convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and
indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,--that the curse of
Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under awful visions of
truths which no one around him will regard. In early life the associate
only of the cultivated and the refined, Father Francesco could not
but experience at times an insupportable _ennui_ in listening to the
confessions of people who had never learned either to think or to feel
with any degree of distinctness, and whom his most fervent exhortations
could not lift above the most trivial interests of a mere animal life.
He was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the monks, of
their puerility, of their selfishness and self-indulgence, of their
hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly discouraged with their
inextricable labyrinths of deception. A melancholy deep as the grave
seized on him, and he redoubled his austerities, in the hope that by
making life painful he might make it also short.

But the first time that the clear, sweet tones of Agnes rang ill his
ears at the confessional, and her words, so full of unconscious poetry
and repressed genius, came like a strain of sweet music through the
grate, he felt at his heart a thrill to which it had long been a
stranger, and which seemed to lift the weary, aching load from off his
soul, as if some invisible angel had borne it up on his wings.

In his worldly days he had known women as the gallants in Boccaccio's
romances knew them, and among them one enchantress whose sorceries had
kindled in his heart one of those fatal passions which burn out the
whole of a man's nature, and leave it, like a sacked city, only a
smouldering heap of ashes. Deepest, therefore, among his vows of
renunciation had been those which divided him from all womankind. The