University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
CLOUDS DEEPENING.

After the departure of her uncle to Florence, the life
of Agnes was troubled and harassed from a variety of
causes.

First, her grandmother was sulky and moody, and though
saying nothing directly on the topic nearest her heart, yet
intimating by every look and action that she considered
Agnes as a most ungrateful and contumacious child. Then
there was a constant internal perplexity, — a constant wearying
course of self-interrogation and self-distrust, the pain
of a sensitive spirit which doubts at every moment whether
it may not be falling into sin. The absence of her kind
uncle at this time took from her the strongest support on
which she had leaned in her perplexities. Cheerful, airy,
and elastic in his temperament, always full of fresh-springing
and beautiful thoughts, as an Italian dell is of flowers, the
charming old man seemed, while he stayed with Agnes, to
be the door of a new and fairer world, where she could walk
in air and sunshine, and find utterance for a thousand
thoughts and feelings which at all other times lay in cold
repression in her heart. His counsels were always so
wholesome, his sympathies so quick, his devotion so fervent
and cheerful, that while with him Agnes felt the
burden of her life insensibly lifted and carried for her as
by some angel guide.

Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold

than ever they had been before. Never did she
so much need counsel and guidance, — never had she so
much within herself to be solved and made plain to her own
comprehension; yet she thought with a strange shiver of
her next visit to her confessor. That austere man, so chilling,
so awful, so far above all conception of human weaknesses,
how should she dare to lay before him all the secrets
of her breast, especially when she must confess to having
disobeyed his most stringent commands? She had had
another interview with this forbidden son of perdition, but
how it was she knew not. How could such things have
happened? Instead of shutting her eyes and turning her
head and saying prayers, she had listened to a passionate
declaration of love, and his last word had called her his
wife. Her heart thrilled every time she thought of it; and
somehow she could not feel sure that it was exactly a thrill
of penitence. It was all like a strange dream to her; and
sometimes she looked at her little brown hands and wondered
if he really had kissed them, — he, the splendid
strange vision of a man, the prince from fairy-land!
Agnes had never read romances, it is true, but she had
been brought up on the legends of the saints, and there
never was a marvel possible to human conception that had
not been told there. Princes had come from China and
Barbary and Abyssinia and every other strange out-of-the-way
place, to kneel at the feet of fair, obdurate saints who
would not even turn the head to look at them; but she had
acted, she was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion,
and so made herself work for confession and penance. Yet
certainly she had not meant to do so; the interview came on
her so suddenly, so unexpectedly; and somehow he would
speak, and he would not go when she asked him to; and
she remembered how he looked when he stood right before
her in the door-way and told her she should hear him, — how
the color flushed up in his cheeks, what a fire there was in
his great dark eyes; he looked as if he were going to do
something desperate then; it made her hold her breath even
now to think of it.

“These princes and nobles,” she thought, “are so used to
command, it is no wonder they make us feel as if they must
have their will. I have heard grandmother call them wolves
and vultures, that are ready to tear us poor folk to pieces;
but I am sure he seems gentle. I 'm sure it is n't wicked
or cruel for him to want to make me his wife; and he
could n't know, of course, why it was n't right he should;
and it really is beautiful of him to love me so. Oh, if I
were only a princess, and he loved me that way, how glad I
should be to give up everything and go to him alone! And
then we would pray together; and I really think that would
be much better than praying all alone. He said men had so
much more to tempt them. Ah, that is true! How can
little moles that grub in the ground know of the dangers of
eagles that fly to the very sun? Holy Mother, look mercifully
upon him and save his soul!”

Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was
preparing for her confession; and all the way to church she
found them floating and dissolving and reappearing in new
forms in her mind, like the silvery smoke-clouds which were
constantly veering and sailing over Vesuvius.

Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that
was the purpose to reveal everything to her spiritual director.
When she kneeled at the confessional with closed eyes,
and began her whispered acknowledgments, she tried to feel
as if she were speaking in the ear of God alone, — that

God whose spirit she was taught to believe, for the time
being, was present in His minister before whom her inmost
heart was to be unveiled.

He who sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat
with his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,
— a sort of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he
mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely days
when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was
surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had
passed through as many phases of strange, unnatural experience
as there were flitting smoke-wreaths eddying about him.

