t, what literature, or what life but
would gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness and
perpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without a
will that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done,
and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's.

The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of the
French fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which rings
with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriatic
littoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for the
dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord."

The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
sound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work of
the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is
principally 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heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world!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.

RUSHES AND REEDS

Taller than the grass and lower than the trees, there is another growth
that feels the implicit spring. It had been more abandoned to winter
than even the short grass shuddering under a wave of east wind, more than
the dumb trees. For the multitudes of sedges, rushes, canes, and reeds
were the appropriate lyre of the cold. On them the nimble winds played
their dry music. They were part of the winter. It looked through them
and spoke through them. They were spears and javelins in array to the
sound of the drums of the north.

The winter takes fuller possession of these things than of those that
stand solid. The sedges