Chapter XX (4)

The young Rahel, endowed with great intelligence and unerring tact, united to a truly kind heart, was valued and sought by every one as soon as she appeared in society. She was exceedingly amiable, full of an obliging good temper that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy. Rare too was her loyalty; not only was her soul incapable of falsehood, but of any want of sincerity. Her husband who had the good taste not to be jealous of his wife's superiority and success, said of her "that she did not think to lose by showing herself as God had made her, or gain by hiding anything." "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of respect--the rest is only external regularity and conventionality," she often said to those who lavished upon her expressions of respect and admiration.

Unhappily for Mlle. Levin, circumstances concurred in alienating her from her family. Her mother and brothers, notwithstanding their ample fortune, showed a rapacity worthy of their race, and most unlike Rahel's broad and generous ideas; and her position would have been pitiable, but for the illustrious friends who frequented her mother's house. Among them the young girl forgot the petty meanness of her home life; and inexhaustible in ideas, perceptive faculty, and wit, she handled the gravest subjects with delicate skill, and almost as if she were playing with them. Full of unfailing good temper, she could discuss the most varied, the most opposite subjects, without dogmatism or eccentricity.

But this want of union with her family, which had deprived her of the domestic happiness so indispensable to every affectionate woman had rendered her paradoxical and even a little sceptical. See, for example, what she wrote to her youngest sister, who had consulted her about a proposal of marriage: "The want of durability in everything, and the inevitable separation between an object and its {842} motive, afford, you see, the final explanation of all that is human. You do not wish to belong to humanity; very well, destroy yourself. I feel quite differently: only transitory things, only what is human can tranquillize and console me." How at variance is this bitterness with the ardent hopefulness of the spiritual Eugénie de Guérin! and how excellent a proof, if we needed any new one, that true happiness is unattainable without that deep religious feeling which raises us above all passing things! Charlotte Brontë had at least that Protestant severity which stifles all tender quailing of the heart and soul, like a miser trembling lest he should lose a farthing of the merits of his sacrifice; but poor Rahel possessed only the intellectual resources of the mind, and they can do little for us.

Goethe, whose countrywoman she was so proud of being; Goethe, little inclined to exaggerate the value of a woman's mind, took pleasure in calling her a generous girl. "She has powerful emotions and a careless way of expressing them," he said: "the better you know her, the more you feel yourself attracted and gently enthralled."

But it was a long time before she enthralled any one. At last one of her friends, Varnhagen von Ense, a young man twenty-six years old, offered her his hand. Let him describe to us the charm of his first interview with Rahel.

"From the first, I must say that she made me experience a very rare
happiness, that of contemplating for the first time a complete
being--complete in intelligence and heart, a perfect union of nature
and cultivation. Everywhere I saw harmony, equilibrium, views as
naïve as they were original, striking in their grandeur as in their
novelty, and always in accordance with her slightest actions. And
all was pervaded with a sentiment of the purest humanity, guided by
an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble
self-forgetfulness in the presence, of the joys and griefs of
others."

Rahel was then thirty-six years old, and this great disparity of age, added to her want of beauty and fortune, must have inspired her with doubts of the duration of a feeling, which perhaps her heart, accustomed to independence, did not at first reciprocate. But in Germany marriages are not made as they are in France; people do not marry without knowing each other, or with a precipitation which might lead one to suppose that on both sides there was something to conceal, or that the intention was to make a good bargain of duty. According to the fashion of their country the two friends were betrothed, and were then forced to separate.

"I am not afraid; I will wait for you; I know you will never forsake me," wrote the indulgent Rahel eight years later, when a Frenchwoman would have lost patience a thousand times over.

In France, where dower, beauty, name, or position, rank before affection, such a separation would certainly have proved fatal. Had he no cause to fear that some one else might supplant him with Rahel? Was she untroubled by dread of the cruel dangers that threaten and disturb the affections? Might not her heart, naturally sceptical, and shaken by contact with the world, distrust the effect of opinion upon so young a man? "But true love has nothing to fear from worldly talk or material considerations; a whiff of a passing breeze cannot destroy strongly rooted affections, whose living germ lies sheltered in the depths of the heart." Such love can wait, for it does not know how to change. Such love was Rahel's; was it Varnhagen's? We shall see.

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Rahel was not an author, and had no thought of publication; it was only after her death that her husband sought some slight consolation in publishing her letters. These letters which make three volumes, were written in the course of forty years, and therefore they reveal the different phases of development in the young girl, the independent woman, and the matron. Through the generous feelings which she expresses, with a soul sympathizing with all sorts of interests, there pierces a certain delicate irony which seems to find pleasure in following out to the end any singular or original idea: We feel painfully that this woman has lost much, suffered deeply. In the life of Rahel the Jewess, as in that of Charlotte the Protestant, we discern the absence of our Saviour's cross; we see nowhere the gentle vision of the Virgin Mother.