There are depths in man's nature and his possibilities
which no plummet has ever sounded, — the wild, lonely
joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite
for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the
whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How
else can we understand the facts related both in Hindoo
and in Christian story, of those men and women who have
found such strange raptures in slow tortures, prolonged from
year to year, till pain became a habit of body and mind?
It is said, that, after the tortures of the rack, the reaction
of the overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most
exquisite relief and repose; and so when mind and body are
harrowed, harassed to the very outer verge of endurance,
come wild throbbings and transports, and strange celestial
clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the
New Jerusalem into his soul.

It had seemed to Father Francesco, when he came down
from the mountain, that he had left his body behind him, —
that he had left earth and earthly things; his very feet touching
the ground seemed to tread not on rough, resisting soil,
but upon elastic cloud. He saw a strange excess of beauty

in every flower, in every leaf, in the wavering blue of the sea,
in the red grottoed rocks that overhung the shore, with their
purple, green, orange, and yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf-tapestry.
The songs of the fishermen on the beach, the
peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder for the cattle, all seemed
to him to have an unnatural charm. As one looking through
a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on every object, so
he beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed to him
something forever past and gone. He looked at himself as
at another person, who had sinned and suffered, and was
now resting in beatified repose; and he fondly thought all
this was firm reality, and believed that he was now proof
against all earthly impressions, able to hear and to judge
with the dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit.
He did not know that this high-strung calmness, this fine
clearness, were only the most intense forms of nervous sensibility,
and as vividly susceptible to every mortal impression
as is the vitalized chemical plate to the least action of the
sun's rays.

When Agnes began her confession, her voice seemed to
him to pass through every nerve; it seemed as if he could
feel her presence thrilling through the very wood of the
confessional. He was astonished and dismayed at his own
emotion. But when she began to speak of the interview
with the cavalier, he trembled from head to foot with uncontrollable
passion. Nature long repressed came back in a
tempestuous reaction. He crossed himself again and again,
he tried to pray, and blessed those protecting shadows which
concealed his emotion from the unconscious one by his side.
But he set his teeth in deadly resolve, and his voice, as
he questioned her, came forth cutting and cold as ice crystals.

“Why did you listen to a word?”

“My father, it was so sudden. He wakened me from
sleep. I answered him before I thought.”

“You should not have been sleeping. It was a sinful
indolence.”

“Yes, my father.”

“See now to what it led. The enemy of your soul, ever
watching, seized this moment to tempt you.”

“Yes, my father.”

“Examine your soul well,” said Father Francesco, in a
tone of austere severity that made Agnes tremble. “Did
you not find a secret pleasure in his words?”

“My father, I fear I did,” said she, with a trembling
voice.

“I knew it! I knew it!” the priest muttered to himself,
while the great drops started on his forehead, in the intensity
of the conflict he repressed. Agnes thought the solemn
pause that followed was caused by the horror that had been
inspired by her own sinfulness.

“You did not, then, heartily and truly wish him to go
from you?” pursued the cold, severe voice.

“Yes, my father, I did. I wished him to go with all my
soul.”

“Yet you say you found pleasure in his being near you,”
said Father Francesco, conscious how every string of his
own being, even in this awful hour, was vibrating with a
sort of desperate, miserable joy in being once more near to
her.

“Ah,” sighed Agnes, “that is true, my father, — woe is
me! Please tell me how I could have helped it. I was
pleased before I knew it.”

“And you have been thinking of what he said to you

with pleasure since?” pursued the confessor, with an intense
severity of manner, deepening as he spoke.

“I have thought of it,” faltered Agnes.

“Beware how you trifle with the holy sacrament! Answer
frankly. You have thought of it with pleasure. Confess
it.”

“I do not understand myself exactly,” said Agnes. “I
have thought of it partly with pleasure and partly with
pain.”

“Would you like to go with him and be his wife, as he
said?”

“If it were right, father, — not otherwise.”

“Oh, foolish child! oh, blinded soul! to think of right in
connection with an infidel and heretic! Do you not see that
all this is an artifice of Satan? He can transform himself
into an angel of light. Do you suppose this heretic would
be brought back to the Church by a foolish girl? Do you
suppose it is your prayers he wants? Why does he not
seek the prayers of the Church, — of holy men who have
power with God? He would bait his hook with this
pretence that he may catch your soul. Do you believe me?”

