INTRODUCTION XXV

had had the disposal of his life in his own hands to a
greater extent than was the case with each woman, I do
not so misread the poems as to conclude that the liberty
they hymned was merely a shaking off the trammels of the
e House-life.' As a novelist of to-day sagaciously puts it :
* Only the selfish and the useless are ever free.'1 * CITTA^
rwincci me /' — it was the freed mind, the release from
sense, superstition, craving, and the Bound of rebirth that
made them break forth into singing. All other escape was
bub bhsanagarrtyanissayaZike indispensable conditions of the
final release. Nevertheless? these little women of old were
every whit as human as we, and I am convinced that the
glory of saintship was for them, and at first — when they
hymned it — no white lighfa, but prismatic through the cir-
cumstances and temperament of each. Thus, those who
had had most ado in breaking away from the world were
most likely to sing :

k O free indeed ! O gloriously h%ee am I T3

and to climb alone and sit on rocky peak, where the keener
air smote on their brow and the world grew wide beneath,
while they mused on this good thing thafe had come to

them i

" So sit I here

Upon the rock. Ar:d o'er my spirit sweeps
The breatih of

To gain this freo mobility, 2)ac& ^ie deeper liberty, they,
like their later Christian sisters, had laid down all social
position, all domestic success; they had lost their world.
But in exchange they had won the status of an individual in
place of being adjuncts, however much admired, fostered,
and sheltered they might, as such, have been. 'With
shaven head, wrapt in their robe' — a dress indistinguish-
able, it would seem, from the s'imfcKing toga and swathed
nader-garxnenfcs of the male religieux — the Sister was freo to

i The Inner S'hrine. 2 Pa. IK-, verse 349 ; o/. Ps. si, xl.

3 Ps, z '