In one of her letters, Mlle. Levin describes the impression which a visit to a Catholic convent had made upon her mind. She had entered into the services in the chapel like an artist: "I would gladly go there again, if it were only to hear the music, and breathe in the odor of the incense," said she. But the mortifications of the religious seemed to her more eccentric than touching; she pitied them for having to fulfil the functions of gardener and cook, to prepare medicines and feel the pulse of their patients. "Without exception their hands looked coarse," she said, "and their masculine tread sounded like the tramp of a patrol." And yet later in life Rahel was to perform, voluntarily, the same work as these nuns, and moreover she had a true sentiment of piety, which sometimes rose to an expression of faith.

"In moments of suffering," she wrote, "how happy faith makes me feel! I love to rest upon it as on a downy pillow."

We read these words so full of simple piety, with a full heart, thinking sadly how little assistance this woman would have needed to become an ardent convert to the true religion. It is really surprising that she should not have sought out Christianity.

"Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling," she wrote to a friend: "despair or discouragement are the only fruits of dry reasoning; examine yourself carefully, and dread above all things the decisions of wisdom unenlightened by the heart."

Rahel and Varnhagen had agreed to meet again one day; but absence is often fatal to the strongest ties, and more than once this one was on the point of snapping.

"A woman who has passed thirty," says our author, "may well fear lest youth, proved by the parish register, should win the day against youth of mind and soul."

It would have been very hard to find a rival to a woman so gifted as Rahel; but the first moment of enthusiasm over, Varnhagen began to think that his betrothed had been very prompt in her acceptance of the promises by which he had bound himself when a young and inexperienced man; and perhaps his memory recalled certain confidences of ill-matched pairs, who had assured him that generosity is a snare.

"For nothing in the world, of course, would he have renounced this affection of which he was proud; but he thought that she would accept his fidelity without his name, and he presumed to offer his devotion in lieu of the projected union."

Rahel could not accept a compromise as humiliating to her heart as dangerous to her reputation. She refused it, but--and this was less dignified--she refused sadly and plainly to free Varnhagen from his engagement. This was what she wrote:

"Bitterness at least equals suffering, when you, the single, solitary soul who knows me thoroughly, would turn away from me, or what is the same thing, when you would be false to yourself, and forsake me: hard words, my friend, but none the less true. I must be severe to the only being who has given me a right to expect anything from him. In you alone had I hoped, and I think I should insult you in saying that I had ceased to hope."

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To this bitter trial was added another one, which was very severe, though merely connected with material matters, especially for a person who was no longer young. Half abandoned, and half _exploitée_ by her family, Rahel had become poor. Valiant and strong, she had long succeeded in hiding from her friends the privations which she imposed upon herself, in order to maintain her household properly. She had just lost her mother, and one of her brothers, who died blessing her for her devotion, and these afflictions must be added to the money troubles, which increased every day. Alas! there was no consolation in this distress, for Rahel could not say like the august daughter of a great king, "I thank God for two things; first, for having made me a Christian, and next, for having made me unhappy."

Economy was not her chief virtue, and kindness, that luxury which she could not live without, led her to deprive herself of the necessaries of life, in order that her servants might want for nothing. "It is mere selfishness," she said, laughing; "I prefer spoiling them to spoiling myself."

The misfortunes of war completed the ruin of her purse and her health. She assisted her countrymen by collecting contributions, and when money failed, she paid with personal exertions, fulfilling the admirable precept, "When you have given everything, give yourself." The vehemence of her feelings exhausted her strength, and her frail health gave way beneath the excess of privation and fatigue. She fell ill, and was forced to keep her bed for three months.

Her resources were exhausted, and poverty approached with great strides. She decided to ask one of her brothers, who was rich, to send her a little money; but he not only refused, but took a cruel pleasure in taunting the poor girl, with what he called her crazy liberality.

For six months the war intercepted all communications, so that she could receive no tidings of him whom she still called her betrothed. But this anxiety was the last. On waking one morning Rahel saw a letter which had just been brought in, and by a sudden inspiration, worthy of one who had never despaired, she guessed what this note contained: "a living hope, which never dies out in valiant souls, cried out that at last she had grasped happiness;" and the hope proved true: ten days later she married August Varnhagen, who having recovered from his hesitation, fulfilled his vows with a good will.

"You will never repent marrying me," she wrote to him, with naïveté, a little while before her marriage; "Love me, or love me not, as God wills; whatever happens I shall be yours for ever, you can rely on me: I am constant, as you have been constant. Rahel shall never fail you."

Her husband was afterward made Prussian minister, and Rahel as ambassadress was once more surrounded as in the pleasantest days of her youth.

She was sixty-two years old when the disease attacked her of which she died. Varnhagen never left her, or ceased trying to make her forget her sufferings by reading the books to her which she loved best; and Heinrich Heine, learning that she was ordered to apply fresh rose-leaves to her inflamed eyes, sent her his first poems, lying at the bottom of a basket of exquisite roses.

Madame von Varnhagen had always loved the Bible, and, especially, Jewess though she was, the New Testament. She was never tired of listening to the history of the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. One day finding herself more feeble, she said, taking her husband's hand and pressing it on her heart: "I feel better, my friend. I have been thinking a long time of Jesus, and it seems as if I had never felt as at this moment how truly He is my brother, and the brother of all men. It has comforted me." . . . These were her last words.

