those men could not be esteemed happy in their great fortunes against whom God was so angry that he would shew his displeasure for a hundred years together." All this Jeremy Taylor says. How many weak and unstable men followed the change of the age with bitter regret and useless lamentations for what they lost and assisted to destroy! It is a curious passage in the Life of Herbert, by Izaac Walton, where he describes the imitation of midnight lauds which were kept up in the chapel at Mr. Ferrar's house, and where the honest Fisherman says, "It is fit to tell the reader that many of the clergy" (he means the new ministers)" that were more inclined to practical piety and devotion than to doubtful and needless disputations, did often come to Gidding Hall and assist in these watches by night." View the illustrious Goethe, as he describes himself, "wandering in the woods, exclaiming, Oh, that we might inhabit these deep solitudes, and sanctify them by contemplation, and live apart from the world! Where else can we more honour the Deity than in these rustic temples, where there is need of no image? What greater homage can we render to him, than that which arises from the very bottom of our hearts after we have communed with nature?" Hear a young soldier, a pupil of the moderns, describe his visit to the convent, which is built at the top of the Cintra mountain, near Lisbon. A monk received him at the gate, and conducted him over the building. "It is secluded, utterly secluded from the world; yet here the eye may range over the vast Atlantic, far as the strength of mortal vision permits, or may rest on lovely vales and dark bosomed glens far beneath. The ear too may catch on the one side the hoarse voice of the rising storm; or may listen on the other to those pleasing and sweet sounds which speak of rural occupation and of rural happiness. Oh, I can imagine many cases where the calm of a retired monastery would afford consolation to the wounded spirit!" Such were the feelings of Milton amidst the embowered lawns of Vallombrosa, of Gray in the solitude of the Chartreuse, of Johnson on the sea-beaten rock of Iona. To poets, indeed, these blessed institutions have been always dear. There was a charm 1 Recollections of the Peninsula. even in the very names of convents. Take only those in Champagne, Val-secret, Sept-Fontaines, Belle-Eaux, Clairvaux. How could it be otherwise, since these religious scenes instantly recall what must always excite the imagination, innocence and contemplation, holy ecstacies, the misfortunes of illustrious men, and lives freed from all base passion and vulgar interest? and also among these austere thoughts-what has not escaped the notice of one who eloquently describes them-the remembrance sometimes of a romantic love, highly poetical, as being accompanied with ideas of sorrow and absence, and religion which gave elevation to sentiment, purity to passion, and seraphic wings, and the hope of an everlasting reunion! For these hermits and monks were not ready to return to the world, and to their human passions, as soon as the world smiled on them and their passions met with their former object, according to the profane and impious fictions which, on account of the sweetness of verse, have passed with the moderns for a poetical and true picture of the gentle hermit of the dale. The holy and innocent muse would not have delighted in these "comfortable" and worldly conclusions; but in the real monk and hermit she found her true children. Dante fixes upon a holy hermit of Florence, Piero Pettingno, as one whose prayers were effectual: Were it not The hermit Piero, touched with charity, In his devout oraisons thought on me!! He had himself spent some time in the hermitage of Pietro Damiano, whom he introduces with such beauty in the xxi. Canto of Paradise: The stony ridge of Catria, at whose foot a cell Is sacred to the lonely eremite, And fertile, which that cloister once was used When mentioning St. Francis and Ascesi, he says, Let none who speak Of that place say Ascesi; for its name 1 Purg, xiii. Carey. Were lamely so delivered; but the East, To call things rightly, be it henceforth styled. He beholds with joy in Paradise, Bernard, Egidius, Sylvester, St. Buonaventura, Hugues of St. Victor, Pietro Mangiadore, John XXI., Anselm, Bede, Richard, Sigebert, Isidore, Peter Lombard, Calabria's Abbot Joachim, Friar Thomas, Pietro Damiano St. Benedict, Macarius, and Romoaldo; And their brethren, who their steps refrained Petrarch speaks with reverence of monks, calling them "the holy and simple friends of Christ." He dates many of his letters from the Carthusian monastery at Milan, where he spent a summer. When his brother became a monk of the Chartreuse, at Montleux, he went to see him, and thus describes his visit: "My wishes are accomplished. I have at length arrived at what I have so long desired to behold. I have been in Paradise. I have seen angels of heaven in human bodies. Happy family of Jesus Christ! What raptures have I not felt in contemplating this sacred hermitage, this religious temple, which resounds with celestial harmony! I never spent so short a day or night. I came to look for one brother, and I found an hundred." Of the Order of St. Francis he says, "I have such an affection for this Order on account of its founder, that I fancy I belong to it." This attachment of poets was natural. They would have loved monks had they no other claim to poetic esteem but their love of nature and of solitude. 