Among the former the Archbishop of Ravenna; among the latter Pope Victor the Ninth.He told him too, with grim delight, of their multifarious austerities, and how each hermit set himself to find where he was weakest, and attacked himself without mercy or remission till there, even there, he was strongest.And how seven times in the twenty-four hours, in thunder, rain, or snow, by daylight, twilight, moonlight, or torchlight, the solitaries flocked from distant points, over rugged precipitous ways, to worship in the convent church; at matins, at prime, tierce, ***te, nones, vespers, and compline.He even, under eager questioning, described to him the persons of famous anchorites he had sung the Psalter and prayed with there; the only intercourse their vows allowed, except with special permission.Moncata, Duke of Moncata and Cardova, and Hidalgo of Spain, who in the flower of his youth had retired thither from the pomps, vanities, and pleasures of the world; Father John Baptist of Novara, who had led armies to battle, but was now a private soldier of Christ; Cornelius, Samuel, and Sylvanus.This last, when the great Duchess de' Medici obtained the Pope's leave, hitherto refused, to visit Camaldoli, went down and met her at the first wooden cross, and there, surrounded as she was with courtiers and flatterers, remonstrated with her, and persuaded her, and warned her, not to profane that holy mountain, where no woman for so many centuries had placed her foot; and she,awed by the place and the man, retreated with all her captains, soldiers, courtiers, and pages from that one hoary hermit.At Basle Clement found fresh materials, especially with respect to German and English anchorites; and he had even prepared a "Catena Eremitarum" from the year of our Lord 250, when Paul of Thebes commenced his ninety years of solitude, down to the year 1470.He called them Angelorum amici et animalium, i.e.
FRIENDS OF ANGELS AND ANIMALS.
Thus, though in those days he never thought to be a recluse, the road was paved, so to speak; and when the dying hermit of Gouda blessed the citadel of Solitude, where he had fought the good fight and won it, and invited him to take up the breast-plate of faith that now fell off his own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: "Heaven itself led my foot hither to this end." It struck him, too, as no small coincidence that his patron, St.Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a cuirassier of the solitary cell.
As soon as he was reconciled to Ghysbrecht Van Swieten, he went eagerly to his abode, praying Heaven it might not have been already occupied in these three days.The fear was not vain; these famous dens never wanted a human tenant long.He found the rude stone door ajar; then he made sure he was too late; he opened the door and went softly in.No; the cell was vacant, and there were the hermit's great ivory crucifix, his pens, ink, seeds, and, memento mori, a skull; his cilice of hair, and another of bristles; his well-worn sheepskin pelisse and hood; his hammer, chisel, and psaltery, etc.Men and women had passed that way, but none had ventured to intrude, far less to steal.Faith and simplicity had guarded that keyless door more securely than the houses of the laity were defended by their gates like a modern gaol, and think iron bars at every window, and the gentry by moat, bastion, chevaux de frise, and portcullis.
As soon as Clement was fairly in the cell there was a loud flap, and a flutter, and down came a great brown owl from a corner, and whirled out of the window, driving the air cold on Clement's face, He started and shuddered.
Was this seeming owl something diabolical? trying to deter him from his soul's good? On second thoughts, might it not be some good spirit the hermit had employed to keep the cell for him, perhaps the hermit himself? Finally he concluded that it was just an owl, and that he would try and make friends with it.
He kneeled down and inaugurated his new life with prayer.
Clement had not only an earthly passion to quell, the power of which made him tremble for his eternal weal, but he had a penance to do for having given way to ire, his besetting sin, and cursed his own brothers.
He looked round this roomy cell furnished with so many comforts, and compared it with the pictures in his mind of the hideous place, eremus in eremo, a desert in a desert, where holy Jerome, hermit, and the Plutarch of hermits, had wrestled with sickness, temptation, and despair four mortal years; and with the inaccessible and thorny niche, a hole in a precipice, where the boy hermit Benedict buried himself, and lived three years on the pittance the good monk Romanus could spare him from his scanty commons, and subdivided that mouthful with his friend, a raven;and the hollow tree of his patron St.Bavon; and the earthly purgatory at Fribourg, where lived a nameless saint in a horrid cavern, his eyes chilled with perpetual gloom, and his ears stunned with an eternal waterfall; and the pillar on which St.
Simeon Stylita existed forty-five years; and the destina, or stone box, of St.Dunstan, where, like Hilarion in his bulrush hive, sepulchro potius quam domu, he could scarce sit, stand, or lie;and the living tombs, sealed with lead, of Thais, and Christina, and other recluses; and the damp dungeon of St.Alred.These and scores more of the dismal dens in which true hermits had worn out their wasted bodies on the rock, and the rock under their sleeping bodies, and their praying knees, all came into his mind, and he said to himself, "This sweet retreat is for safety of the soul;but what for penance Jesu aid me against faults to come; and for the fault I rue, face of man I will not see for a twelvemonth and a day." He had famous precedents in his eye even for this last and unusual severity.In fact the original hermit of this very cell was clearly under the same vow.Hence the two apertures, through which he was spoken to, and replied.