ion
of the manor-house leads into it. The place is merely a small, square
plot of ground, damp, shady, and overgrown with long grass. An old and
elaborately carved stone cross stands in it; and about this appear the
graves of the nuns, marked by plain slate tablets. But even here, the
mystery which hangs darkly over the Carmelite household does not
clear--the seclusion that has hidden the living in the Convent, is but
the forerunner of the secrecy that veils from us on the tombstone the
history of the dead. The saint's name once assumed by the nun, and the
short yet beautiful supplication of the Roman Church for the repose of
the soul of the departed, form the only inscriptions that appear over
the graves.

This is all--all of the lives, all of the deaths of the sisterhood at
Lanhearne that we can ever know! The remainder must be conjecture. We
have but the bare stern outline that has been already drawn--who shall
venture, even in imagination, to colour and complete the picture which
it darkly, yet plainly, indicates?

Even if we only endeavour to image to ourselves the externals of the
life which those massy walls keep secret, what have we to speculate on?
Nothing but the day that in winter and summer, in sunshine and in storm,
brings with it year after year, to young and to old alike, the same
monotony of action and the same monotony of repose--the turning door in
the wall (sole indication to those within, that there is a world
without), moved in silence, ever at the same stated hour, by invisible
hands--the prayer and penance in the chapel choir, always a solitude to
its occupants, however many of their fellow-creatures may be standing
beneath it--the short hours of exercise amid high garden walls, which
shut out everything but the distant sky. Beyond this, what remains but
that utter vacancy where even thought ends; that utter gloom in which
the brightest fancy must cease to shine?

Should we try to look deeper than the surface; to strip the inner life
of the convent of all its mysteries and coverings, and anatomising it
inch by inch, search it through down to the very heart? Should we pry
into the dread and secret processes by which, among these women, one
human emotion after another may be suffering, first ossification, then
death? No!--this is a task which is beyond our power; an investigation
which, of our own knowledge, we cannot be certain of pursuing aright. We
may imagine grief that does not exist, remors