“Poor and wretched!” you answer. “But when once everybody is convinced that heaven is a large gasometer, and when we have turned all the world into a small gasometer, and can drive round it by steam, and in forty minutes be back again where we were,—nobody will be poor or wretched any more. Sixty pounds on the square inch,—can anybody be wretched under that general application of high pressure?” (Assisi, 15th April.) Good wiseacres, yes; it seems to me, at least, more than probable: but if not, and you all find yourselves rich and merry, with steam legs and steel hearts, I am well assured there will be found yet room, where your telescopes have not reached, nor can,—grind you their lenses ever so finely,—room for the quiet souls, who choose for their part, poverty, with light and peace. I am writing at a narrow window, which looks out on some broken tiles and a dead wall. A wall dead in the profoundest sense, you wiseacres would think it. Six hundred years old, and as strong as when it was built, and paying nobody any interest, and still less commission, on the cost of repair. Both sides of the street, or pathway rather,—it is not nine feet wide,—are similarly built with solid blocks of grey marble, arched rudely above the windows, with here and there a cross on the keystones. If I chose to rise from my work and walk a hundred yards down this street (if one may so call the narrow path between grey walls, as quiet and lonely as a sheep-walk on Shap Fells,) I should come to a small prison-like door; and over the door is a tablet of white marble let into the grey, and on the tablet is written, in contracted Latin, what in English signifies:— “Here, Bernard the Happy [37] Received St. Francis of Assisi, And saw him, in ecstacy.” Good wiseacres, you believe nothing of the sort, do you? Nobody ever yet was in ecstacy, you think, till now, when they may buy cat-skin cheap?