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Do these women explain _the women of our times_? It is at least disputable; but we must recognize in them three interesting characters. We will not try to compare them; the differences between them are self-evident; and certainly though Eugénie de Guérin, the Frenchwoman and the Catholic, played in a worldly sense the most obscure part, no person of elevated views can contest the fact that hers was the most beautiful life of the three.

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From The Lamp.

HENRI PERREYVE.

The Church of France sustained a great loss when, in the flower of his age, Henri Perreyve was cut off. Had his life been prolonged he would doubtless have attained a high position in the diocese of Paris, and done a very great work. A memorial of him--for it can hardly be called a "Life"--has been recently given to the world by his friend and confidant, Pére Gratry of the French Oratory; and thus the record of this young priest is now made immortal by the eloquent pen of one of the greatest spiritual writers in France. Henri Perreyve was born in April, 1831, and died June, 1865. His was, therefore, but a brief life--brief, but brilliant, like a short, bright summer-day.

The comparison is not an inapt one. The life of this young man was, compared to that of the minority of his fellow-creatures, a bright and happy one. No great exterior sorrows met him during his earthly career; and for the interior, there could not be much real suffering for one who from his early childhood had given himself to God, and who followed the standard of his Divine Master with a courage that could not be dismayed, with an ardor which was never cooled. He was a son of Christian parents, who early discerned his genius, and gave no opposition to the workings of God's grace in him. He was educated at the Lycée St. Louis; but he did not distinguish himself there. He was, however, at the head of the catechism-class in St. Sulpice; for the child's heart was given to God, and he could not devote himself ardently to secular studies until he had learnt to consecrate even them to the service of God. At twelve years old he made his first communion. This act, which is the turning-point in the life of so many, proved such to him. In after-years he thus described it:

"May 29, 1859.

"You know that I always date from my first communion the first call
from God to the ecclesiastical state. This thought gives me
happiness. I can recall now, as if it were yesterday, the blessed
moment when, having received our Lord at the holy table, I returned
to my place, and there kneeling on that red-velvet bench, which I
can see now, I promised our Lord, with a movement of sincere
affection to belong to him always, and to him only. I feel still the
kind of certainty I had from that moment of being accepted. I feel
the warmth of those first tears for the love of Jesus, which fell
from my childish eyes; and the ineffable shrinking of a soul, which
for the first time had spoken to God, had seen him and heard him.
Intimate and profound joy of the sacerdotal espousals!"

As years passed on, he kept his faith with his Lord. Naturally seeking his friends from among those like-minded with himself, he became soon surrounded by and closely bound to some of the most remarkable and {846} devoted men of the day. The Père Gratry was the guide of his youth; and among those who followed his direction were a group of young ardent men, burning to devote themselves to the cause of God and his Church. Meeting a little later on with the Père Pététot, they became the foundation-stones of the newly-revived French Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Henri Perreyve was obliged, however, before long, by the feebleness of his health, to withdraw from the congregation; but he was ever linked to it by the ties of the closest affection. Père Charles Perraud, one of the Oratorians, was throughout life his bosom friend. They learnt together and prayed together, and were called together to serve God in the priesthood. Charles Perraud was the first to attain this dignity; and on the occasion of his saying his first mass, Henri thus wrote to him.

"Hyères, Dec. 16, 1857.

"May the Lord be with thee! These are the sacramental words of the
deacon, the only ones I have the right of addressing to you, my dear
friend and brother, before the holy altar. I address them to you
with all the fulness of my heart, and with all the deep meaning that
befits these holy words. Yes, may the Lord be with you, dear
brother!

"With you this morning at the altar of your first mass, to accept
your bridal promise, and reply to your perpetual vow by that
reciprocal love which passes all other love. With you during the
whole of this great day, to maintain the perfume of celestial
incense in your soul, and the odor of the sacrifice which has begun,
but which--thanks be to God!--has no ending. With you to-morrow, to
make you feel that joy in God has somewhat of eternity in it, and
that it differs from the joys of earth because we can taste it
constantly without ever exhausting it. With you when, soon after
your holy ecstasy of joy, you will feel that you must be a priest
for men; and you will go down from Mount Tabor to go to those who
suffer, to those who are ignorant, to those who are hungering and
thirsting for the true light and the true life. With you in your
sorrows to console you; with you in your joys to sanctify them; with
you in your desires to make them fruitful.

"'_Memor sit omnis sacrificii tui,
et holocaustum tuum pingue fiat_.'

"With you, my Charles, if you are alone in life, if our friendship
be taken from you, if you have to walk on leaning only on the arm of
a Divine Friend.

"With you, young priest, with you growing old in the conflicts of
the priesthood, and in the service of God and men. With you on the
day of your death, which shall bring to your lips, by the hands of
another, that same Jesus who has so often been carried to others by
your trembling hands.

