and then the house occupied by the vast numbers of artisans and workmen attached to the monastery gardens too, and vineyards creeping up the mountain slopes, and beyond them fields of waving corn, and sheep speckling the green meadows, and far away boats busily plying on the lake and carrying goods and passengers--what a world it was of life and activity; yet how unlike the activity of a town! It was, in fact, not a town, but a house,--a family presided over by a father, whose members were all knit together in the bonds of common fraternity. I know not whether the spiritual or the social side of such a religious colony were most fitted to rivet the attention. Descend into the valley, and visit all these nurseries of useful toil, see the crowds of rude peasants transformed into intelligent artisans, and you will carry away the impression that the monks of St. Gall had found out the secret of creating a world of happy Christian factories. Enter their church and listen to the exquisite modulations of those chants and sequences peculiar to the abbey which boasted of possessing the most scientific school of music in all Europe; visit their scriptorium, their library, and their school, or the workshop where the monk Tutilo is putting the finishing touch to his wonderful copper images, and his fine altar frontals of gold and jewels, and you will think yourself in some intellectual and artistic academy. But look into the choir, and behold the hundred monks who form the community at their midnight office and you will forget everything, save the saintly aspect of those servants of God who shed abroad over the desert around them the good odour of Christ, and are the apostles of the provinces which own their gentle sway. You may quit the circuit of the abbey and plunge once more into the mountain region which rises beyond, but you will have to wander far before you find yourself beyond the reach of its softening, humanising influence. Here are distant cells and hermitages with their chapels, where the shepherds come for early mass; or it may be that there meets you, winding over the mountain paths of which they sing so sweetly,[96] going up and down among the hills into the thick forests and the rocky hollows, a procession of the monks carrying their relics, and followed by a peasant crowd. In the schools you may have been listening to lectures in the learned, and even in the Eastern tongues; but in the churches, and here among the mountains, you will hear these fine classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to a rude race, who before the monks came among them sacrificed to the Evil One, and worshipped stocks and stones.