mon in the suburbs of Troyes, called the L'Isle Germaine. This marshy place being part of the royal domains was full of lakes and weeds, and brush wood; but the holy man, by dint of great diligence, succeeded in draining off the water, and clearing the ground, and then he constructed his little cells and oratory.' The origin of Cisteaux was similar. Robert the Norman, Alberic, and Stephen Harding, an Englishman, after remaining some time in the wood of Molesme, where they had erected some huts in 1098, and observed strictly the Benedictine rule, removed with twenty-one brethren to a spot called Cisteaux, marshy and woody, and desert. Near the wood which surrounded it, was a little church for the convenience of the husbandmen who tilled the lands adjoining. Here was a rivulet from a source said to be bottomless, which flowed over in dry, and sunk in wet weather, like the fountain of the Carthusians. First they cut down the reeds, cleared away the trees, and then built huts with the boughs. By their labor the place became wholesome, and the ground was given to them by Viscount Raynald, and Odo, duke of Burgundy. The duke subsequently built a lodge for himself adjoining the monastery, to which he used to retire on the festivals. Henry, his second son, took the habit: the duke was buried in their church. They assumed the white under-habit in honor of the blessed Virgin. Few, however, came to join them until the arrival of St. Bernard in the seventh year.† In the ancient monastic diplomas and charters of Italy, there is notice of many woods, of which not a trace now exists. Cassino, Farfense, Subiaco, Vulturno, Bobbio, Pomposa, and Nonantula, were all constructed in wildernesses. The annals of Corby, in Saxony, recorded the foundation of that abbey in these words, "In the year 818 religion began to glow in a woody solitude."§ St. Boniface, writing to Pope Zachary, makes mention of Fulda in a way not more calculated to excite the envy of our contemporaries. "There is," he says, a woody place in a desert of vast solitude, in the midst of the nations to whom we have preached, where, having built a monastery, we have placed monks who live under the rule of St. Benedict, men of strict abstinence, content with the labor of their own hands. I have dedicated it in honor of the Holy Saviour, and in this place, with the consent of your piety, I have proposed to give my body, worn with old age, a little rest, and that it may lie here after death."|| When monks did choose their ground, it was often in " a desert peopled by the storms alone, save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, and the wolf tracks her there. How hideously its shapes are heaped around, rude, bare, and high, ghastly, and scarred, and riven." St. Balderic retiring into a solitude, followed a falcon, and fixed himself where it alighted, on a spot which was thence called Montfaucon. A white eagle similarly guided St. Thierri, chaplain of St. Remi. St. Gebehard, reflecting whether he should found the monastery of Admontes in * Desguerrois, Hist. du Diocèse de Troyes, p. 204. Angelo Manrique Cisterciens. An. I. Ap. Liebnitz Script. Brunsvic. illust. iii. Murat. Antiq. Ital. xxi. | S. Bon. Epist. cxli. a desert place far remote from men, in a valley on the river Anasus, fasted three days while deliberating. The solitude pleased, and the very horror of overhanging mountains surrounded it on all sides, seemed favorable to a life of heavenly contemplation. Nevertheless, the difficulty of approach to it, there being no track, discouraged him, till a certain man, by nature deaf and dumb, suddenly spoke in German, and said, "Begin, and God will finish it," and never afterwards spoke. The monastery was accordingly built there.* The severity of the climate in places to which St. Gall and other founders of the Alpine monasteries retired, may be learned from the liturgy of that abbey, in which we find these supplications, "Auræ ut temperiem te Christe rogamus."+"Ut nobis donetur aeris temperies," and "aeris blandos facilesque motus." St. Bernard, from the top of the tower of St. Bertin at St. Omer, marked the site for the new abbey of Clairmarais, and what land did he select? A spot amidst vast marshes and limpid lakes, and floating islands, which the old romance writers speak of as mysterious and horrible. "It is a cursed place, haunted by the demon," says one: "I do not know how many spectres resort there." The monks, however, placed there by St. Bernard, rendered it a delightful solitude, resounding day and night with hymns of love and gratitude to God. In fact, many of the ancient abbeys were built in spots which the blind population of heathen times had deemed ill-omened, many of them in forests, as Tacitus says, "consecrated by the old terror," where