Explore "The Hermits" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ON the south shore of the Black Sea, eastward of Sinope, there dwelt in those days, at the mouth of the River Iris, a hermit as gentle and as pure as Ephrem of Edessa. Beside a roaring waterfall, amid deep glens and dark forests, with distant glimpses of the stormy sea beyond, there lived on bread and water a graceful gentleman, young and handsome; a scholar too, who had drunk deeply at the fountains of Pagan philosophy and poetry, and had been educated with care at Constantinople and at Athens, as well as at his native city of Cesarea, in the heart of Asia Minor, now dwindled under Turkish misrule into a wretched village. He was heir to great estates; the glens and forests round him were his own: and that was the use which he made of them. On the other side of the torrent, his mother and his sister, a maiden of wonderful beauty, lived the hermit life, on a footing of perfect equality with their female slaves, and the pious women who had joined them.
Basil's austerities-or rather the severe climate of the Black Sea forests-brought him to an early grave. But his short life was spent well enough. He was a poet, with an eye for the beauty of Nature-especially for the beauty of the sea-most rare in those times; and his works are full of descriptions of scenery as healthy-minded as they are vivid and graceful.