But my heart was too full of its own emotions to feel interested in the
anchorites of the Abbey. The enthusiasm and self-denial of the early
monasteries had subsided into a profession; and at a later period their
lives, unlinked with those of their fellow-beings, had fruitlessly
evaporated within these cloisters, and left no trace behind. I felt no
regret as I stood upon their tombs, but only wondered, as I noted how
speedily Nature seizes on the empty dwellings and deserted abodes of
man, and how superior is the living architecture of shrubs and briers,
waving ivy, wall-flowers and creeping plants, throwing their mantle on
the ruined walls, to the cold symmetry of stones, or the lifeless
ornaments of the chiselled monuments of men.
There was now more sunshine, music, and perfume, more holy psalmody of
the winds and waters, of birds, and sonorous echoes of the lakes and
forests, beneath the crumbling pillars, dismantled nave, and shattered
roof of the empty Abbey, than there had been holy tapers, fumes of
incense and monotonous chants in the ceremonies and processions that
filled it night and day. Nature is the high priest, the noblest
decorator, the holiest poet and most inspired musician of God. The
young swallows in their nests below the broken cornice, greeting their
mother with their cheerful chirping; the sighing of the breeze, which
seems to bear to the unpeopled cloisters the sound of flapping sails,
the lament of the waves, and the dying notes of the fisherman's song;
the balmy emanations which now and then are wafted through the nave;
the flowers which shed their leaves upon the tombs, the waving of the
green drapery which clothes the walls; the sonorous and reverberated
echoes of the stranger's steps upon the vaults where sleep the
dead,--are all as full of piety, holy thoughts, and unbounded
aspirations, as was the monastery in its days of sacred splendor. Man
is no longer there, with all his miserable passions contracted by the
narrow pale in which they were confined, but not extinguished; but God
is there, never so plainly seen as in the works of Nature,--God whose
unshadowed splendor seems to re-enter once more these intellectual
graves, whose vaulted roofs no longer intercept the glorious sunshine
and the light of heaven.