Shut in, and guarded, and fortified

By rocks that hardly a goat would climb,

All smoothed by tempest and bleached by time—

Such was the spot that the hermit chose,

From youth to age, for his life's repose.

There had he lived for forty years,

Trying, with penance and prayers and tears,

To make his soul like a polished stone

In God's great temple; for this alone

Was the one dear wish that his soul possessed,

And 't was little he cared for all the rest,

Nothing had changed since first he came;

The sky and the mountain were all the same,

Only a beech-tree, that there had grown

Ere ever he builded his cell of stone,

Had risen and spread to a stately grace,

And its shifting shadow filled half the place.

Many a winter its storms had spent,

Many a summer its sunshine lent

To the little cell, till it came to look

 Prev. P 13/198 next