These Cistercians, then and always, were rigidists. Up they got at two in the morning to prayer and “matins;” and for full two hours were busy, in a cold dark chapel, over them. Then, with the first dawn of light, out again to “lauds.” Before this service, and after it, the monk’s time was fairly his own; but at two o’clock he dined, at nightfall he had “vespers,” and at six or eight (according to the season) came “compline,” and then immediately the dormitory and bed. Such was the life, with a little more of it on Sundays, and with sermons interspersed at intervals. There is no mention of breakfast or supper! And in such a life the ecstatic, mystical character of Bernard rose into visions and prophecies. His body was nearly subjugated, and his taste, and, indeed, all his senses, appeared to have deserted him. He watched, he dug, he hewed and carried wood; he kept the very letter, and more than the letter of his monastic rule. And yet, as Morison acutely observes, this very abstraction from people and things gave him that delight in nature from which, so often in the future, he was to catch the illustration or the inspiration of his discourse. “Beeches and oaks,” he said, “had ever been his best teachers in the Word of God.” But now Citeaux (suddenly become prosperous) must colonize; and who so fit to lead the swarm from the gates and found the new hive as this same Bernard? Into his hands Abbot Stephen puts the cross, and he and his twelve companions march solemnly across the interdicted boundaries of their little Cistercian home, and nearly a hundred miles to the northward. There he chooses a place which exhibits, as Bernard’s actions generally do, the far-sighted sagacity which takes mean and worthless matters and makes them what, with right handling, they are able to become. It is a valley—the “Valley of Wormwood.” It is grown up with underbrush and is a haunt of robbers. But here, with the river Aube winding down between the hills, with the hills themselves capable of culture, and with the future of this little vale revealed to his prophetic eye, he sets his cloister and calls it Clairvaux—“Fair Valley,” or “Brightdale.”