He soon comes back, weary of the labor and sick for home, to look on the Aube once more, to hear the old mills go drumming and droning, with that monotony of muffled sound⁠—the associate of his pious reveries⁠—often heard in his dreams when far away; to set his feet on the very same flagstone in the choir where he used to stand, and to be happy. But Bernard, though away in Italy, toiling in the matter of the schism, gets to hear of his return, and finds time to send him across the Alps a letter of rebuke for this criminal self-pleasing, whose terrible sharpness must have darkened the poor man’s meditations for many a day. “Bernard had further the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the Papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more Scriptural Christianity, for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry; and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christian virtue.” ↩