Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 | Page 3

nor hearing any living being but
his spiritual director.
The effect of all this on an ardent and sensitive temperament can
scarcely be conceived; and it is not to be wondered at that the once gay
and luxurious Lorenzo Sforza, when emerging from this tremendous
discipline, was so wholly lost in the worn and weary Padre Francesco
that it seemed as if in fact he had died and another had stepped into his
place. The face was ploughed deep with haggard furrows, and the eyes
were as those of a man who has seen the fearful secrets of another life.
He voluntarily sought a post as far removed as possible from the scenes
of his early days, so as more completely to destroy his identity with the
past; and he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of awakening
to a higher spiritual life the indolent, self-indulgent monks of his order,
and the ignorant peasantry of the vicinity.
But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been

baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and
inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and
convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and
indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,--that the curse of
Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under awful visions
of truths which no one around him will regard. In early life the
associate only of the cultivated and the refined, Father Francesco could
not but experience at times an insupportable ennui in listening to the
confessions of people who had never learned either to think or to feel
with any degree of distinctness, and whom his most fervent
exhortations could not lift above the most trivial interests of a mere
animal life. He was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the
monks, of their puerility, of their selfishness and self-indulgence, of
their hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly discouraged with their
inextricable labyrinths of deception. A melancholy deep as the grave
seized on him, and he redoubled his austerities, in the hope that by
making life painful he might make it also short.
But the first time that the clear, sweet tones of Agnes rang ill his ears at
the confessional, and her words, so full of unconscious poetry and
repressed genius, came like a strain of sweet music through the grate,
he felt at his heart a thrill to which it had long been a stranger, and
which seemed to lift the weary, aching load from off his soul, as if
some invisible angel had borne it up on his wings.
In his worldly days he had known women as the gallants in Boccaccio's
romances knew them, and among them one enchantress whose
sorceries had kindled in his heart one of those fatal passions which burn
out the whole of a man's nature, and leave it, like a sacked city, only a
smouldering heap of ashes. Deepest, therefore, among his vows of
renunciation had been those which divided him from all womankind.
The gulf that parted him and them was in his mind deep as hell, and he
thought of the sex only in the light of temptation and danger. For the
first time in his life, an influence serene, natural, healthy, and sweet
breathed over him from the mind of a woman,--an influence so
heavenly and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it, but rather
opened his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid chamber
naturally breathes freer when the fresh air is admitted.

How charming it was to find his most spiritual exhortations seized
upon with the eager comprehension of a nature innately poetic and
ideal: Nay, it sometimes seemed to him as if the suggestions which he
gave her dry and leafless she brought again to him in miraculous
clusters of flowers, like the barren rod of Joseph, which broke into
blossoms when he was betrothed to the spotless Mary; and yet, withal,
she was so humbly unconscious, so absolutely ignorant of the beauty of
all she said and thought, that she impressed him less as a mortal woman
than as one of those divine miracles in feminine form of which he had
heard in the legends of the saints.
Thenceforward his barren, discouraged life began to blossom with
wayside flowers,--and he mistrusted not the miracle, because the
flowers were all heavenly The pious thought or holy admonition that he
saw trodden under the swinish feet of the monks he gathered up again
in hope,--she would understand it; and gradually all his thoughts
became like carrier-doves, which, having once learned the way to a
favorite haunt, are ever fluttering to return