“I am bound to believe you, my father.”

“But you do not. Your heart is going after this wicked
man.”

“Oh, my father, I do not wish it should. I never wish or
expect to see him more. I only pray for him that his soul
may not be lost.”

“He has gone, then?”

“Yes, my father. And he went with my uncle, a most
holy monk, who has undertaken the work of his salvation.
He listens to my uncle, who has hopes of restoring him to
the Church.”

“That is well. And now, my daughter, listen to me.
You must root out of your thought every trace and remembrance
of these words of sinful earthly love which he hath
spoken. Such love would burn your soul to all eternity
with fire that never could be quenched. If you can tear
away all roots and traces of this from your heart, if by fasting
and prayer and penance you can become worthy to be
a bride of your divine Lord, then your prayers will gain
power, and you may prevail to secure his eternal salvation.
But listen to me, daughter, — listen and tremble! If ever
you should yield to his love and turn back from this heavenly
marriage to follow him, you will accomplish his damnation
and your own; to all eternity he will curse you, while
the fire rages and consumes him, — he will curse the hour
that he first saw you.”

These words were spoken with an intense vehemence
which seemed almost supernatural. Agnes shivered and
trembled; a vague feeling of guilt overwhelmed and disheartened
her; she seemed to herself the most lost and
abandoned of human beings.

“My father, I shall think no penance too severe that may
restore my soul from this sin. I have already made a vow
to the blessed Mother that I will walk on foot to the Holy
City, praying in every shrine and holy place; and I humbly
ask your approval.”

This announcement brought to the mind of the monk a
sense of relief and deliverance. He felt already, in the
terrible storm of agitation which this confession had aroused
within him, that nature was not dead, and that he was infinitely
farther from the victory of passionless calm than he
had supposed. He was still a man, — torn with human
passions, with a love which he must never express, and a

jealousy which burned and writhed at every word which he
had wrung from its unconscious object. Conscience had
begun to whisper in his ear that there would be no safety to
him in continuing this spiritual dictatorship to one whose
every word unmanned him, — that it was laying himself
open to a ceaseless temptation, which in some blinded, dreary
hour of evil might hurry him into acts of horrible sacrilege;
and he was once more feeling that wild, stormy revolt of
his inner nature that so distressed him before he left the
convent.

This proposition of Agnes' struck him as a compromise.
It would take her from him only for a season, she would go
under his care and direction, and he would gradually recover
his calmness and self-possession in her absence. Her pilgrimage
to the holy places would be a most proper and fit
preparation for the solemn marriage-rite which should forever
sunder her from all human ties, and make her inaccessible
to all solicitations of human love. Therefore, after an
interval of silence, he answered, —

“Daughter, your plan is approved. Such pilgrimages
have ever been held meritorious works in the Church, and
there is a special blessing upon them.”

“My father,” said Agnes, “it has always been in my
heart from my childhood to be the bride of the Lord; but
my grandmother, who brought me up, and to whom I owe
the obedience of a daughter, utterly forbids me: she will
not hear a word of it. No longer ago than last Monday she
told me I might as well put a knife into her heart as speak
of this.”

“And you, daughter, do you put the feelings of any
earthly friend before the love of your Lord and Creator
who laid down His life for you? Hear what He saith: —

`He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
of me.'”

“But my poor old grandmother has no one but me in the
world, and she has never slept a night without me; she is
getting old, and she has worked for me all her good days;
— it would be very hard for her to lose me.”

“Ah, false, deceitful heart! Has, then, thy Lord not
labored for thee? Has He not borne thee through all the
years of thy life? And wilt thou put the love of any mortal
before His?”

“Yes,” replied Agnes, with a sort of hardy sweetness, —
“but my Lord does not need me as grandmother does; He
is in glory, and will never be old or feeble; I cannot work
for Him and tend Him as I shall her. I cannot see my
way clear at present; but when she is gone, or if the saints
move her to consent, I shall then belong to God alone.”

“Daughter, there is some truth in your words; and if
your Lord accepts you, He will dispose her heart. Will
she go with you on this pilgrimage?”

“I have prayed that she might, father, — that her soul
may be quickened; for I fear me, dear old grandmamma
has found her love for me a snare, — she has thought too
much of my interests and too little of her own soul, poor
grandmamma!”

