CONVENT OF THE VALLOMBROSA.

VALLOMBROSA, formerly, and more significantly, written Val Ombrosa, is proverbially noted for its luxuriant beauty, even in a country in which every species of picturesque loveliness continually meets the eye. Occupying an elevated site among the Apennines, whose "alps on alps," however, look down upon it and close it in, Vallombrosa has been not inaptly called "beauty in the lap of horror." Milton's description of Paradise might be fitly applied to it; for it

"Crowns with its enclosure green,

As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides,

With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access deny; while overhead up-grows

Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene."

That a spot so rich in beauty should have been chosen for the site of a convent, will surprise none who are aware of the importance which the founders of religious houses have ordinarily attached to the selection of imposing situations for the erection of such structures. A secluded vale among the Apennines, sheltered by embowering woods, and combining picturesque grandeur with soft beauty, or "a galléd rock, swill'd by the wild and wasteful ocean," are sites alike calculated to affect the impressible imagination and the uncultivated mind; and such sites were, therefore, in the middle ages, frequently selected by the founders of monasteries or convents.

Giovanni Gualberti, the founder of the celebrated Convent of Vallombrosa, was probably influenced in his choice of its site by his own singularly romantic temperament, and by his enthusiastic love of the wild and picturesque in nature. In his case, an instinctive love of the sublime and beautiful induced him to select for his convent a situation, which a process of interested calculation might have recommended to a founder less deeply embued with the sense of beauty.

Giovanni Gualberti, who was a Florentine of noble family, lived in the early part of the eleventh century. Being on a journey from the place of his residence, he chanced to pass through the wild, and, at that time, almost untrodden district of Vallombrosa. The extreme beauty and deep solitude of the place exercised an extraordinary influence upon his imagination; insomuch that, acted upon by a mixture of religious and romantic enthusiasm, not uncommon in the age in which he lived, he resolved to pass amid its secluded shades the remainder of his days. A small spot of level ground, surrounded on all sides by the rugged heights of the Apennines, seemed to him to be peculiarly suited, if not expressly intended, for the erection of a religious house, within whose