University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
ALTARS AND INCENSE.

Rome has a certain species of consolation readier at
hand, for all the necessitous, than any other spot under
the sky; and Hilda's despondent state made her peculiarly
liable to the peril, if peril it can justly be termed,
of seeking, or consenting, to be thus consoled.

Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled
heart, her inheritance of New England Puritanism would
hardly have protected the poor girl from the pious strategy
of those good fathers. Knowing, as they do, how to
work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately
impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith,
which so marvellously adapts itself to every human need.
Not, indeed, that it can satisfy the soul's cravings, but, at
least, it can sometimes help the soul towards a higher
satisfaction than the faith contains within itself. It supplies
a multitude of external forms, in which the spiritual
may be clothed and manifested; it has many painted windows,
as it were, through which the celestial sunshine, else
disregarded, may make itself gloriously perceptible in
visions of beauty and splendor. There is no one want or

weakness of human nature, for which Catholicism will
own itself without a remedy; cordials, certainly, it possesses
in abundance, and sedatives in inexhaustible variety,
and what may once have been genuine medicaments,
though a little the worse for long keeping.

To do it justice, Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness
for its own ends, many of which might seem to be admirable
ones, that it is difficult to imagine it a contrivance
of mere man. Its mighty machinery was forged and put
together, not on middle earth, but either above or below.
If there were but angels to work it, instead of the very
different class of engineers who now manage its cranks
and safety-valves, the system would soon vindicate the
dignity and holiness of its origin.

Hilda had heretofore made many pilgrimages among
the churches of Rome, for the sake of wondering at their
gorgeousness. Without a glimpse at these palaces of
worship, it is impossible to imagine the magnificence of
the religion that reared them. Many of them shine with
burnished gold. They glow with pictures. Their walls,
columns, and arches, seem a quarry of precious stones,
so beautiful and costly are the marbles with which they
are inlaid. Their pavements are often a mosaic, of rare
workmanship. Around their lofty cornices, hover flights
of sculptured angels; and within the vault of the ceiling
and the swelling interior of the dome, there are frescoes
of such brilliancy, and wrought with so artful a perspective,
that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears to
be opened, only a little way above the spectator. Then
there are chapels, opening from the side-aisles and transepts,

decorated by princes for their own burial-places,
and as shrines for their especial saints. In these, the
splendor of the entire edifice is intensified and gathered to
a focus. Unless words were gems, that would flame with
many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a
tremulous glimmer into the reader's eyes, it were vain to
attempt a description of a princely chapel.

Restless with her trouble, Hilda now entered upon another
pilgrimage among these altars and shrines. She
climbed the hundred steps of the Ara Cœli; she trod the
broad, silent nave of St. John Lateran; she stood in the
Pantheon, under the round opening in the dome, through
which the blue, sunny sky still gazes down, as it used
to gaze when there were Roman deities in the antique
niches. She went into every church that rose before her,
but not now to wonder at its magnificence, which she
hardly noticed more than if it had been the pine-built
interior of a New England meeting-house.

She went — and it was a dangerous errand — to
observe how closely and comfortingly the Popish faith
applied itself to all human occasions. It was impossible
to doubt that multitudes of people found their spiritual
advantage in it, who would find none at all in our own
formless mode of worship; which, besides, so far as the
sympathy of prayerful souls is concerned, can be enjoyed
only at stated and too unfrequent periods. But here,
whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the
soul, it could on the instant be appeased. At one or another
altar, the incense was forever ascending; the mass
always being performed, and carrying upward with it the

devotion of such as had not words for their own prayer.
And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to
offer, his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath,
there were divine auditors ever ready to receive it from
his lips; and what encouraged him still more, these auditors
had not always been divine, but kept, within their
heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience.
Now a saint in heaven, but once a man on
earth.

Hilda saw peasants, citizens, soldiers, nobles, women
with bare heads, ladies in their silks, entering the churches
individually, kneeling for moments, or for hours, and directing
their inaudible devotions to the shrine of some
saint of their own choice. In his hallowed person, they
felt themselves possessed of an own friend in heaven.
They were too humble to approach the Deity directly.
Conscious of their unworthiness, they asked the mediation
of their sympathizing patron, who, on the score of his
ancient martyrdom, and after many ages of celestial life,
might venture to talk with the Diyine Presence, almost
as friend with friend. Though dumb before its Judge,
even despair could speak, and pour out the misery of its
soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon,
whatever were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she
deemed to be an example of this species of confidence
between a young man and his saint. He stood before a
shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole
frame in an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally
knelt down to weep and pray. If this youth had been a

Protestant, he would have kept all that torture pent up in
his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him into
indifference.

