standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods,
heard YE that whistle?'

At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun
came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. 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