uty,
and utility, as ever has existed on earth. It was a retreat from the
commonplace prose of life into an atmosphere at once devotional and
poetic; and prayers and sacred hymns consecrated the elegant labors of
the chisel and the pencil, no less than the more homely ones of the
still and the crucible. San Marco, far from being that kind of sluggish
lagoon often imagined in conventual life, was rather a sheltered hotbed
of ideas,--fervid with intellectual and moral energy, and before the
age in every radical movement. At this period, Savonarola, the poet and
prophet of the Italian religious world of his day, was superior of this
convent, pouring through all the members of the order the fire of his
own impassioned nature, and seeking to lead them back to the fervors of
more primitive and evangelical ages, and in the reaction of a worldly
and corrupt Church was beginning to feel the power of that current which
at last drowned his eloquent voice in the cold waters of martyrdom.
Savonarola was an Italian Luther,--differing from the great Northern
Reformer as the more ethereally strung and nervous Italian differs from
the bluff and burly German; and like Luther he became in his time the
centre of every living thing in society about him. He inspired the
pencils of artists, guided the counsels of statesmen, and, a poet
himself, was an inspiration to poets. Everywhere in Italy the monks of
his order were travelling, restoring the shrines, preaching against
the voluptuous and unworthy pictures with which sensual artists
had desecrated the churches, and calling the people back by their
exhortations to the purity of primitive Christianity.

Father Antonio was a younger brother of Elsie, and had early become a
member of the San Marco, enthusiastic not less in religion than in Art.
His intercourse with his sister had few points of sympathy, Elsie being
as decided a utilitarian as any old Yankee female born in the granite
hills of New Hampshire, and pursuing with a hard and sharp energy her
narrow plan of life for Agnes. She regarded her brother as a very
properly religious person, considering his calling, but was a little
bored with his exuberant devotion, and absolutely indifferent to his
artistic enthusiasm. Agnes, on the contrary, had from a child attached
herself to her uncle with all the energy of a sympathetic nature, and
his yearly visits had been looked forward to on her part with intense
expectation. To him she could say a