like a dove; then would I flee away and be at rest!" and so have
found, in the contemplation of the wide ocean, a substitute at least
for the contemplation of those Eastern deserts which seemed the
proper home for the solitary and meditative philosopher.

For indeed in no northern country can such situations be found for
the monastic cell as can be found in those great deserts which
stretch from Syria to Arabia, from Arabia to Egypt, from Egypt to
Africa properly so called. Here and there a northern hermit found,
as Hilarion found, a fitting home by the seaside, on some lonely
island or storm-beat rock, like St. Cuthbert, off the coast of
Northumberland; like St. Rule, on his rock at St. Andrew's; and St.
Columba, with his ever-venerable company of missionaries, on Iona.
But inland, the fens and the forests were foul, unwholesome,
depressing, the haunts of fever, ague, delirium, as St. Guthlac
found at Crowland, and St. Godric at Finkhale. {130} The vast pine-
woods which clothe the Alpine slopes, the vast forests of beech and
oak which then spread over France and Germany, gave in time shelter
to many a holy hermit. But their gloom, their unwholesomeness, and
the severity of the climate, produced in them, as in most northern
ascetics, a temper of mind more melancholy, and often more fierce;
more given to passionate devotion, but more given also to dark
superstition and cruel self-torture, than the genial climate of the
desert produced in old monks of the East. When we think of St.
Antony upon his mountain, we must not picture to ourselves, unless
we, too, have been in the East, such a mountain as we have ever
seen. We must not think of a brown northern moorland, sad, savage,
storm-swept, snow-buried, save in the brief and uncertain summer
months. We must not picture to ourselves an Alp, with thundering
avalanches, roaring torrents, fierce alternations of heat and cold,