For several years this news was to men the staple of all conversation. The body of their own duke was finally brought back from Palestine to his ancient heritage, and laid, by his own desire, in the cemetery of the poor monks of Citeaux. There, in this comparatively recent monastery near Dijon, he had selected his last home, in preference to many more opulent and renowned establishments. The son of Burgundy’s vassal Tesselin beheld this and other incidents. His brothers went to the wars with the next duke, but he himself grew less and less inclined toward such pursuits. Books formed his world. His cell was afterward said to be stored with them; and he obtained easily the credit of being the best instructed person of his time in the Bible and in the works of the fathers of the Church. And already these tendencies were aroused in the youth of eighteen or nineteen years who had begun the old-fashioned austerities on his own account. We are not surprised to find him neck-deep in ice-water; stung into intellectual vigor by the recent victory of Abelard over William of Champeaux; aroused into an actual preaching fervor, in which he denounces the sins of the age; continually mindful of his dead mother Alith’s prayers, and finally resolved upon entering the monastic order and upon carrying all his friends and relations with him. That singular mastery of other minds, which was his at every period henceforth, now displayed itself. It did not matter that his brother Guido had a wife and family; nor that his brother Gerard loved to fight a good deal better than he loved to pray. Into the cloister they must go! Gerard indeed was something after the manner of Lot’s wife, disposed to look back. But his brother touched him on the side, and by some strange prescience or happy guess, predicted to him a spear-wound, which actually happened. On being thus remarkably warned, the soldier relented as they carried him wounded off the field, and cried, “I turn monk, monk of Citeaux.” This was the Gerard over whom, long afterward, Bernard delivered that touching sermon, where he branched out from the Song of Solomon (1:5) to declare that this body “is not the mansion of the citizen, nor the house of the native, but either the soldier’s tent or the traveller’s inn;” and then poured forth his full heart in a tide of uncontrollable and lofty grief. So the youth marched into the poor monastery of Citeaux, where scanty food, rough clothing, harsh surroundings and occasional epidemic disorders had nearly disheartened and broken up the company of monks. Stephen Harding, their English abbot, was proudly indifferent to all patronage; but he was not so blind as not to perceive that Bernard, with thirty captives of the bow and spear of his eloquence, was a valuable addition to a depleted community.