Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 | Page 2

of luxury that
could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The
whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung
in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain
amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that
strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden
histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy was
so fertile.
He was listening to Elsie, as she kneeled, with that easy air of
superiority which marks a practised man of the world, yet with a grave
attention which showed that her communication had awakened the
deepest interest in his mind. Every few moments he moved slightly in
his seat, and interrupted the flow of the narrative by an inquiry
concisely put, in tones which, clear and low, had a solemn and severe

distinctness, producing, in the still, dusky twilight of the church, an
almost ghostly effect.
When the communication was over, he stepped out of the confessional
and said to Elsie in parting,--"My daughter, you have done well to take
this in time. The devices of Satan in our corrupt times are numerous
and artful, and they who keep the Lord's sheep must not sleep. Before
many days I will call and examine the child; meanwhile I approve your
course."
It was curious to see the awe-struck, trembling manner in which old
Elsie, generally so intrepid and commanding, stood before this man in
his brown rough woollen gown with his corded waist; but she had an
instinctive perception of the presence of the man of superior birth no
less than a reverence for the man of religion.
After she had departed from the church, the Capuchin stood lost in
thought; and to explain his reverie, we must throw some further light
on his history.
Il Padre Francesco, as his appearance and manner intimated, was in
truth from one of the most distinguished families of Florence. He was
one of those whom an ancient writer characterizes as "men of longing
desire." Born with a nature of restless stringency that seemed to doom
him never to know repose, excessive in all things, he had made early
trial of ambition, of war, and of what the gallants of his time called
love,--plunging into all the dissipated excesses of a most dissolute age,
and outdoing in luxury and extravagance the foremost of his
companions.
The wave of a great religious impulse--which in our times would have
been called a revival--swept over the city of Florence, and bore him,
with multitudes of others, to listen to the fervid preaching of the
Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola; and amid the crowd that
trembled, wept, and beat their breasts under his awful denunciations, he,
too, felt within himself a heavenly call,--the death of an old life, and the
uprising of a new purpose.
The colder manners and more repressed habits of modern times can
give no idea of the wild fervor of a religious revival among a people so
passionate and susceptible to impressions as the Italians. It swept
society like a spring torrent from the sides of the Apennines, bearing all
before it. Houses were sacked with religious fervor by penitent owners,

and licentious pictures and statuary and books, and all the thousand
temptations and appliances of a luxurious age, were burned in the great
public square. Artists convicted of impure and licentious designs threw
their palettes and brushes into the expiatory flames, and retired to
convents, till called forth by the voice of the preacher, and bid to turn
their art into higher channels. Since the days of Saint Francis no such
profound religious impulse had agitated the Italian community.
In our times a conversion is signalized by few outward changes,
however deep the inner life; but the life of the Middle Ages was
profoundly symbolical, and always required the help of material images
in its expression.
The gay and dissolute young Lorenzo Sforza took leave of the world
with rites of awful solemnity. He made his will and disposed of all his
worldly property, and assembling his friends, bade them the farewell of
a dying man. Arrayed as for the grave, he was laid in his coffin, and
thus carried from his stately dwelling by the brethren of the
Misericordia, who, in their ghostly costume, with mournful chants and
lighted candles, bore him to the tomb of his ancestors, where the coffin
was deposited in the vault, and its occupant passed the awful hours of
the night in darkness and solitude. Thence he was carried, the next day,
almost in a state of insensibility, to a neighboring convent of the
severest order, where, for some weeks, he observed a penitential retreat
of silence and prayer, neither seeing