sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes
rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a
diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go
abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the
thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer
clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal
at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my
knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him
that so often and so gladly I talked with: whose pious daughter, eight
years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play
and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her
afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the
springtime of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he
recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over _her_;
still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked
within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is _now_ within a
second and a deeper darkness. This _Mater Lachrymarum_ also has been
sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar,
bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to
God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound.
By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly
intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless
children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her,
because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire,
let us honor with the title of "Madonna."

The second sister is called _Mater Suspiriorum_, Our Lady of Sighs. She
never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no
diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor
subtile; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with
perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises
not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops
forever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But
she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna is oftentimes
stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against Heaven, and demanding
back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never defies,
dreams not of rebellious aspirations