blue gentians, hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots.  The house itself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to the mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble contemplations and soul-stirring thoughts.  If Mentone spoke to me of the poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediaeval monasticism—­of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, of silence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and changelessness of daily life.  Some precepts of the Imitatio came into my mind:  ’Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray or meditate, or work with diligence for the common needs.’  ’Praiseworthy is it for the religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem to shun, and keep his eyes from men.’  ’Sweet is the cell when it is often sought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its seclusion.’  Then I thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under sun and stars.  Then would they read or write, what long melodious hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, what flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut, what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness!  In such a hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among the Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts and birds, and preached them sermons.  Stretched for hours motionless on the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown peasant’s serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age.  So still he lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind and low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet, lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air.  There, too, in those long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the spirit of Nature was even as God’s Spirit, and he sang:  ’Laudato sia Dio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l’aire, e nuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo.’  Half the value of this hymn would be lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes and mountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract word like Pantheism.  Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of that brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon and stars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, and all creatures, are bound together with the soul of man.