"O my friend! I gather up all that my heart can contain of happy
desires, wishes, and hopes for you. I gather them all up in one
single wish: May the Lord be with thee always!

"It will be the life of a holy priest on earth; one day it will be
heaven.

"The Lord be with thee!

"My Charles, bless me! I embrace yon tenderly, and feel myself with
you pressed against the Heart of the Divine Master, beloved for
ever.

"Henri Perreyve."

Henri Perreyve was advancing rapidly toward manhood when the Providence of God threw him in the path of one who was to exercise a powerful influence over his future. While Henri was a boy at school. Father Lacordaire held the pulpit of Notre Dame; and it might truly be said, "All Paris was moved." What those wonderful conferences did toward undoing the fatal spiritual havoc wrought at the Revolution, and in subsequent years, cannot be recorded in any mortal history. It was given to men to see somewhat of the result of the labor; but the seeds of eternal life are scattered broadcast by a preacher's hand, and fall hither and thither unknown to any but God.

Henri Perreyve, as a boy of thirteen, found his delight in listening to the conferences. Six years passed by, and found him still the attentive disciple at the feet of the great master of minds at that period; but he was too diffident and retiring to seek a personal acquaintance. One day, however, a friend insisted on introducing him. Father Lacordaire was busy, and the interview lasted but a moment; but Henri Perreyve resembled the ideal we may not unreasonably form of the young man on whom our Lord looked and loved. Nature had been prodigal of her gifts, and genius and innocence lent additional charm to his exterior beauty. Lacordaire's keen eye had discerned the treasures that could be developed in that ardent soul.

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A few days after this hasty introduction, Henri was astonished by the entrance of the great Dominican into his room.

"I received you very ill the other day," he said; "I come to ask your pardon, and talk with you."

From that day began the closest friendship and intimacy between them. They were literally like father and son; and at the death of Lacordaire he bequeathed to his dear friend all that a poor monk had to leave--his letters and papers. Henri Perreyve is said to have been the being on earth best loved by Lacordaire. "You shall be," wrote the latter to him, "forever in my heart as a son and as a friend." Henri, by the pure devotion of his early youth to God, had deserved some great gift, and it was given to him in the friendship of Lacordaire. That the rest of his life was spent in an earnest endeavor to imitate his friend, we can scarcely wonder at Had he lived, no doubt he would have been a second Lacordaire; but the "sword wore out the sheath," the frail body could not sustain the burning soul within. Lacordaire died in the prime of life, Perreyve in the flower of his youth.

A few more years from the time we are speaking of and he was made priest. Work poured in on him. "The work of ten priests was offered to him day by day." He refused a good deal; but what he reserved would have been enough for three, and he had most feeble health.

He was preacher at the Sorbonne, director of the Conferences of St. Barbe, "sermons everywhere, special works on all sides, endless correspondence, confessions, directions, reunions of young people, incessant visits."

Frequent illness attacked him, and obliged him to withdraw for a time from his labors; but he returned to them with new zest. Of his literary works the one most generally admired is the "Journée des Malades." Here his genius was aided by that personal experience of illness which enables a person so readily to enter into the feelings of another. But many can know and feel the weariness and temptations which beset a sick person, and be very incapable of putting it into words, while M. Perreyve's "Journée des Malades" will comfort many a heart.

His "Rosa Ferrucci," an exquisitely written little biography, is already to some extent known to our readers. He likewise published "Méditations sur le Chemin de la Croix; Entretiens sur l'Eglise Catholique;" and he edited with the greatest care, and wrote an introduction for, the celebrated Letters from Father Lacordaire to young people. He also wrote a "Station at the Sorbonne," and "Poland," besides various little _brochures_.

The chief work of the Abbé Perreyve was the guidance and influence over young men and boys.

The Conferences at St. Barbe were listened to by a most attentive auditory of this class, and his power over his hearers was large and increasing.

"He possessed in a rare degree," says Père Gratry, "that sacred art of speaking to men, of speaking to each one, and yet speaking to all. Hence the universal success of his discourses."

One of the great orators of the day, after hearing him preach at the Sorbonne, exclaimed, "He who has not heard that, does not know how far human eloquence can go."

The Count de Montalembert was one day among the audience. He wrote afterward: "I have been touched and delighted in a way I have not been for twenty years; since the time when he of whom you are the worthy successor enchanted my youth at Nôtre Dame."

But as the Père Gratry justly observes, his success in colleges such as the Lycée St. Louis and St. Barbe is still more remarkable than that at the Sorbonne. One secret of it might be found in an acknowledgment that he made to his friend. He had for these {848} young people such a love, such a respect, such an idea of the _possible future_ of each soul, such an esteem of the hidden treasures in each heart, that he seemed to hold the key of their souls, and to come before them as the friend of each.

On one occasion he had to speak on the most delicate and difficult topic it was possible a priest could have to deal with before such an assembly. He told a story: he spoke of a death which he had witnessed, and of the crime which had caused that death; a crime which is not punished by human laws, but which works ruin and death on all sides.

