-and in the midst of it all, surrounded by the defaced and crumbling
emblems of life and death, and the equally decaying symbols of
immortality, with the splendours of the sinking sun shedding roseate
haloes about him, walked one for whom eternal truths outweighed all
temporal seemings,--Cardinal Felix Bonpre, known favourably, and
sometimes alluded to jestingly at the Vatican, as "Our good Saint
Felix." Tall and severely thin, with fine worn features of ascetic
and spiritual delicacy, he had the indefinably removed air of a
scholar and thinker, whose life was not, and never could be in
accordance with the latter-day customs of the world; the mild blue
eyes, clear and steadfast, most eloquently suggested "the peace of
God that passeth all understanding";--and the sensitive intellectual
lines of the mouth and chin, which indicated strength and determined
will, at the same time declared that both strength and will were
constantly employed in the doing of good and the avoidance of evil.
No dark furrows of hesitation, cowardice, cunning, meanness or
weakness marred the expressive dignity and openness of the
Cardinal's countenance,--the very poise of his straight spare figure
and the manner in which he moved, silently asserted that inward
grace of spirit without which there is no true grace of body,--and
as he paused in his slow pacing to and fro to gaze half-wistfully,
half-mournfully upon the almost ghastly artistic achievement of "Le
Mourant" he sighed, and his lips moved as if in prayer. For the
brief, pitiful history of human life is told in that antique and
richly-wrought alabaster,--its beginning, its ambition, and its end.
At the summit of the shrine, an exquisite bas-relief shows first of
all the infant clinging to its mother's breast,--a stage lower down
is seen the boy in the eager flush of youth, speeding an arrow to
its mark from the bent bow,--then, on a still larger, bolder scale
of design is depicted the proud man in the zenith of his career, a