The Argosy — page 316: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

About Norway. 297 whilst a railed partition up a narrow, quaintly-carved staircase might have secluded nuns at their devotions. In this little place, only a few feet square, one could stand and go back centuries in imagina- tion, to an age when men chanted their matins and their vespers, held their feasts and their fasts, and measured time not by events but by the rolling hours: with only their little quips and cranks, small quibbles and jealousies amongst themselves, to vary the endless monotony of their existence. ‘‘ The world. forgetting, by the world forgot.” It is a quiet and desolate enough place now; then it must have been the very embodiment of a living tomb: a death in life. And for that matter the monasteries of to-day, buried in those far-off —— > : IA yA Af pe = — be pane | \\\) HH} |" { | te rn » . > _— _ > . ~ X o / i . 7 ® ‘ S ‘ 7 a + ‘ ; \ = A 1) a 1 tr ) ~ ~ f/ 7 6 OF ii ON OUR WAY SOUTHWARD. solitudes, amidst the eternal silence of dark, gloomy forests or lonely mountain heights, are no better. It is all a living death. Go, for instance, to the Monastery of La Chartreuse. Watch a monk creep out of his cell with stealthy tread and disappear down the long cloisters until the far-off gloom hides him from view, whilst he goes on his way, it may be to perform some penance. See them all gliding out of their cells at midnight, a long, solemn, silent, mysterious, cowled procession, each carrying a lantern which obscures yet more the surrounding darkness and lights faintly their footsteps only : footsteps that make no sound in the long, cold, stone corridors, and find no echo in the distant arches. Watch them gliding into the dark chapel, each taking his seat and placing before him his lantern: all done as silently as if they were hooded ghosts: listen to the melancholy chant of the midnight mass, which sounds more like a requiem for the dead than the prayers and praises that should -animate the COM (C JOO Ss (CO)