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Updated: July 14, 2025
"De gustibus non est," etc. there is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones!
With Simeon Stylites, they point to their barren sojourn on the hills: Three winters that my soul might grow to thee, I lived up there on yonder mountain-side, My right leg chained into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones. It is to the rarefied perception of beauty that we may trace the quickening of spirit which artists and poets experience on the mountains.
"Hence," continued my father, "hence it follows that the more fractional a life be that is, the greater the number of persons among whom it can be subdivided why, the more there are to say, 'A very valuable life that! Thus the leader of a political party, a conqueror, a king, an author, who is amusing hundreds or thousands or millions, has a greater number of persons whom his worth interests and affects than a Saint Simeon Stylites could have when he perched himself at the top of a column; although, regarded each in himself, Saint Simeon, in his grand mortification of flesh, in the idea that he thereby pleased his Divine Benefactor, might represent a larger sum of moral value per se than Bonaparte or Voltaire."
In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.
She entered and looked round my little sitting-room. "What a pill-box in the sky! I had no idea it was as tiny as this. I think I shall call you Saint Simon Stylites." I was in no mood for Agatha. I bowed ironically and inquired to what I owed the honour of the visit. "I want you to do me a favour a great favour. I'm dying to see the new dances at the Palace Theatre.
At sunset several of the men who had killed the martyr Simeon Stylites were suddenly filled with horror and cried out loudly; for lo! he stood before them on a hilltop with arms outstretched like a cross, while amid continual bowing he struck his knees with his head. And I had helped to bury the lifeless form!
Many hermits received their parents or brothers and sisters with their eyes shut. When the father of Simeon Stylites died, his widowed mother prayed for entrance into her son's cell. For three days and nights she stood without, and then the blessed Simeon prayed the Lord for her, and she immediately gave up the ghost.
"Hence," continued my father, "hence it follows that the more fractional a life be that is, the greater the number of persons among whom it can be subdivided why, the more there are to say, 'A very valuable life that! Thus the leader of a political party, a conqueror, a king, an author, who is amusing hundreds or thousands or millions, has a greater number of persons whom his worth interests and affects than a Saint Simeon Stylites could have when he perched himself at the top of a column; although, regarded each in himself, Saint Simeon, in his grand mortification of flesh, in the idea that he thereby pleased his Divine Benefactor, might represent a larger sum of moral value per se than Bonaparte or Voltaire."
The St Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion pieces, contain the romance, as St Simeon Stylites shows the repulsive side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young, beautiful, and eager as St Theresa in her childhood.
And not the least vehement of these protestants were the "Honor girls" themselves. To see their names posted in an alphabetical list of twenty or more students who had achieved, all unwittingly, a certain number of A's and B's throughout their course, seems to have caused them a mortification more keen than that experienced by St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar.
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