Often, and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and
chapels of the Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant
steps. Here, perhaps, strange as it may seem, her
delicate appreciation of art stood her in good stead, and
lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had represented
Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in
the very mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in
which she held so elevated a position. But she saw that
it was merely the flattered portrait of an earthly beauty;
the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a peasant
girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom
he desired to pay his court. For love, or some even less
justifiable motive, the old painter had apotheosized these
women; he thus gained for them, as far as his skill would
go, not only the meed of immortality, but the privilege of
presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth.
Hilda's fine sense of the fit and decorous could not be
betrayed into kneeling at such a shrine.

She never found just the virgin mother whom she
needed. Here, it was an earthly mother, worshipping the
earthly baby in her lap, as any and every mother does,
from Eve's time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother's face, of some
divine quality in the child. In a third, the artist seemed
to have had a higher perception, and had striven hard to
shadow out the Virgin's joy at bringing the Saviour into

the world, and her awe and love, inextricably mingled, of
the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something
more; a face of celestial beauty, but human as well as
heavenly, and with the shadow of past grief upon it;
bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and motherly;
and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender,
as the highest and deepest attribute of her divinity.

“Ah,” thought Hilda to herself, “why should not there
be a woman to listen to the prayers of women? a mother
in heaven for all motherless girls like me? In all God's
thought and care for us, can He have withheld this boon,
which our weakness so much needs?”

Oftener than to the other churches, she wandered into
Saint Peter's. Within its vast limits, she thought, and beneath
the sweep of its great dome, there should be space
for all forms of Christian truth; room both for the faithful
and the heretic to kneel; due help for every creature's
spiritual want.

Hilda had not always been adequately impressed by the
grandeur of this mighty cathedral. When she first lifted
the heavy leathern curtain, at one of the doors, a shadowy
edifice in her imagination had been dazzled out of sight
by the reality. Her preconception of Saint Peter's was
a structure of no definite outline, misty in its architecture,
dim and gray and huge, stretching into an interminable
perspective, and overarched by a dome like the cloudy
firmament. Beneath that vast breadth and height, as she
had fancied them, the personal man might feel his littleness,
and the soul triumph in its immensity. So, in her

earlier visits, when the compassed splendor of the actual
interior glowed before her eyes, she had profanely called
it a great prettiness; a gay piece of cabinet-work, on a
Titanic scale; a jewel casket, marvellously magnified.

This latter image best pleased her fancy; a casket, all
inlaid, in the inside, with precious stones of various hue,
so that there should not be a hair's-breadth of the small
interior unadorned with its resplendent gem. Then, conceive
this minute wonder of a mosaic box, increased to
the magnitude of a cathedral, without losing the intense
lustre of its littleness, but all its petty glory striving to be
sublime. The magic transformation from the minute to
the vast has not been so cunningly effected but that the
rich adornment still counteracts the impression of space
and loftiness. The spectator is more sensible of its limits
than of its extent.

Until after many visits, Hilda continued to mourn for
that dim, illimitable interior, which with her eyes shut she
had seen from childhood, but which vanished at her first
glimpse through the actual door. Her childish vision
seemed preferable to the cathedral, which Michael Angelo,
and all the great architects, had built; because, of the
dream edifice, she had said, “How vast it is!” while of
the real Saint Peter's she could only say, “After all, it
is not so immense!” Besides, such as the church is, it
can nowhere be made visible at one glance. It stands in
its own way. You see an aisle or a transept; you see
the nave, or the tribune; but, on account of its ponderous
piers and other obstructions, it is only by this fragmentary
process that you get an idea of the cathedral.

There is no answering such objections. The great
church smiles calmly upon its critics, and, for all response,
says, “Look at me!” and if you still murmur for the
loss of your shadowy perspective, there comes no reply,
save, “Look at me!” in endless repetition, as the one
thing to be said. And, after looking many times, with
long intervals between, you discover that the cathedral
has gradually extended itself over the whole compass of
your idea; it covers all the site of your visionary temple,
and has room for its cloudy pinnacles beneath the dome.

