"O Lord, what is thys worldy's blysse Is darked before the none." One might tell of what was spoken in the salons, in the gardens, on the steps of churches,-verifying again, after so many years, what Mme. de Sévigné said to her daughter: "Ah! my dear child, for what a length of time have I been of your opinion! rien n'est bon que d'avoir une belle et bonne âme; one sees it in every thing as through a heart of crystal; it cannot be hidden. There are no dupes in its regard; the shadow is never long mistaken for the body; there is no appearing without being, the world's injustice is not lasting." Accordingly, in conversation and by letters it was now but one voice of spontaneous lamentation. "Que cette vie est une triste vie," wrote the translator of St. Augustin's Confessions on hearing of her death; "je ne puis jeter un regard autour de moi sans trouver un voide, un deuil, une irréparable absence, mais l'on a le fruit de sa souffrance; quelque consolation dans le temps et pour l'avenir une espérance infinie." "For myself too," wrote a revered Russian friend, "allow me to say, it is a most cruel loss, as I had, from the bottom of my heart, attached myself to that angelic person." "Je suis ému jusqu'au fond de l'âme," wrote a French nobleman of deep Catholic impressions. un mortel regret de n'avoir pas revu cette chère sainte que j'ai toujours et depuis tant d'années aimée tendrement; M— n'a pu retenir ses larmes." "It is as if I had lost an old and esteemed friend," wrote the Protestant physician who had last attended her, "for during my short acquaintance with her I had learned to know and value her for her admirable qualities of heart and head." In fine, an English priest related to her family made use of this expression: "I would have gladly died to have had her spared." "I feel I have said nothing," wrote his illustrious superior. "But then it is such a sorrow! No one but God can reach to the depths of such a grief!" A priest from the west of England concluded his letter by saying that the poor woman, his servant, burst out a crying when he "J'ai announced the news to her; and another vicar, resident in London, related that on communicating the event to a newmarried couple in humble life, neither of whom, he supposed, knew her, the young bride seemed so overwhelmed, that he felt regret at having been the first to announce to her such intelligence. So that, in fine, this event of yesterday presented somewhat of the same old scene so often acted, and described with such fidelity by St. Ambrose, saying, “plorat ecclesia in sapientibus suis, plorat in sacerdotibus suis, plorat in virginibus suis, plorat in pauperibus suis." As a benefactress, churches prayed for her, and by the desire of distant friends many an altar in foreign countries heard whispered the name of Jane Mary. A solemn dirge for her soul was sung in the two monasteries at Subiaco, of St. Scholastica and St. Benedict, also in the monasteries of Praglia, Genoa, and Pierre-qui-vive; besides, by order of the abbot, a daily mass, for a long while, at Ramsgate. One must draw a veil over the solitude of the domestic hearth and the leavings of the fell intruder. What's thy interest reader in this sad wreck? One must be silent as to holy and poetic usages, Homeric and Sophoclean, and eminently Christian, disappearing from one's eyes; rooms becoming deserted one after the other; observances hallowed and dear to memory rendered impossible for want of instigators and admirers, of agents and players. Time rolls on. What a silence still! There is the chair vacant. "There's a change here," solemnly whispered a stranger, grave though another Yorick, raising his shoulders and piercing you through and through with a look and a brow that spake more than his words! One must draw the curtain over the dismemberments, "all broken implements of a ruined house," and think it enough to hear the dull faint accents of "Undone! undone! and now forgotten are all former woes!" But one should attend an instant to the fact to which these last words refer. It was even So. There was the same astonishment as before. There had been no sense of the value of what had been left, and that only was prized which had already been taken away. "He who does not know how to welcome Fortune when she comes," and who-one may ask it in her presence-sufficiently glad and grateful, and aware of what he possesses ?