“Well, child, I shall enjoin this pilgrimage on her as a
penance.”

“I have grievously offended her lately,” said Agnes, “in
rejecting an offer of marriage with a man on whom she had
set her heart, and therefore she does not listen to me as she
is wont to do.”

“You have done right in refusing, my daughter. I will
speak to her of this, and show her how great is the sin of

opposing a holy vocation in a soul whom the Lord calls to
Himself, and enjoin her to make reparation by uniting with
you in this holy work.”

Agnes departed from the confessional without even looking
upon the face of her director, who sat within listening to
the rustle of her dress as she rose, — listening to the soft
fall of her departing footsteps, and praying that grace might
be given him not to look after her: and he did not, though
he felt as if his life were going with her.

Agnes tripped round the aisle to a little side-chapel where
a light was always kept burning by her before a picture of
Saint Agnes, and, kneeling there, waited till her grandmother
should be through with her confession.

“Ah, sweet Saint Agnes,” she said, “pity me! I am a
poor ignorant young girl, and have been led into grievous
sin; but I did not mean to do wrong, — I have been trying
to do right; pray for me, that I may overcome as you did.
Pray our dear Lord to send you with us on this pilgrimage,
and save us from all wicked and brutal men who would do
us harm. As the Lord delivered you in sorest straits, keeping
soul and body pure as a lily, ah, pray Him to keep me!
I love you dearly, — watch over me and guide me.”

In those days of the Church, such addresses to the glorified
saints had become common among all Christians. They
were not regarded as worship, any more than a similar outpouring
of confidence to a beloved and revered friend yet
in the body. Among the hymns of Savonarola is one addressed
to Saint Mary Magdalen, whom he regarded with
an especial veneration. The great truth, that God is not
the God of the dead, but of the living, that all live to Him,
was in those ages with the truly religious a part of spiritual
consciousness. The saints of the Church Triumphant, having

become one with Christ as he is one with the Father,
were regarded as invested with a portion of his divinity, and
as the ministering agency through which his mediatorial
government on earth was conducted; and it was thought to
be in the power of the sympathetic heart to attract them
by the outflow of its affections, so that their presence often
overshadowed the walks of daily life with a cloud of healing
and protecting sweetness.

If the enthusiasm of devotion in regard to these invisible
friends became extravagant and took the language due to
God alone, it was no more than the fervid Italian nature
was always doing with regard to visible objects of affection.
Love with an Italian always tends to become worship, and
some of the language of the poets addressed to earthly loves
rises into intensities of expression due only to the One, Sovereign,
Eternal Beauty. One sees even in the writings of
Cicero that this passionate adoring kind of love is not confined
to modern times. When he loses the daughter in
whom his heart is garnered up, he finds no comfort except
in building a temple to her memory, — a blind outreaching
towards the saint-worship of modern times.

Agnes rose from her devotions, and went with downcast
eyes, her lips still repeating prayers, to the font of holy
water, which was in a dim shadowy corner, where a painted
window cast a gold and violet twilight. Suddenly there was
a rustle of garments in the dimness, and a jewelled hand essayed
to pass holy water to her on the tip of its finger. This
mark of Christian fraternity, common in those times, Agnes
almost mechanically accepted, touching her slender finger to
the one extended, and making the sign of the cross, while
she raised her eyes to see who stood there. Gradually the
haze cleared from her mind, and she awoke to the consciousness

that it was the cavalier! He moved to come
towards her, with a bright smile on his face; but suddenly
she became pale as one who has seen a spectre, and, pushing
from her with both hands, she said faintly, “Go, go!” and
turned and sped up the aisle silently as a sunbeam, joining
her grandmother, who was coming from the confessional
with a gloomy and sullen brow.

Old Elsie had been enjoined to unite with her grandchild
in this scheme of a pilgrimage, and received the direction
with as much internal contumacy as would a thriving church-member
of Wall Street a proposition to attend a protracted
meeting in the height of the business season. Not but that
pilgrimages were holy and gracious works, — she was too
good a Christian not to admit that, — but why must holy
and gracious works be thrust on her in particular? There
were saints enough who liked such things; and people could
get to heaven without, — if not with a very abundant entrance,
still in a modest way, — and Elsie's ambition for
position and treasure in the spiritual world was of a very
moderate cast.