"And this man," said he, with that voice of his which thrilled to the hearts of his hearers--"and this man is in society honorable and refined; perhaps even not without religion. Gentlemen, is this the honor that shall be yours, and is this the religion which you will have?"

Never can those who heard him that day forget it; they were moved to the very depths of their souls, and tears flowed from the eyes of those who are not easily made to weep. When he had concluded, many of his auditors gathered around him said: "Thanks, sir; you have opened our eyes for ever."

The popularity of M. Perreyve survived even the severe trial of having to address the boys of the preparatory school and the students of St. Barbe at an hour on Sunday which would otherwise have been at their own disposal. The sermon was to be given every fortnight, and the audience the first time were in anything but an amiable mood. The next day a petition was sent up by them that the sermons might be given every week.

Thus his life passed away; and the end hurried on all too rapidly for those who loved him and hung upon his words. His lungs were again affected, and he passed the last winter of his life m the south of France. There he thought he had improved, and wrote flattering accounts of himself; so that when he returned to Paris on Palm Sunday, April the 9th, his family and friends were in consternation at his altered looks. Doctors could not reassure them, and the complaint made rapid progress. It was a terrible confirmation of his relatives' fears when they found he was unconscious of his danger, and, like all those in the same fatal disease, busy in making plans for the future. He planned how he should resume his sermons at the Sorbonne, even while he was too weak to bear the fasting necessary for his Easter Communion; and it was with great difficulty, and leaning on the arm of his friend the Abbé Bernard, that he communicated on May 1st in the little chapel of our Lady of Sion, close to his home. He then went into the country, where he rallied for a short time, and then grew rapidly worse. The news of his change spread amongst those who loved him because they knew him, and those who loved him because they knew his worth in the Church.

A "league" of prayers was organized for his recovery, and Henri began to realize his state. He looked the prospect calmly in the face. Fame, opportunities for doing good, the love and esteem of friends, were instantly and willingly resigned.

"I think of death, and accept it without regret or fear. I am grateful for all these prayers for me; but I do not desire life. I cannot pray with that intention."

Then he thought of his sins, and his unworthiness, and of the Divine Face he was about to behold; and he shrank back. He was reminded of the mercy of God. "Truly," he said, "I who have so often preached to others the mercy of God ought to trust in it myself."

His greatest grief was the rarity of his communions. He consoled himself by saying: "Missionaries are often obliged to pass a long time without communion, and then one feels God _also_ by privation."

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A love of solitude began to grow on him, for he was preparing himself to be alone with God. When begged to try a new treatment, he consented, saying, "I ask myself, as I often do, what would Père Lacordaire have done in my place? It seems to me he would have thought it an indication of Providence."

He returned to Paris; and every effort of medical science was made to arrest the malady, but all in vain. An alarming fainting fit on the 14th of June made his friends fear death was nearer to him than they had imagined, and the Abbé Bernard thought it right to warn him.

"You surprise me," he said quietly. "I thought myself very ill, but not so near death; but it is so much the better; you must give me the holy viaticum and extreme unction."

The abbé went to fetch the blessed sacrament and holy oils from St. Sulpice, the parish church of their childhood, of their first communion, where they had prayed and wept together, where they had asked many things from God, where they had together been consecrated priests. There their whole Christian life had run by; and now one had come to fetch for the other divine succor for his last hours.

The invalid insisted on rising, and was dressed in his cassock to receive the holy sacraments. Père Gratry and other friends were present. "I can see him now," says the former, "as full of grace and energy as ever, smiling as usual, and saying, 'I am in perfect peace, dear father--in perfect peace.' I shall remember that sight all my life, thank God; that noble bearing, that face pale as marble, those large speaking eyes, his tender glance, and his last words, 'in perfect peace.'" He made his profession of faith, begged pardon of all whom he had offended or scandalized, thanked all for the kindness they had shown him; and implored them "not to say, as was too often done, 'he is in heaven;' but to pray much for him after his death." Then he said the "Te Deum" in thanksgiving for all the mercies of his life; and at last he said to his friend, "You cannot think what interior joy I feel since you told me I was going to die."

The next day the Archbishop of Paris came to see him. He would be dressed in his cassock to receive the visit, and would kneel for the bishop's blessing. He then had a long private conversation with him.

To this dying chamber came some of the most celebrated names in Paris: Père Pététot, the Count do Montalembert, the Prince de Broglie, Augustin Cochin, Mgr. Buguet, the Vicar-general, the curé of St. Sulpice, General Zamoiski, and a hundred others. One of them said, "We are a long way off from knowing now what he is. We shall know it one day." "Dear friend," said he to Father Adolphe Perreud of the Oratory, "we shall not cease to work _together_ for the cause of God and his church. Before you leave me, give me your blessing." "On condition you give me yours," said the Oratorian; and blessing each other, the friends parted for ever on earth. His bodily sufferings were severe. His bones were nearly through his skin, and his cough shook him to pieces. He grew weaker and weaker, and at last the end came. "Give me the crucifix, sister," said he to the nursing sister who attended on him; "not mine, but yours, that has so often rested on dying lips. If I die to-morrow, mother, it will be my first communion anniversary." "Dear child," she answered, weeping, "we were both happy that day." "Well," he answered, "we must be still happier to-morrow."

