluses; and the damp dungeon of St.
Alred. These and scores more of the dismal dens in which true hermits
had worn out their wasted bodies on the rock, and the rock under their
sleeping bodies, and their praying knees, all came into his mind, and he
said to himself, "This sweet retreat is for safety of the soul; but what
for penance Jesu aid me against faults to come; and for the fault I rue,
face of man I will not see for a twelvemonth and a day." He had famous
precedents in his eye even for this last and unusual severity. In fact
the original hermit of this very cell was clearly under the same vow.
Hence the two apertures, through which he was spoken to, and replied.

Adopting, in other respects, the uniform rule of hermits and anchorites,
he divided his day into the seven offices, ignoring the petty
accidents of light and dark, creations both of Him to whom he prayed so
unceasingly. He learned the psalter by heart, and in all the intervals
of devotion, not occupied by broken slumbers, he worked hard with his
hands. No article of the her