"Long years ago I learned a lesson from the stars.

Our holy Abbot took me out one night into the quiet cloister, and pointing to the glittering heavens showed me my duty in a way I never have forgot.

I had grown restive in my lot and chafed against its narrow round of cell and cloister.

But in a word he made me see that if I stepped aside from that appointed path, merely for mine own pleasure, 'twould mar the order of God's universe as surely as if a planet swerved from its eternal course.
"'No shining lot is thine,' he said.

'Yet neither have the stars themselves a light.