monks. alone would venture to remain. -" olim silvestribus horrida dumis. Jam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestes Dira loci jam tum silvam saxumque treme bant,"** Such was the deep narrow sequestered valley of Battuecas, so famed in the fabulous history of Spain, and which became so dear to religion from their convent of Carmelites, which stands amidst the steep rocks half buried in the groves, even still almost the only human habitation in that solitude, through which wanders a quantity of wild animals of all kinds. No longer on the lofty mountains in the centre of Italy, and in the deep woods that clothe them, is one directed to the horrid cave which opens its pestiferous jaws to breathe destruction; but, as on Mount Gargano, where stands the monastery of St. Michael, it is to a house of peace that pilgrims traverse them. Thanks to holy Benedict, no longer is an unhappy name associated with lands which the Allia waters,†† or with any of those natural vaults, such as are found on the shores of Cuma, like the vast cavern which heard the secrets of the horrid Sibyl, or that terrible cave in Salamis in which Euripides was said to have composed his tragedies. The hollow Germania Sacra, tom. ii. 179. Antiphona de S. Gallo Cod. 389. + Lytania Ratperti in Lect. Antiq. Canisii. § Lytania de S. Othmaro, | Berthond. ¶ Piers, Hist. des Abbayes de Watten et de Clairmarais. ** Æn. viii. 348. †† Æn. vii. 717. . Aul. Gell. xv. 20. rocks, with their clear sources, so by birds beloved, more beauteous than the Coycian cave, are the abodes now, not of nymphs and demons, but of hermits and holy fathers, who, like angels, sanctify them. Petrarch says, that they who behold the holy cave:n of St. Benedict, believe that they behold the threshold of paradise. To many hills on which monasteries stood we might apply the Virgilian line, and say of them before so crowned, "Tum neque nomen erat, nec honos, aut gloria monti.“* Such was Alvernia. In the land of Florence and diocese of Arezzo, between the Tyber and the Arno, to the south and west extend two lines of hills from the Apennines to the Alps. Over these rises an umbrageous mountain, which from the east towards the Tyber has an ascent of seven miles, but from the west towards the Corsalo the pilgrim has but three to mount. Upon this rises another mount, all of rock, yet beautiful to the eye, adorned with groves, and raising its head above all the circumjacent heights.† Here abounds the herb called Carolina, the prickly leaves of which defend the flower, so called from having been u-ed as a remedy against the plague by the army of Charlemagne, to whom it is said its secret properties were divinely revealed. Here are impenetrable caverns, abrupt and overhanging rocks, inaccessible crags, and profound gulfs, which excite horror. This is the seraphic mountain of St. Francis, whose convent is built into the side. Every where now are sacred grottos, chapels, oratories, and iniraculous vestiges of holy men and of the consolations of angels. The whole place excites the mind with a desire after holiness of life, and a renouncement of the deceits of the world, as if a divine voice were heard, saying, "Locus sanctus est; finem peccandi facito." The mountain was solemnly consecrated by seven bishops, those of Arezzo, Urbino, Florence, Assisi, Perugia, Tifernata, and Fiesoli, at which imposing ceremony St. Bonaventura was present. Where were the cells of that saint, and of St. Anthony of Padua, are now the chapels. The bounty of Cosmo de Medicis, and of his wife, Eleonore of Toledo, to this convent is attested by their arms, which are discovered on the buildings, sacred vestments, and choral books. O thou joyous simple family of Christ, dwelling in this desert, so free from wants, so cheerful, so engaging; happy is the man who can behold thee on the great day when thou dost so devourly commemorate the grace bestowed upon thy holy founder, when countless pilgrims throng thy courts, and kneel before thy altars. Other mountains, once associated with lugubrious traditions, became the chosen resting-place of world-worn men. Such was the mountain of the holy martyrs near Grenada, which became so dear to pilgrims. It is so called from the number of Christians who confessed Jesus Christ there during the persecution of the Moors. From the summit the view over the city and the famous plain, through which the * xii. 134. Wadding, An. Min. iv. river Genii wanders in many circuits, is said to be one of the most delicious in all Spain. Here on the spot which once received the tears and blood of so many martyrs, and where the Catholic kings had constructed a hermitage and church on the conquest of Grenada, to honor their memory, was built the monastery of barefooted Carmelites; underneath which, were vast caverns, where the Moors used to confine their captives, and where they inflicted tortures to prevail upon them to embrace the law of Mahomet.