“Well, now, I hope you are satisfied,” she said to Agnes,
as she pulled her along with no very gentle hand; “you 've
got me sent off on a pilgrimage, — and my old bones must
be rattling up and down all the hills between here and
Rome, — and who 's to see to the oranges? — they 'll all be
stolen, every one.”

“Grandmother,” began Agnes in a pleading voice —

“Oh, you hush up! I know what you 're going to say:
`The good Lord will take care of them.' I wish He may!
He has His hands full, with all the people that go cawing
and psalm-singing like so many crows, and leave all their
affairs to Him!”

Agnes walked along disconsolate, with her eyes full of
tears, which coursed one another down her pale cheeks.

“There 's Antonio,” pursued Elsie, “would perhaps look
after things a little. He is a good fellow, and only yesterday
was asking if he could n't do something for us. It 's you
he does it for, — but little you care who loves you, or what
they do for you!”

At this moment they met old Jocunda, whom we have
before introduced to the reader as portress of the Convent.
She had on her arm a large square basket, which she was
storing for its practical uses.

“Well, well, Saint Agnes be praised, I have found you at
last,” she said. “I was wanting to speak about some of your
blood-oranges for conserving. An order has come down
from our dear gracious lady, the Queen, to prepare a lot for
her own blessed eating, and you may be sure I would get
none of anybody but you. — But what 's this, my little heart,
my little lamb? — crying? — tears in those sweet eyes?
What 's the matter now?”

“Matter enough for me!” said Elsie. “It 's a weary
world we live in. A body can't turn any way and not meet
with trouble. If a body brings up a girl one way, why,
every fellow is after her, and one has no peace; and if a
body brings her up another way, she gets her head in the
clouds, and there 's no good of her in this world. Now look
at that girl, — does n't everybody say it 's time she were
married? — but no marrying for her! Nothing will do but
we must off to Rome on a pilgrimage, — and what 's the
good of that, I want to know? If it 's praying that 's to be
done, the dear saints know she 's at it from morning till
night, — and lately she 's up and down three or four times a
night with some prayer or other.”

“Well, well,” said Jocunda, “who started this idea?”

“Oh, Father Francesco and she got it up between them,
— and nothing will do but I must go, too.”

“Well, now, after all, my dear,” said Jocunda, “do you
know, I made a pilgrimage once, and it is n't so bad. One
gets a good deal by it, first and last. Everybody drops
something into your hand as you go, and one gets treated as
if one were somebody a little above the common; and then
in Rome one has a princess or a duchess or some noble lady
who washes one's feet, and gives one a good supper, and
perhaps a new suit of clothes, and all that, — and ten to one
there comes a pretty little sum of money to boot, if one
plays one's cards well. A pilgrimage is n't bad, after all;
— one sees a world of fine things, and something new every
day.”

“But who is to look after our garden and dress our
trees?”

“Ah, now, there 's Antonio, and old Meta his mother,”
said Jocunda, with a knowing wink at Agnes. “I fancy
there are friends there that would lend a hand to keep things
together against the little one comes home. If one is going
to be married, a pilgrimage brings good luck in the family.
All the saints take it kindly that one comes so far to see
them, and are more ready to do a good turn for one when
one needs it. The blessed saints are like other folks, — they
like to be treated with proper attention.”

This view of pilgrimages from the material stand-point
had more effect on the mind of Elsie than the most elaborate
appeals of Father Francesco. She began to acquiesce,
though with a reluctant air.

Jocunda, seeing her words had made some impression,
pursued her advantage on the spiritual ground.

“To be sure,” she added, “I don't know how it is with
you; but I know that I have, one way and another, rolled
up quite an account of sins in my life. When I was tramping
up and down with my old man through the country, —
now in this castle and then in that camp, and now and then
in at the sacking of a city or village, or something of the
kind, — the saints forgive us! — it does seem as if one got
into things that were not of the best sort, in such times.
It 's true, it 's been wiped out over and over by the priest;
but then a pilgrimage is a good thing to make all sure, in
case one's good works should fall short of one's sins at last.
I can tell you, a pilgrimage is a good round weight to throw
into the scale; and when it comes to heaven and hell, you
know, my dear, why, one cannot be too careful.”

