‘Partir, partir bisogna,
Dove commanderà il mio Sovrano.’
But Lamia got no further than those two lines; for our venerable host suddenly exclaimed, the colour mounting to his face, and the tears brimming in his eyes:
‘Stop! stop! Mi monta la fantasia.’ And he went on to tell us how he had not heard that strain for five-and-forty years, and that it used to be sung by one whose caprice had caused him to abandon the world and assume the habit of Saint Bruno.
On our journey homeward, the following morning, Lamia asked:
‘How would you translate the words the dear old Prior used last night, Mi monta la fantasia?’
‘They are not easily rendered into another tongue,’ said Veronica, ‘for they mean so much in the original. But when he said, “the fantasy mounts and seizes hold of me,” he doubtless meant that your voice suddenly made him feel all he had felt five-and-forty years ago.‘
‘O, how delightful!’ said Lamia. ‘Then I forced the Clausura, after all.’
‘It is a pity,’ said Veronica, whose sane nature and active temperament render her a little intolerant of monasticism in any form, ‘that you could not break it down altogether, and so make an end of it.’
‘And yet,’ said the Poet, who has rather more indulgence for the weaknesses of human nature, perhaps because he shares them more, ‘I doubt if we have done with the motives, many and various, that once engendered and still foster monasticism. The strong, the valiant, the sensible, require no shelter from the rough usage of the world. But, as in the days of savage militarism, so in these of an almost equally pitiless industrialism, terror, timidity, indolence, mysticism, love of meditation, longing for silence, and a certain passive piety, make men fly the market-place for the cloister. When Dante, exiled from Florence, appeared at the Convent in the Apennines, and was asked by the monks who he might be, did he not answer, “One who is in quest of peace”? There is no second Dante, but there are many exiles in this modern world, and I fear their number every day increases. As the struggle for existence waxes fiercer and fiercer, I think I hear them, too, exclaiming, Dona nobis pacem.‘