school
Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.

* * * * *

"From the high window, I beheld the scene
On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,--
The mountains and the valley in the sheen
Of the bright sun,--and stood as one amazed.

* * * * *

"The conflict of the Present and the Past,
The ideal and the actual in our life,
As on a field of battle held me fast,
Where this world and the next world were at strife."

The monastery of Monte Cassino entertains, as its guests, for dinner or
for a night, all gentlemen who visit it; but there is an alms box on the
ancient gate into which the guest is supposed to place whatever
contribution he pleases for the poor of the place. The Italian
government, in 1866, declared this monastery to be a "Monumento
Nazionale," and it is now a famous ecclesiastical school with some two
hundred students and a resplendent faculty of fifty learned monks under
the direction of the Abbot. Some of the most celebrated prelates in
Europe have been educated at Monte Cassino.

Quite near Monte Cassino, as Longfellow depicts in his lines, is Monte
Aquino, a picturesque hillside where the "Doctor Angelicus," Thomas
Aquinas, was born (in 1224), the son of Count Landulf, in the Castel
Roccasecca. He was educated in the monastery, and one finds himself
recalling here these lines of Thomas William Parsons, entitled "Turning
from Darwin to Thomas Aquinas:"--

"Unless in thought with thee I often live,
Angelic doctor! life seems poor to me.
What are these bounties, if they only be
Such boon as farmers to their servants give?
That I am fed, and that mine oxen thrive,
That my lambs fatten, that mine hours are free--
These ask my nightly thanks on bended knee;
And I do thank Him who hath blest my hive,
And made content my herd, my flock, my bee.
But, Father! nobler things I ask from Thee.
Fishes have sunshine, worms have everything!
Are we but apes? Oh! give me, God, to know
I am death's master; not a scaffolding,
But a true temple where Christ's word could grow."

It was at Aquinum, too, at the foot of Monte Aquino, Juvenal was born.
Near the peaks of Monte Cassino and Monte Aquino is that of Monte Cairo,
five thousand five hundred feet high, from whose summit one of the
finest views of all southern Europe is attained. The Gulf