Mount St. Michael! What memories are awakened only by the name, which is in itself a magical evocation of bygone centuries! Here, too, present realities still rival the memories of the past. With respect to its natural situation, as well as the share which human hands have had in its formation, there is about it much that defies comparison. It is at once a nest of legends, the home of religious thought, of prayer and meditation, as well as of learning and the arts. Mount St. Michael, being a monastery, a cathedral, and a fortress, is, in its triple unity, a summary of the three great elements of the life of France during all the poetic, heroic, and religious though stormy period of the middle ages. Beaten into ruggedness by the storms of heaven, and discrowned of the golden statue of its patron archangel, the summit of the mount no longer springs upward into space with the same loftiness and lightness that used to strike so forcibly those who beheld it for the first time. The great human work thus seems as if arrested in its heavenward climbing; but, like other and grander majesties, St. Michael’s Mount has been uncrowned without undergoing any diminution of its glory, and it still presents its singular threefold aspect to the eye. On the western side the rock, stern and bare, seems to bid defiance to the hand of man; on the north a strong wall rises to the height of two hundred feet from base to battlements, strengthened with buttresses and flanked by bastions, pierced irregularly with pointed windows, and surmounted by a series of elegant arcades. To the south we find a rich display of architectural art, the exuberance of which is almost equalled by its caprice. Above all, and larger than all the rest, rises the church, with its forest of granite pinnacles and turrets overlooking the distant horizons of Normandy and Brittany, and, to use the language of the ancient chroniclers, imposing the fear of the archangel on the vast expanse of ocean—_immensi tremor oceani_. In ages long anterior to any of its architectural constructions, and before the Christian era, this rock, much loftier then than now, rose from the midst of a vast forest which extended from Coutances to the rocks of Cesembre beyond St. Malo. This forest of Scissey, or Chesey (Sissiacum), took its name from the goddess Sessia, who was invoked at the time of sowing, and worshipped as the protectress of the corn while in the ground. The rock itself was called Tomba, and also Belenus, the name given by the Gauls and Druids to their sun-god,[13] and which was identical with Baal of the Phœnicians, Bel of the Assyrians, and the Apollo of the Greeks. On Mount Belenus was a college of nine Druidesses, the eldest of whom, like the pythoness of Delphi, uttered oracles.[14] The Romans, in the course of their conquests in Gaul, made Bel give place to Jove: Tomba Belenus became _Mons Jovis_ and was sacred to Jupiter.