There Was Not A Sign
Of Man's Hand In All The Prospect; And Indeed Not A Trace Of His Passage,
Save where generation after generation had walked in twisted footpaths,
in and out among the beeches, and up and down
Upon the channelled slopes.
The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and
fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I drew a long breath. It
was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for
the human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my
boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of
twopence every day of my life.
But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white
statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the
traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward, and
pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my
secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.
I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a
Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
on me from head to foot - slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For
there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my
childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler - enchanting
prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a
county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough,
was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like any
spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his contention
with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull. He
might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all the lively
parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the farmer's harrow.
I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a
person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I
doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence.
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