esence, almost as friend with friend.
Though dumb before its Judge, even despair could speak, and pour out the
misery of its soul like water, to an advocate so wise to comprehend the
case, and eloquent to plead it, and powerful to win pardon whatever
were the guilt. Hilda witnessed what she deemed to be an example of this
species of confidence between a young man and his saint. He stood before
a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in
an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and
pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that
torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him
into indifference.

Often and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels of the
Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps. Here, perhaps,
strange as it may seem, her delicate appreciation of art stood her
in good stead, and lost Catholicism a convert. If the painter had
represented Mary with a heavenly face, poor Hilda was now in the very
mood to worship her, and adopt the faith in which she held so elevated
a position. But she saw that it was merely the flattered portrait of
an earthly beauty; the wife, at best, of the artist; or, it might be, a
peasant girl of the Campagna, or some Roman princess, to whom he desired
to pay his court. For love, or some even less justifiable motive, the
old painter had apotheosized these women; he thus gained for them, as
far as his skill would go, not only the meed of immortality, but the
privilege of presiding over Christian altars, and of being worshipped
with far holier fervors than while they dwelt on earth. Hilda's fine
sense of the fit and decorous could not be betrayed into kneeling at
such a shrine.

She never found just the virgin mother whom she needed. Here it was
an earthly mother, worshipping the earthly baby in her lap, as any and
every mother does, from Eve's time downward. In another picture, there
was a dim sense, shown in the mother's face, of some divine quality
in the child. In a third, the artist seemed to have had a higher
perception, and had striven hard to shadow out the Virgin's joy at
bringing the Saviour into the world, and her awe and love, inextricably
mingled, of the little form which she pressed against her bosom. So
far was good. But still, Hilda looked for something more; a face of
celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow
of past grief u