The agony came on; he kissed the crucifix again and again, murmuring, "Lord, have pity on me; Jesus, take me soon; Jesus, soon." Suddenly a great terror seized him; his eyes were dilated with fear, gazing at something invisible to all around; and he cried out, "I am afraid, I am afraid."

{850}

The Abbé Bernard said, "You most not fear God; abandon yourself to his mercy, and say, In thee, Lord, have I hoped; let me not be confounded for ever."

He looked at him and said, "It is not God whom I fear; oh! no. I fear that they will prevent my dying." Then he grew calm.

The abbé brought him the cross of Père Lacordaire, and said, "My God, I love thee with all my heart in time and in eternity."

"Oh! yes, with all my heart," he said, kissing the image of his Lord. It was his last act and his last words.

"Depart, O Christian soul!" prayed his friends Charles and Adolphe Perreud.

"I absolve thee from all thy sins," said the Abbé Bernard; and in a few minutes the last struggle was over, and his soul was set free.

Among his papers was found the following:

"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I die in the faith of the Catholic Church, to whose service since I was twelve years old I have had the happiness of consecrating my life.

"I tenderly bless my relations and friends; I implore all those who remember me to pray for a long time for my soul, that God, turning away from the sight of my sins, may deign to receive me into the place of eternal rest and happiness. I bless once again all those who are dear to me--my relations, my benefactors, my masters, my fathers and brothers in the priesthood, my spiritual sons, the number of dear young people who have loved me, all the souls to whom I have been united on earth by the tie of the same faith and the same love in Jesus Christ."

The inscription on his tomb was chosen by himself:

"Lord, when I have seen thy glory, I shall be satisfied with it."

These words were as a key to his life. An insatiable, ardent desire for God had possessed him, animated his actions; and at last the very ardor of his longings wore out the feeble body that enclosed so grand and beautiful a soul.

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From The Dublin University Magazine.

SONNET.

Upon a rose-tree bending o'er a river
A bird from spring to summer gaily sang;
For love of its sweet friend, the rose, for ever
Its beating heart with happy music rang,
In sunshine warm and moonlight by the shore,
Whose waves afar its voice melodious bore,
Blent with its own. But when, alas! the sere
Grey autumn came, withering those blooms so dear,
Still full of love but full of sadness too,
Changed the sweet song as changed the rose's hue
Mourning each day some rich leaf disappear
Until the last had dropped into the stream,
Anguished by wintry breezes blowing keen.
Then, on the bough forlorn, mute as a dream.
Awhile the poor bird clung, and soon was seen no more.

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{851}

From Once a Week.

CARDINAL TOSTI.

BY BESSIE RAYNOR PARKER.

It was in the afternoon of Friday, the 23d of March, that Rome heard of the death of the "learned and venerable Tosti." This aged cardinal, long the director of the great establishment of San Michele, (which is a hospital and school combined,) had attained to nearly ninety years. Now he was dead, and laid out in state in his own room at San Michele, whither we went about five o'clock, and, threading the vast corridors, which run round a court blossoming with oranges and lemons, ascending a long flight of stone stairs, got into upper regions filled with a perceptible hum, soldier sentinels stationed by the opened doors, who motioned us on from room to room till we came to the last of all. These rooms were perfectly empty of all furniture, save a few book-cases under glass; but the yellow satin walls of one, and the delicately-tinted panels of another, showed that they had but lately formed the private apartments of him who was gone. Three or four temporary altars were erected in the empty space, adorned by tall unlighted candles. A thrill crept over us as we neared that last open door, a silent sentinel at either side; as we crossed the antechamber, and came in a direct line with the aperture, we saw a figure, splendidly attired, reposing on a great sloping couch of cloth of gold. The face of this figure indicated extreme age; the brow was surmounted by the bright scarlet berretta, which caught the light from the setting sun. The shrunken frame was clothed in the soft purple of its ecclesiastical rank. The hands were crossed and held a crucifix; the feet were turned up in new and pointed shoes. There he lay, Cardinal Tosti, who for five-and-twenty years was the handsomest of all the Sacred Conclave, and towered above his brethren when they walked in procession, drawing the admiration of beholders.

There was no sound, as we knelt by the dead man's couch; through the window could be seen the swift Tiber, swollen by the recent rains, and on the other side of the river rose the green slopes of the half-deserted Aventine, with its few solitary churches, Santa Sabina, Santa Alessio, and its gracious crown of trees. Here had Tosti dwelt for many a year, in rooms which looked to the golden west. Here he occupied himself with his books, and with the school for industrial and artistic pursuits which was due to his efforts at San Michele. I have never seen anything so marvellously picturesque and impressive as that dead man, lying on his couch of cloth of gold, the closing scene of a long life, which stretched back far beyond the wars of the first Napoleon, even to the period when Papal Rome received the royal refugees of the French Revolution.