—“ has no right to complain when she departs." Poor consolation, but most just reproof yielded by the familiar proverb. So now you have the interior empty, the house like a body from which the soul had departed: “Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé." No longer seen or heard the faithful one,-the personification of prayer and faith, of constancy,-the inseparable handmaiden of the blessed Virgin, on whom one could always reckon in gladness and in sorrow, in health and in one's last moments. But no more! Others too have mourned thus; though there is a voice at all times to check, when unbridled, such lamentations; for, as the Friar says in Romeo and Juliet, "The most you sought was-her promotion; For 'twas your heaven, she should be advanc'd: Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?" No And if we cannot read any longer in the heart of the creature which received from its God so many marks of an ineffable predilection, at least as the eloquent Dominican, so often cited, says, we can follow the Gospel with the modesty of a tender admiration, and seek there, in the shadow of our weaknesses, the imperfect joy which is permitted to us here below." more lamentation for her. "Woman, why weepest thou? He did not say that to her when on the day of her conversion she wept at His feet. Now the hour of tears is past. Penitence, the cross, the tomb, all have disappeared in the triumphant splendours of the Resurrection! Woman, why weepest thou *?” "Now, therefore, wolde I ask you this one question," says Bishop Fisher, speaking of the death of Lady Margaret. "Were it, suppose ye, a metely thyng for us to desyre to have her here amongst us agayn? To forgo the joyous lyfe above; to want the presence of the glorious Trynyte, whom she so longe hath soughte and honoured; to leve that moost noble kyngdome, to be absente from the moost blessyd company of saintes and saintesses, and hither to come agayn to be wrapped and endangered with the myseres of this wretched worlde, with * Lacordaire. dyseases and with the other encomberaunces that dayly happeth in this myserable lyfe. Were thys a reasonable request of our partye? were thys a kynde desyre? were thys a gentle wyshe? after she hath bene so kynde and lovynge unto us?" "Oh! blest are they who live and die like her, CHAPTER XVI. T is curious to remark how poetical images and trite metaphors are often verified and brought so home to us by the actual events of life, that they occur spontaneously as the most exact and natural expression which we can devise to describe the latter. It is thus that, while the grave Calderon talks of life being a dream, Sir Thomas Brown even adding, that "surely, it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next;" while the philosopher compares life to a phantom of the night, and another poet to a drama, the man who is least addicted to the muses or the schools, finds that in point of fact his own experience in the relations belonging to it could not be qualified by any terms that would express with more popular exactness, in common-life language, the impression which it has left upon his mind. Not to pretend to any anticipations of what may be the waking up of our soul, we are all of us in fact assisting here below at a certain show, which bears a close resemblance to what we call a dramatic representation; and when, as Ballanche said to Mme. Récamier, we do not survive ourselves, as in these times men often do, we behold at least the exit of others off the stage, so quickly are we all overtaken and passed by events, when after this short eventful scene in which they played their respective parts, the dark curtain as it were falls, and we see them no more. It has been remarked by a recent historian that among the last poems of St. Colomban, in which he playfully endeavours to amuse the mind of a friend, one perceives that his thoughts all of a sudden were somewhat darkened by a glance at the rapidity with which his own part had been played; "for I am already," he says, "in the eighteenth olympiad of my life. All passes and irreparable days roll on. Live, be strong, be happy, but remember what awaits you!" It reminds one of the lines placed on a scroll in a picture that represents mortality, which ends with "Ut leve folium quod vento rapitur, Felix qui potuit mundum contemnere." Standing within this sepulchral chapel at least, it is but natural to think that such impressions must come with a force that cannot be resisted. For how quickly has this beautiful life that we have been considering passed away! The first meeting and the quick wooing; the simple espousals and the romantic journeys; the brilliant assemblies of friends, and the juvenile circle with its ever fresh and enlivening incidents; the presence of what itself taught respect, the grandmother and her prudence; the sight of what, like Shakspeare's holiest page, showed religion in its noblest form-the mother and her faith; the magnificent moments of the churches and the processions; the startling scenery of accidents and hair-breadth escapes from fire; the moving episodes of joys and sorrows; the plot undeviatingly carried out in infinite variety of the well-directed and nobly sustained life, with the unsparing accompaniments of generous actions-all are but a memory. The play is over. The spectator has only to retire. "La terre est un séjour d'épreuve, L'homme n'est qu'un hôte en ces lieux, Nous descendons le cours d'un fleuve Où mille objects frappent nos yeux : |