* A similar interest was attached to the site of the celebrated monastery of Cava, five miles from Salerno, at the foot of the lofty mountain of Fenestra, founded about 992 by St. Alferius, of the family of the Pappacarboni, of the blood of the Longobards, which derived its name from the caves in the metal mines of that mountain, into which the Christians fled from the fury of Genseric, king of the Vandals. That sombre mountainous desert of Ida too, which Homer animated, resounded with the songs of David, when in the third and fourth centuries it was inhabited by holy men, whose ruined cells and chapels can still be seen. The mountian tops to wanderers, over the ocean stream, in heathen and in Christain times, were associated with very different recollections. When Jason and the Argonauts sailed forward, borne along by the rapid wind, after passing the boundless land of the Bechirians, there appeared to them a bay, beyond which arose the topmost crags of Caucasus, to the sun's rays alone accessible. There Prometheus, with his limbs bound to the hard rock by brazen chains, continually fed with his liver, a ravenous eagle rushing upon him. That bird they saw at even from the mast-head, flying near the clouds, and heard his sharp scream. The sails he made flap with the rush of his mighty wings, for he had not the nature of an aerial bird, but such as became a monster so enormous. Then after a little pause, they heard the groaning voice of Prometheus having his entrails torn out; and the air resounded with his cries until they again perceived the bloodsmeared eagle, soaring back from the mountian. Such were not the sounds that came from mountians, when faith had covered them with the asylums of men delivered for ever from the worst of torturers. Then monasteries stood upon the rocks, whose pinnacles seemed sculptured in the sky, dear age after age to all who passed amidst the solitude of distant seas; for there instead of Promethean imprecations, arose continually the saintly orison, and there, instead of victims to celestial vengeance, dwelt convertites, having found ease for all the sorrows of their wounded conscience, and the sweet nourishment of peace with heaven; and oh, to use the poet's words, In the annals of the Carmelite order, it is related that St. Louis, passing in view of mount Carmel, was overtaken during the night by a furious tempest, that the sailors despaired of saving the vessel, that the king heard a bell tolling, and on expressing his astonishment, was told that it came from the solitary religious men who lived upon that mountain; on which he pledged himself to found a convent for them in this kingdom if he should escape shipwreck, in fulfilment of which vow, he established the Carmelites at Paris. The blessed transformation came on islands too, as that once held by Druids on the coast of Brittany, where navigators passing by used to hear with terror furious cries and the noise of barbaric cymbals. It would be long to enumerate the islands which became now holy, as Lindisfarne, Iona, Lerins, Lipara, and that on the north side of the bay of Dublin, called the eye of Ireland, where St. Nessan, in the sixth century, founded an abbey, in which was the copy of the four gospels that was held in such veneration, and Beg-Ery, on the coast of Wexford, where was the abbey founded in the fifth century by St. Ibar, which became celebrated for the sanctity and learning of the monks! Thus did the dreary sea behold houses of celestial peace within hearing of its surge. Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen above the illimitable plain, Morning on night, and night on morning rise, The inconvenience attending such situations, only furnishea occasions for the exercise of greater generosity towards the monks. Thus, as the island of Lipara was too small for nourishing cattle, Count Royes, who, with Robert Guiscard, on the expulsion of the Sarassans, had built there the monastery of St. Bartholomew for Benedictine monks, gave to it a farm in Sicily, pasture for cattle, lands for Islands in lakes and rivers, were culture, and a mountain for feeding swine.* Loch Ree, in Ireland, by reasons also esteemed fitting sites for such foundations. of the number of monks living in its islands where abbeys had been founded in an early age, was called "the holy lake." On almost all the islands in the numerous lakes of that country, as also on those in the river Shannon, there were monasteries; and so it was where skies were brighter and waters more pellucid, as Nonenworth in the Rhine, and L'Isle Barbe in the Saone can still bear witness. *Sicilia Sacra, 11. |