No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it, unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege.
Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of the monastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more than beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-house and garden.
The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin - the first of the dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, and backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a cleft high up among the hills of Wales.The brown habit is this, and these are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky.Just such a Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night.The same order of friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteen chapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine.
Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green over the blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing of smoke lies round the horizon.The country, rather thinly and languidly cultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines; the breath of pit and factory, out of sight, thickens the lower sky, and lies heavily over the sands of Dee.It leaves the upper blue clear and the head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady ray of the evening star.
The people scattered about are not mining people, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor.Their cottages are rather cabins;not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates have taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upon their edges.The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure to see.How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more than half the colour - over all the chocolate and all the blue - with which the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine and the bright grey of an English sky.
The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense - it is modern; and the friars look young in another - they are like their brothers of an earlier time.No one, except the journalists of yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint,"or "old world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the excursionists.
With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-farm.A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging the washed linen in the sun.A printing press, and a machine which slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the obscure impulses of a dog's heart -atoned for by long and self-conscious remorse - he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make doggerel of him.The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his editions hardly reaches.There is no disturbing renown to be got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills.Homeward, over the verge, from other valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth.
