the "process," and for
oblivion.

Doubtless this abandonment of hopes so large at once and so cheap costs
the artist something; nay, it implies an acceptance of the inevitable
that is not less than heroic. And the reward has been in the singular
and manifest increase of vitality in this work which is done for so short
a life. Fittingly indeed does life reward the acceptance of death,
inasmuch as to die is to have been alive. There is a real circulation of
blood-quick use, brief beauty, abolition, recreation. The honour of the
day is for ever the honour of that day. It goes into the treasury of
things that are honestly and--completely ended and done with. And when
can so happy a thing be said of a lifeless oil-painting? Who of the wise
would hesitate? To be honourable for one day--one named and dated day,
separate from all other days of the ages--or to be for an unlimited time
tedious?

AT MONASTERY GATES

No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it,
unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege.
Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of the
monastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more than
beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-house
and garden.

The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of the
dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, and
backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a
cleft high up among the hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, and
these are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and
loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky. Just such a
Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final
crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the
encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night. The same order
of friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the
Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteen
chapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine.

Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green over
the blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing of
smoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidly
cultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines;
the breath of pit and factory, out of s