prophet-king for his eternal home. Not ecstasies, but a serene
tranquillity, marked her closing hours. Raising her finger to her lip,
she impressed upon it the sign of the cross, and yielded up her spirit
without a groan. And the icy hand of death neither changed the freshness
of her countenance nor robbed it of its celestial loveliness; it seemed
as if she were in a trance, listening to the music of angelic hosts, and
glowing with their boundless love. The Bishop of Jerusalem and the
neighboring clergy stood around her bed, and Jerome closed her eyes. For
three days numerous choirs of virgins alternated in Greek, Latin, and
Syriac their mournful but triumphant chants. Six bishops bore her body
to the grave, followed by the clergy of the surrounding country. Jerome
wrote her epitaph in Latin, but was too much unnerved to preach her
funeral sermon. Inhabitants from all parts of Palestine came to her
funeral: the poor showed the garments which they had received from her
charity; while the whole multitude, by their sighs and tears, evinced
that they had lost a nursing mother. The Church received the sad
intelligence of her death with profound grief, and has ever since
cherished her memory, and erected shrines and monuments to her honor. In
that wonderful painting of Saint Jerome by Domenichino,--perhaps the
greatest ornament of the Vatican, next to that miracle of art, the
"Transfiguration" of Raphael,--the saint is represented in repulsive
aspects as his soul was leaving his body, ministered unto by the
faithful Paula. But Jerome survived his friend for fifteen years, at
Bethlehem, still engrossed with those astonishing labors which made him
one of the greatest benefactors of the Church, yet austere and bitter,
revealing in his sarcastic letters how much he needed the soothing
influences of that sister of mercy whom God had removed to the choir of
angels, and to whom the Middle Ages looked as an intercessor, like Mary
herself, with the Father of all, for the pardon of sin.