Explore "Brother Cœlestin" by Edna Worthley Underwood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
High in the Apennines it stood -- a gloomy cloister. It towered blackly on the edge of a steep, forbidding, treeless abyss, and the sun beat pitilessly upon its bare, gray walls. There was something strange about this Cloister; here God and Satan dwelled side by side. God hid Himself behind the great altar in the church; Satan dwelled in the cell of the Prior, above his desk, and in fact right behind a picture. God knows to what school that picture belongs! It represented the Temptation of Saint Anthony. This had been a favorite subject for representation with a school of painters. Teniers and Tassaert had represented the subject with humor, Bosch with great imagination; it had been given by Callot to the modern world through the pen of Hoffman, that unjustly forgotten poet, and dreamer of golden vessels and magic draughts.
On one of these pictures, among the many shapeless and nameless monsters that surrounded the poor and holy hermit, moving in a hideously merry dance, there was in one corner of the canvas a great green frog with a bird-shaped beak, and a hugely swollen white goiter. Behind this frog dwelled Satan, and unobserved, through the eyes of the frog he watched -- not holy Saint Anthony kneeling in prayer, but the living body of the Prior and his priestly comrades.