pally a place of studies. So much elect intellect and strength of
heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True, the friars are not
doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair. These
"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing,
hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--upon
the Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, or
reluctantly jostling other men for places. They might be among the
involuntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof is
a discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the superfluous
activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by the
dwellers within such walls as these. The output--again a beautiful
word--of the age is lessened by this abstention. None the less hopes the
stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery
gates.

THE SEA WALL

A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright shadows of
grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick above
into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, with
its too many windows and too few walls, the city which of all capitals
takes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some other
attraction or aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at the
base, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the inexpressive peering
of windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area,"
and by the helpless hollows of shop-fronts.

I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wrought-
iron. A wall is the safeguard of simplicity. It lays a long level line
among the indefinite chances of the landscape. But never more majestic
than in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot upon
the rock, builds in the serried ilex-wood and builds out the wave. The
sea-wall is the wall at its best. And fine as it is on the strong coast,
it is beautiful on the weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a
northern beach.

That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that
passes away into shingle at its foot. It is at close quarters with the
winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the sky-line
of sea is jagged. Never from any height does the ocean-horizon show thus
broken