248 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



monks cleared with their own hands the forests and erected 

 peaceful habitations for man in the spots where formerly 

 had lurked the wolf and the bear. They turned aside devast- 

 ating torrents, they restrained, by means of dykes, rivers 

 accustomed to overflow their banks; and soon the deserts 

 where before was heard only the cry of the owl and the 

 hiss of the serpent were changed into smiling fields and fat 

 pasturage. The love of solitude, the desire of placing by 

 every means possible a check to human passion, inspired 

 them to seek out sites the most unhealthy and to render 

 them by cultivation not only sanitary but even profitable. 

 Modern writers recognize that Italy, devastated by the re- 

 peated incursions of Barbarians, owed its restoration, its 

 tranquillity, and the preservation of the last remains of art 

 to the monasteries. Wherever we see them rise we see 

 agriculture reappear, the people relieved from their bur- 

 dens, and kindly relations established between the master 

 and the slave. 



In the twelfth century impenetrable forests still covered 

 the valley of the Jura. A monastery of the order of Premon- 

 tre cut down the first trees in their forests and attracted 

 there the first colonists. A monastery of the order of Citeaux 

 had but a short time previously restricted within its 

 banks the river Saone, which covered with its overflow the 

 foot of Rodomont. It cleared the soil of the virgin forest 

 where now is situated the little city of Rougemont with its 

 two thousand inhabitants. At great expense and by almost 

 superhuman effort dykes were opposed to the waves of the 

 ocean, and they snatched from the element a soil which the 

 work of man changed afterward into fertile fields. Marshes 

 became arable land and the home of man. The monks 



