ather got colder, and Clement's
heart got warmer, and despondency was rolling away; and by-and-by,
somehow or another, it was gone. He had outlived it.

It had come like a cloud, and it went like one.

And presently all was reversed; his cell seemed illuminated with joy.
His work pleased him; his prayers were full of unction; his psalms of
praise. Hosts of little birds followed their crimson leader, and flying
from snow, and a parish full of Cains, made friends one after another
with Abel; fast friends. And one keen frosty night as he sang the
praises of God to his tuneful psaltery, and his hollow cave rang forth
the holy psalmody upon the night, as if that cave itself was Tubal's
surrounding shell, or David's harp, he heard a clear whine, not
unmelodious; it became louder and less in tune. He peeped through
the chinks of his rude door, and there sat a great red wolf moaning
melodiously with his nose high in the air.

Clement was rejoiced. "My sins are going," he cried, "and the creatures
of God are owning me, one after another." And in a burst of enthusiasm
he struck up the laud:

"Praise Him all ye creatures of His!

"Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord."

And all the time he sang the wolf bayed at intervals.

But above all he seemed now to be drawing nearer to that celestial
intercourse which was the sign and the bliss of the true hermit; for he
had dreams about the saints and angels, so vivid, they were more like
visions. He saw bright figures clad in woven snow. They bent on him eyes
lovelier than those of the antelope's he had seen at Rome, and fanned
him with broad wings hued like the rainbow, and their gentle voices bade
him speed upon his course.

He had not long enjoyed this felicity when his dreams began to take
another and a strange complexion. He wandered with Fra Colonna over the
relics of antique nations, and the friar was lame and had a staff,
and this staff he waved over the mighty ruins, and were they Egyptian,
Greek, or Roman, straightway the temples and palaces, whose wrecks they
were, rose again like an exhalation, and were thronged with the famous
dead. Songsters that might have eclipsed both Apollo and his rival
poured forth their lays; women, god-like in form, and draped like
Minerva, swam round the marble courts in voluptuous but easy and
graceful dances. Here sculptors carved away amidst admiring pupils, and
forms of supernatural beauty grew out of Parian marble in a quarte