Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 | Page 4

thither.
Such is the wonderful power of human sympathy, that the discovery
even of the existence of a soul capable of understanding our inner life
often operates as a perfect charm; every thought, and feeling, and
aspiration carries with it a new value, from the interwoven
consciousness that attends it of the worth it would bear to that other
mind; so that, while that person lives, our existence is doubled in value,
even though oceans divide us.
The cloud of hopeless melancholy which had brooded over the mind of
Father Francesco lifted and sailed away, he knew not why, he knew not
when. A secret joyfulness and alacrity possessed his spirits; his prayers
became more fervent and his praises more frequent. Until now, his
meditations had been most frequently those of fear and wrath,--the
awful majesty of God, the terrible punishment of sinners, which he
conceived with all that haggard, dreadful sincerity of vigor which
characterized the modern Etruscan phase of religion of which the
"Inferno" of Dante was the exponent and the out-come. His preachings
and his exhortations had dwelt on that lurid world seen by the severe
Florentine, at whose threshold hope forever departs, and around whose
eternal circles of living torture the shivering spirit wanders dismayed
and blasted by terror.

He had been, shocked and discouraged to find how utterly vain had
been his most intense efforts to stem the course of sin by presenting
these images of terror: how hard natures had listened to them with only
a coarse and cruel appetite, which seemed to increase their hardness
and brutality; and how timid ones had been withered by them, like
flowers scorched by the blast of a furnace; how, in fact, as in the case
of those cruel executions and bloody tortures then universal in the
jurisprudence of Europe, these pictures of eternal torture seemed to
exert a morbid demoralizing influence which hurried on the growth of
iniquity.
But since his acquaintance with Agnes, without his knowing exactly
why, thoughts of the Divine Love had floated into his soul, filling it
with a golden cloud like that which of old rested over the mercy-seat in
that sacred inner temple where the priest was admitted alone. He
became more affable and tender, more tolerant to the erring, more fond
of little children; would stop sometimes to lay his hand on the head of a
child, or to raise up one who lay overthrown in the street. The song of
little birds and the voices of animal life became to him full of
tenderness; and his prayers by the sick and dying seemed to have a
melting power, such as he had never known before. It was spring in his
soul,--soft, Italian spring,--such as brings out the musky breath of the
cyclamen, and the faint, tender perfume of the primrose, in every moist
dell of the Apennines.
A year passed in this way, perhaps the best and happiest of his troubled
life,--a year in which, insensibly to himself, the weekly interviews with
Agnes at the confessional became the rallying-points around which the
whole of his life was formed, and she the unsuspected spring of his
inner being.
It was his duty, he said to himself, to give more than usual time and
thought to the working and polishing of this wondrous jewel which had
so unexpectedly been intrusted to him for the adorning of his Master's
crown; and so long as he conducted with the strictest circumspection of
his office, what had he to fear in the way of so delightful a duty? He
had never touched her hand; never had even the folds of her passing
drapery brushed against his garments of mortification and renunciation;
never, even in pastoral benediction, had he dared lay his hand on that
beautiful head. It is true, he had not forbidden himself to raise his

glance sometimes when he saw her coming in at the church-door and
gliding up the aisle with downcast eyes, and thoughts evidently so far
above earth, that she seemed, like one of Frà Angelico's angels, to be
moving on a cloud, so encompassed with stillness and sanctity that he
held his breath as she passed.
But in the confession of Dame Elsie that morning he had received a
shock which threw his whole interior being into a passionate agitation
which dismayed and astonished him.
The thought of Agnes, his spotless lamb, exposed to lawless and
licentious pursuit, of whose nature and probabilities his past life gave
him only too clear an idea, was of itself a very natural source of anxiety.
But Elsie had unveiled to him her plans for her marriage, and consulted
him on the propriety of placing Agnes immediately under the
protection of the husband she had chosen for her; and it was this part