Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 | Page 8

gayly along the beach with her flowers and vines fluttering
from her gay striped apron, and her cheeks flushed with exercise and
pleasure,--sometimes stopping and turning with animation to her
grandmother to point out the various floral treasures that enamelled
every crevice and rift of the steep wall of rock which rose
perpendicularly above their heads in that whole line of the shore which
is crowned with the old city of Sorrento: and surely never did rocky
wall show to the open sea a face more picturesque and flowery. The
deep red cliff was hollowed here and there into fanciful grottos, draped
with every varied hue and form of vegetable beauty. Here a crevice
high in air was all abloom with purple gillyflower, and depending in
festoons above it the golden blossoms of the broom; here a cleft
seemed to be a nestling-place for a colony of gladiolus, with its
crimson flowers and blade-like leaves; here the silver-frosted foliage of
the miller-geranium, or of the wormwood, toned down the extravagant
brightness of other blooms by its cooler tints. In some places it seemed
as if a sort of floral cascade were tumbling confusedly over the rocks,
mingling all hues and all forms in a tangled mass of beauty.
"Well, well," said old Elsie, as Agnes pointed to some superb
gillyflowers which grew nearly half-way up the precipice,--"is the child
possessed? You have all the gorge in your apron already. Stop looking,
and let us hurry on."
After a half-hour's walk, they came to a winding staircase cut in the
rock, which led them a zigzag course up through galleries and grottos
looking out through curious windows and loop-holes upon the sea, till
finally they emerged at the old sculptured portal of a shady garden
which was surrounded by the cloistered arcades of the Convent of Saint

Agnes.
The Convent of Saint Agnes was one of those monuments in which the
piety of the Middle Ages delighted to commemorate the triumphs of
the new Christianity over the old Heathenism.
The balmy climate and paradisiacal charms of Sorrento and the
adjacent shores of Naples had made them favorite resorts during the
latter period of the Roman Empire,--a period when the whole civilized
world seemed to human view about to be dissolved in the corruption of
universal sensuality. The shores of Baiae were witnesses of the orgies
and cruelties of Nero and a court made in his likeness, and the
palpitating loveliness of Capri became the hot-bed of the unnatural
vices of Tiberius. The whole of Southern Italy was sunk in a
debasement of animalism and ferocity which seemed irrecoverable, and
would have been so, had it not been for the handful of salt which a
Galilean peasant had about that time east into the putrid, fermenting
mass of human society.
We must not wonder at the zeal which caused the artistic Italian nature
to love to celebrate the passing away of an era of unnatural vice and
demoniac cruelty by visible images of the purity, the tenderness, the
universal benevolence which Jesus had brought into the world.
Some time about the middle of the thirteenth century, it had been a
favorite enterprise of a princess of a royal family in Naples to erect a
convent to Saint Agnes, the guardian of female purity, out of the
wrecks and remains of an ancient temple of Venus, whose white pillars
and graceful acanthus-leaves once crowned a portion of the precipice
on which the town was built, and were reflected from the glassy blue of
the sea at its feet. It was said that this princess was the first lady abbess.
Be that as it may, it proved to be a favorite retreat for many ladies of
rank and religious aspiration, whom ill-fortune in some of its varying
forms led to seek its quiet shades, and it was well and richly endowed
by its royal patrons.
It was built after the manner of conventual buildings generally,--in a
hollow square, with a cloistered walk around the inside looking upon a
garden.
The portal at which Agnes and her grandmother knocked, after
ascending the winding staircase cut in the precipice, opened through an
arched passage into this garden.

As the ponderous door swung open, it was pleasant to hear the lulling
sound of a fountain, which came forth with a gentle patter, like that of
soft summer rain, and to see the waving of rose-bushes and golden
jessamines, and smell the perfumes of orange-blossoms mingling with
those of a thousand other flowers.
The door was opened by an odd-looking portress. She might be
seventy-five or eighty; her cheeks were of the color of very yellow
parchment drawn in dry wrinkles; her eyes were those large, dark,
lustrous ones so common in her country, but seemed, in the general
decay