Few, of course, were like S. Francis.  Probably no monk of San Romolo was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation of the Divine Spirit inherent in the world.  Still fewer can have felt the aesthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely.  It was as much as they could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended to the concerns each of his own soul.  A terrible selfishness, if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence.  Why, then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed themselves in scenes so beautiful?  Why rose the Camaldolis and Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of Engelbergs,—­always the eyries of Nature’s lovers, men smitten with the loveliness of earth?  There is surely some meaning in these poetic stations.

Here is a sentence of the Imitatio which throws some light upon the hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life in studying death:  ’If thy heart were right, then would every creature be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine.  There is no creature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness of God.’  With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra Angelico and S. Francis.  To men like them the mountain valleys and the skies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance.  Though they reasoned ‘de conditione humanae miseriae,’ and ’de contemptu mundi,’ yet the whole world was a pageant of God’s glory, a testimony to His goodness.  Their chastened senses, pure hearts, and simple wills were as wings by which they soared above the things of earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with every other creature in the symphony of praise.  To them, as to Blake, the sun was no mere blazing disc or ball, but ’an innumerable company of the heavenly host singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty."’ To them the winds were brothers, and the streams were sisters—­brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethren in common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by vows of holiness.  Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle; they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things were ever present, and as clear as day.  Yet did they not forget that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the smallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations.  We who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affections more on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the world, and did not write about its landscapes,