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  So much elect intellect and strength of heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world!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.

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 and battered at its very verge, but from the flat coast and the narrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; and the stormy light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shifting with the buoyant hillocks and their restless line.