I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 477

And why meditation among the Alps? He and his disciples might as easily have avoided the rest of mankind by shutting themselves into a penitentiary on a plain, or in whatever kind country they chanced to be born in, without danger to themselves of being buried by avalanches, or trouble to their venerating visitors in coming so far up hill.

Least of all I understand how they could pass their days of meditation without getting interested in plants and stones, whether they would or no; nor how they could go on writing books in scarlet and gold,-(for they were great scribes, and had a beautiful library,)-persisting for centuries in the same patterns, and never trying to draw a bird or a leaf rightly-until the days when books were illuminated no more for religion, but for luxury, and the amusement of sickly fancy.¹

4. Without endeavouring to explain any of these matters, I will try to set down, in this chapter, merely what I have found monks or nuns like, when by chance I was thrown into their company, and of what use they have been to me.

And first let me thank my dear Miss Edgeworth for the ideal character of Sister Frances, in her story of “Madame de Fleury,”² which, read over and over again through all my childhood, fixed in me the knowledge of what a good sister of charity can be, and for the most part is, in France; and, of late, I suppose in Germany and England.

But the first impression from life of the secluded Sister-hoods* was given me at the Convent of St. Michael, on

* Of the Brotherhoods, of course the first I knew were those of St. Bernard;³ but these were not secluded for their own spiritual welfare, any more than our coastguardsmen by the Goodwin sands; and are to be spoken of elsewhere,⁴ and in quite other relations to the modern world.

¹ [On the subject of Monasticism, see Vol. XXXIII. p. 101, and the other passages there referred to.]

² [One of the Tales of Fashionable Life; contained in vol. viii. of the collected edition of Miss Edgeworth’s Novels and Tales, 1825.]

³ [For Ruskin’s visits to the Hospice on the Great St. Bernard in 1835, see Vol. I. pp. 505 seq.]

⁴ [Probably this was to have been done in the planned but unwritten Ninth Part of Our Fathers have Told Us, devoted to “The Pastoral Forms of Catholicism” (Vol. XXXIII. p. 187).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]