Presently, a group of white-robed priests entered, and began reciting the office for the dead. This was the signal for the gathering of a little crowd of Romans. Brown-cowled monks, peasant women with their children in arms, boys and girls with large wondering dark eyes. Together they crowded to the door of the dead man's chamber, and knelt upon the floor, so that above and {852} beyond their bowed heads could be seen that pale splendor upon its shining couch. We left with reluctant footsteps, feeling a fascination in the picture which it is hard to describe.

Late in the evening, an hour after the _Ave_, the corpse was to be conveyed by torch-light to Santa Cecilia, the cardinal's titular church; and at Santa Cecilia we found ourselves in the starry night. The torches were just entering the church as we drove up; and for some minutes the doors were inexorably shut, and we feared we had lost all chance of an entrance. But we were presently admitted, and saw indeed a striking scene! The small church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, famous as being built upon the site of the young martyr's dwelling, was draped in black and gold from ceiling to pavement, and where the altar-piece is generally to be seen was a great flat gold cross on a black ground. The sanctuary was greatly enlarged for the morrow's service, and hung with black; and in the nave, not very far from the great portal, rose a large empty couch, exactly resembling that which we had seen in the cardinal's private chamber. At its foot was a low bier, whereon now lay the same white image of a man in its purple robes, and a group of attendants crowded reverentially around it, flashing torches in their hands, which formed a centre of light in the dark church, reminding one of the famous Correggio; only, instead of the new-born Babe, the illumination of humanity for all time to come, was the aged dead, no longer capable of communicating the living light of intelligence or of faith, but lying in a pale reflection under the torches, and gathering into itself all the meaning of the whole scene.

We perceived that something remarkable was about to take place, and retired discreetly behind a pillar, that our accidental presence might attract no notice. The truth was, that the cardinal was about to be laid out for the great funeral service of the morrow; and by chance we had gained admission at this purely private hour. The body was taken on the little bier into the sacristy, and there we supposed that some change was made in the raiment; when it was brought back the hands were gloved, and instead of the scarlet berretta was a plain skull-cap. Then, with difficulty and much consultation, but with perfect reverence of intention, the straight image was lifted on to the great couch; the assistant men being grouped on ladders, and an eager voluble monsignore directing the whole. The ladders, the torch-light, the mechanical difficulty of the operation, again reminded me of one of those great depositions in which the actual scene of the Cross is so vividly brought out by art. At length the dead cardinal lay placidly upon his cloth of gold, and they fetched his ring to put upon his hand, and his white mitre wherewith to clothe his gray hairs. We left them performing the last careful offices, making the strangest, the most gorgeous torch-light group in the middle of that dark church that poet or artist could conceive.

The next morning the Pope and the College of Cardinals came to officiate at the funeral mass. The square court in front of Santa Cecilia was filled with an eager crowd of Romans and _Forestieri_, with the splendid costumes of the Papal Guard, with prancing horses and old-fashioned chariots, gorgeous with gilding and color. They were much such a company of equipages as may be seen in our Kensington Museum, but so fresh and well-appointed in spite of the extreme antiquity of their design, that one felt as if carried back to the days of Whittington, Lord Mayor of London. Into Santa Cecilia itself we could not penetrate, by reason of the crowd and the stern vigilance of the soldiers, who, attired in the red-and-yellow costume designed by Michael Angelo, kept a considerable space in the nave empty for the moment when the Pope should walk from the altar to the bier. But {853} through the open door we saw the lights upon the black-draped altar and in front of that gorgeous couch, with its motionless occupant, his white mitre being now the conspicuous point in the picture. And when the Pope left the dim church and came out into the sunshine, the brilliant rays fell upon his venerable white hair and scarlet cap, while the weapons flashed and the crowd shouted, as he ascended his wonderful chariot with the black horses, and drove away.

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MISCELLANY.

_Microscopic Plants the Cause of Ague_.--Owing to the prevalence of ague in the malarial district of Ohio and Mississippi, Dr. Salisbury undertook a series of experiments in 1862, with a view to determine the microscopic characters of the expectorations of his patients. He commenced his experiments by examining the mucous secretions of those patients who had been most submitted to the malaria, and in these he detected a large amount of low forms of life, such as algae, fungi, diatomaceae, and desmidiae. At first he imagined that the presence of these organisms might be accidental, but repeated experiments convinced him that some of them were invariably associated with ague. The bodies which are constantly present in such cases he describes as being "minute oblong cells, either single or aggregated, consisting of a distinct nucleus, surrounded with a smooth cell-wall, with a highly clear, apparently empty space between the outer cell-wall and the nucleus." From these characters Dr. Salisbury concludes that the bodies are not fungi, but belong properly to the algae, in all probability being species of the genus _Palmella_. Whilst the diatomaceae and other organisms were found to be generally present the bodies just described were not found above the level at which the ague was observed. In order to ascertain exactly their source, he suspended plates of glass over the water in a certain marsh which was regarded as unhealthy. In the water which condensed upon the under surface of these plates, he found numerous palmella-like structures, and on examining the mould of the bog, he found it full of similar organisms. From repeated researches Dr. Salisbury concludes: (1.) Cryptogamic spores are carried aloft above the surface at night, in the damp exhalations which appear after sunset (2.) These bodies rise from thirty to sixty feet, never above the summit of the damp night-exhalations, and ague is similarly limited. (3.) The day-air of ague districts is free from these bodies.