“Well, that may be true enough,” said Elsie, — “though,
as to my sins, I have tried to keep them regularly squared
up and balanced as I went along. I have always been regular
at confession, and never failed a jot or tittle in what the
holy father told me. But there may be something in what
you say; one can't be too sure; and so I 'll e'en school my
old bones into taking this tramp.”

That evening, as Agnes was sitting in the garden at sunset,
her grandmother bustling in and out, talking, groaning,
and hurrying in her preparations for the anticipated undertaking,
suddenly there was a rustling in the branches overhead,
and a bouquet of rose-buds fell at her feet. Agnes
picked it up, and saw a scrip of paper coiled among the
flowers. In a moment remembering the apparition of the
cavalier in the church in the morning, she doubted not from
whom it came. So dreadful had been the effect of the
scene at the confessional, that the thought of the near presence
of her lover brought only terror. She turned pale;

her hands shook. She shut her eyes, and prayed that she
might not be left to read the paper; and then, summoning
all her resolution, she threw the bouquet with force over the
wall. It dropped down, down, down the gloomy, shadowy
abyss, and was lost in the damp caverns below.

The cavalier stood without the wall, waiting for some
responsive signal in reply to his missive. It had never
occurred to him that Agnes would not even read it, and he
stood confounded when he saw it thrown back with such
apparent rudeness. He remembered her pale, terrified look
on seeing him in the morning. It was not indifference or
dislike, but mortal fear, that had been shown in that pale
face.

“These wretches are practising on her,” he said, in wrath,
— “filling her head with frightful images, and torturing her
sensitive conscience till she sees sin in the most natural and
innocent feelings.”

He had learned from Father Antonio the intention of
Agnes to go on a pilgrimage, and he longed to see and talk
with her, that he might offer her his protection against dangers
which he understood far better than she. It had never
even occurred to him that the door for all possible communication
would be thus suddenly barred in his face.

“Very well,” he said to himself, with a darkening brow,
— “let them have it their own way here. She must pass
through my dominions before she can reach Rome, and I
will find a place where I can be heard, without priest or
grandmother to let or hinder. She is mine, and I will care
for her.”

But poor Agnes had the woman's share of the misery to
bear, in the fear and self-reproach and distress which every
movement of this kind cost her. The involuntary thrill at

seeing her lover, at hearing from him, the conscious struggle
which it cost her to throw back his gift, were all noted by
her accusing conscience as so many sins. The next day she
sought again her confessor, and began an entrance on those
darker and more chilly paths of penance, by which, according
to the opinion of her times, the peculiarly elect of the
Lord were supposed to be best trained. Hitherto her religion
had been the cheerful and natural expression of her
tender and devout nature according to the more beautiful
and engaging devotional forms of her Church. During the
year when her confessor had been, unconsciously to himself,
led by her instead of leading, her spiritual food had been its
beautiful old hymns and prayers, which she found no weariness
in often repeating. But now an unnatural conflict was
begun in her mind, directed by a spiritual guide in whom
every natural and normal movement of the soul had given
way before a succession of morbid and unhealthful experiences.
From that day Agnes wore upon her heart one of
those sharp instruments of torture which in those times
were supposed to be a means of inward grace, — a cross
with seven steel points for the seven sorrows of Mary. She
fasted with a severity which alarmed her grandmother, who
in her inmost heart cursed the day that ever she had placed
her in the way of saintship.

“All this will just end in spoiling her beauty, — making
her as thin as a shadow,” — said Elsie; “and she was good
enough before.”

But it did not spoil her beauty, — it only changed its
character. The roundness and bloom melted away, — but
there came in their stead that solemn, transparent clearness
of countenance, that spiritual light and radiance, which the
old Florentine painters gave to their Madonnas.

It is singular how all religious exercises and appliances
take the character of the nature that uses them. The pain
and penance, which so many in her day bore as a cowardly
expedient for averting divine wrath, seemed, as she viewed
them, a humble way of becoming associated in the sufferings
of her Redeemer. “Jesu dulcis memoria,” was the thought
that carried a redeeming sweetness with every pain. Could
she thus, by suffering with her Lord, gain power like Him to
save, — a power which should save that soul so dear and so
endangered! “Ah,” she thought, “I would give my life-blood,
drop by drop, if only it might avail for his salvation!”