One afternoon, as Hilda entered Saint Peter's in sombre
mood, its interior beamed upon her with all the effect
of a new creation. It seemed an embodiment of whatever
the imagination could conceive, or the heart desire,
as a magnificent, comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious
faith. All splendor was included within its verge,
and there was space for all. She gazed with delight even
at the multiplicity of ornament. She was glad at the
cherubim that fluttered upon the pilasters, and of the
marble doves, hovering, unexpectedly, with green olive-branches
of precious stones. She could spare nothing,
now, of the manifold magnificence that had been lavished,
in a hundred places, richly enough to have made world-famous
shrines in any other church, but which here melted
away into the vast, sunny breadth, and were of no separate
account. Yet each contributed its little all towards
the grandeur of the whole.

She would not have banished one of those grim popes,
who sit each over his own tomb, scattering cold benedictions
out of their marble hands; nor a single frozen sister

of the Allegoric family, to whom — as, like hired mourners
at an English funeral, it costs them no wear and tear
of heart — is assigned the office of weeping for the dead.
If you choose to see these things, they present themselves;
if you deem them unsuitable and out of place,
they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon the
walls.

The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of
many-colored marble, where thousands of worshippers
might kneel together, and shadowless angels tread among
them without brushing their heavenly garments against
those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,
filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless
after centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate
the heavens to mortal comprehension, and help the spirit
upward to a yet higher and wider sphere. Must not the
faith, that built this matchless edifice, and warmed, illuminated,
and overflowed from it, include whatever can
satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to
human necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material
home, was it not here?

As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone
calmly before the New England maiden at her entrance,
she moved, as if by very instinct, to one of the vases of
holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty
cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed
the cross upon her breast, but forbore, and trembled,
while shaking the water from her finger-tips. She felt
as if her mother's spirit, somewhere within the dome,
were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan

forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by
these gaudy superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward,
up the nave, and towards the hundred golden lights that
swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman, a priest,
and a soldier, kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St.
Peter, who protrudes it beyond his pedestal, for the purpose,
polished bright with former salutations, while a child
stood on tiptoe to do the same, the glory of the church
was darkened before Hilda's eyes. But again she went
onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right
transept, and thence found her way to a shrine, in the
extreme corner of the edifice, which is adorned with a
mosaic copy of Guido's beautiful Archangel, treading on
the prostrate fiend.

This was one of the few pictures, which, in these
dreary days, had not faded nor deteriorated in Hilda's
estimation; not that it was better than many in which
she no longer took an interest; but the subtile delicacy of
the painter's genius was peculiarly adapted to her character.
She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done
a great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but
for the cause of Good. The moral of the picture, the
immortal youth and loveliness of Virtue, and its irresistible
might against ugly Evil, appealed as much to Puritans
as Catholics.

Suddenly, and as if it were done in a dream, Hilda
found herself kneeling before the shrine, under the ever-burning
lamp that throws its ray upon the Archangel's
face. She laid her forehead on the marble steps before
the altar, and sobbed out a prayer; she hardly knew to

whom, whether Michael, the Virgin, or the Father; she
hardly knew for what, save only a vague longing, that
thus the burden of her spirit might be lightened a little.

In an instant she snatched herself up, as it were, from
her knees, all a-throb with the emotions which were struggling
to force their way out of her heart by the avenue
that had so nearly been opened for them. Yet there was
a strange sense of relief won by that momentary, passionate
prayer; a strange joy, moreover, whether from
what she had done, or for what she had escaped doing,
Hilda could not tell. But she felt as one half stifled,
who has stolen a breath of air.

Next to the shrine where she had knelt, there is another,
adorned with a picture by Guercino, representing a
maiden's body in the jaws of the sepulchre, and her lover
weeping over it; while her beatified spirit looks down
upon the scene, in the society of the Saviour and a throng
of saints. Hilda wondered if it were not possible, by some
miracle of faith, so to rise above her present despondency
that she might look down upon what she was, just as
Petronilla in the picture looked at her own corpse. A
hope, born of hysteric trouble, fluttered in her heart. A
presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her,
that, before she had finished the circuit of the cathedral,
relief would come.

The unhappy are continually tantalized by similar delusions
of succor near at hand; at least, the despair is
very dark that has no such will-o'-the-wisp to glimmer
in it.