_Use of Lime in Extracting Sugar_.--Peligot long ago demonstrated that owing to the insoluble nature of the compound formed of lime with sugar, the former substance would be a most valuable agent in the manufacture of the latter. Peligot's suggestion is now being carried out on a large scale in MM. Schrötter and Wellman's sugar-factory at Berlin. The molasses is mixed with the requisite quantity of hydrate of lime and alcohol in a large vat, and intimately stirred for more than half an hour. The lime compound of sugar which separates is then strained off, pressed, and washed with spirit. All the alcohol used in the process is afterward recovered by distillation. The mud-like precipitate thus produced is mixed with water and decomposed with a current of carbonic acid, which is effected in somewhat less than half an hour. The carbonate of lime is removed by filtration, and the clear liquid, containing the sugar, evaporated, decolorized with animal charcoal, and crystallized in the usual manner. The sugar furnished by this method has a very clear appearance, and is perfectly crystalline. It contains, according to polarization analysis, sixty-six per cent of sugar, twelve per cent of water, the remainder being uncrystallizable organic matter and salts. The yield, of course, varies with the richness and degree of concentration of the raw material; on an average, thirty pounds of sugar were obtained from one hundred pounds of molasses.

{854}

_Russian Coal Resources_.--Recent explorations and surveys appear to show that the Russian coal resources are much vaster even than those of the United States of America. In the Oural district coal has been found in various places, both in the east and west sides of the mountain-chain; its value being greatly enhanced by the fact that an abundance of iron is found in the vicinity. There is an immense basin in the district of which Moscow is the centre, which covers an area of one hundred and twenty thousand square miles, which is therefore nearly as large as the entire bituminous coal area of the United States. The coal region of the Don is more than half as large as all of our coal measures. Besides these sources, coal has lately been discovered in the Caucasus, Crimea, Simbirsk, the Kherson, and in Poland.

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NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Medical Recollections Of The Army Of The Potomac. By Jonathan Letterman, M.D., late Surgeon U.S.A., and Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo, pp. 194.

The preface to this volume announces the intention of its author: "It is written in the hope that the labors of the medical officers of the army may be known to an intelligent people, with whom to know is to appreciate; and as an affectionate tribute to many, long my zealous and efficient colleagues, who, in days of trial and danger which have passed, let us hope never to return, evinced their devotion to their country and the cause of humanity without hope of promotion or expectation of reward." It is a sketch of the Medical Department of the army of the Potomac under Dr. Letterman's administration, from July, 1862, to January, 1864, and affords a concurrent view of the military movements of that army during the period specified.

Without infringing upon military details properly so called, an excellent general idea is given of the battles fought, and the strategic value of the great changes of position which were executed with such remarkable promptitude and precision.

Dr. Letterman confines himself strictly to the period of his own administration, and the account of the alterations and improvements introduced under his direction, and chiefly through his means, in the working of the medical department.

The system which he adopted became the system substantially of all the armies of the United States, and with occasional modifications to suit particular occasions has proved to be the best and most efficient as well as manageable that could have been devised. To Dr. Letterman belongs the great praise of having studiously and laboriously perfected the principles and details of these changes, and succeeded in securing their recognition and enforcement.

The total inadequacy of the old system was painfully obvious to all competent and thoughtful observers at the breaking out of the war. It was especially so to those who were placed in responsible executive positions at the front, while the authority in the rear remained bound to its old ideas, and incapable of understanding the great issues involved, and the expenditure of independent intelligence and _matérial_ necessary to accomplish any adequate result. The immediate consequence was an unnecessary waste of life, of national strength and resources, and an amount of misery inflicted and suffering endured which can never be computed and had best now be dismissed for ever. These causes led early in the war to the appointment of a young, vigorous, bold, and undeniably able man as Surgeon-General. He made a complete reformation in the department, and shared the fate of reformers. He was sacrificed as a victim to the genius of indifference, neglect, parsimony, and cruelty, which had hitherto held undisputed or but feebly disputed sway over the fallen on battlefields and the sick of armies. {855} This is not the time or place to discuss ex-Surgeon-General Hammond; but it is due to him at all hands, that he has probably been the means of mitigating the horrors of war as respects the sick and wounded, and promoting the sacred cause of humanity in these particulars to a greater degree than any man who ever lived. The magnitude of the reforms accomplished, the magnificent scale on which preparation was made, and the courage to order the necessary expenditures in the face of the time-honored but mean and timid traditions of the Surgeon-General's office, and the habits of thought and action engendered thereby in the bureaus of administration and supply, cannot be appreciated until some learned and philosophical physician shall write the medical history of the war from its humane and social points of view.