66 Oh, what a goodly thing it is," cries Caussin, "to talk face to face with those great forests which are born with the world, to discourse with the murmur of waters and the warbling of birds in the sweetness of solitude!"? "Believe me, upon my own experience," said St. Bernard to those whom he invited into his Order, "you will find more in the woods than in books; the forests and rocks will teach you what you cannot learn of the greatest masters." I like this better than what Socrates said: 7à dévòpa οὐδέν μ' ἐθέλει διδάσκειν. It was in solitary meditation on the sea-shore that St. Justin Martyr had that affecting 2 Holy Court. Famil. Epist. x. 12. 3 Plato, Phædrus. meeting with the old sage, whom the Count of Stolberg piously believes to have been an angel. This union of the poetic and the devout feeling was displayed in great lustre by Father Luis de Leon, whom a modern writer1 has described as being a holy man, a sublime Platonist, and an admirable poet. It was in his cloister that he composed what follows: Oh, happy, happy he, who flies Far from the noisy world away, The silence of the secret road, That leads the soul to virtue and to God. O streams, and shades, and hills on high, To fly, and be at rest; Thus from the world's tempestuous sea, Be mine the holy calm of night, Soft sleep and dreams serenely gay, Far from the sternly frowning eye The warbling birds shall bid me wake Like the sad shapes that hover still Round him that hangs upon another's will. Again in his Noche Serena, where he sings of the stars, Who that has seen these splendours roll, And pass the gulf that yawns between ? "O solitudo beata," cries another monk, "ô ereme, mors vitiorum, vita virtutum, te lex et prophetæ mirantur, et quicumque ad perfectionem venerunt, per te in Paradisum introierunt; ô beata vita solitaria et contemplativa; 1 Edinburgh Review, No. 80. quid ultra de te loquar? Ipse Dei Filius, Salvator et Magister noster, exemplum dedit nobis, fugiens in desertum et manens in solitudine."1 The story which Eusebius Nieremberg relates from Johannes Major leaves us in doubt which most to admire, the poet or the saint. A certain monk being at matins with the other religious of his monastery, and coming to that verse of the Psalm, "A thousand years in the presence of God are but as yesterday," he began to imagine with himself how it was possible; and remaining in the choir, as his manner was, after the end of matins, to finish his devotions, he humbly besought God to grant him the true understanding of that place. After a time he perceived a little bird in the choir that was flying up and down before him, and by little and little, with her melodious singing, insensibly she drew him out of the church into a wood not far off, where, perching herself upon a bough, she for a short time, as it seemed to him, continued her music, to the unspeakable delight of the monk, and then flew away, leaving him sad and pensive. Finding that she came no more, he returned home, thinking it to be about tierce of the same day; but coming to the convent, he found the gate by which he was accustomed to enter closed up, and another opened in a different place. The reader need not be told the rest: the monk had been absent for 300 years. "If the music of a little bird," concludes the monk, "did so transport him, what will be the music of angels! what the clear vision of God!"2 In Ysaie le triste we read how one clear moonlight evening, when a certain hermit had retired to his devotions, and was kneeling before the altar, his attention was distracted by the sound of delightful and unearthly music, which he heard at a distance in the forest. What is more affecting still, because true history, one night while watching in prayer on the mountains, near his flock, according to his custom, St. Cuthbert had a distinct intimation of the soul of St. Aidan being carried up to heaven by angels, at the very instant when that holy man departed in the isle of Lindisfarne. Who that enjoyed any spark of imagination, and any perception of beauty, but must love the re2 Temporal and Eternal. Pia Desideria, lib. ii. p. 187. |