he kind permission of the proprietors.

VEZELAY*

[126] As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, low-pitched
for France, above the cottages and willow-shaded streams of the place,
you might think the abbey church of Pontigny, the largest Cistercian
church now remaining, only a great farm-building. On a nearer view
there is something unpretending, something pleasantly English, in the
plain grey walls, pierced with long "lancet" windows, as if they
overlooked the lowlands of Essex, or the meadows of Kent or Berkshire,
the sort of country from which came those saintly exiles of our race
who made the cloisters of Pontigny famous, and one of whom, Saint
Edmund of Abingdon, Saint-Edme, still lies enshrined here. The country
which the sons of Saint Bernard choose for their abode is in fact but a
patch of scanty pasture-land in the midst of a heady wine-district.
Like its majestic Cluniac rivals, the church has its western portico,
elegant in structure but of comparatively humble [127] proportions,
under a plain roof of tiles, pent-wise. Within, a heavy coat of
white-wash seems befitting to the simple forms of the "Transition," or
quite earliest "Pointed," style, to its remarkable continence of
spirit, its uniformity, and cleanness of build. The long prospect of
nave and choir ends, however, with a sort of graceful smallness, in a
chevet of seven closely packed, narrow bays. It is like a nun's
church, or like a nun's coif.

The church of Pontigny, representative generally of the churches of the
Cistercian order, including some of the loveliest early English ones,
was in truth significant of a reaction, a reaction against monasticism
itself, as it had come to be in the order of Cluny, the genius of which
found its proper expression in the imperious, but half-barbaric,
splendours of the richest form of the Romanesque, the monastic style
pre-eminently, as we may still see it at La Charite-sur-Loire, at
Saint-Benoit, above all, on the hill of Vezelay. Saint Bernard, who
had lent his immense influence to the order of Citeaux by way of a
monastic reform, though he had a genius for hymns and was in other ways
an eminent religious poet, and though he gave new life to the expiring
romance of the crusades, was, as regards the visible world, much of a
Puritan. Was it he who, wrapt in thought upon the world unseen, walked
along the shores of Lake Leman without observing it?--the eternal snows
he might have taken for