racts invented for those who could not read, wherein
the substance of pages was condensed and gave itself to the eye and
the touch. Let us not, from the height of our day, with the better
appliances which a universal press gives us, sneer at the homely rounds
of the ladder by which the first multitudes of the Lord's followers
climbed heavenward.

If there seemed somewhat mechanical in the number of times which Agnes
repeated the "Hail, Mary!"--in the prescribed number of times she rose
or bowed or crossed herself or laid her forehead in low humility on
the flags of the pavement, it was redeemed by the earnest fervor which
inspired each action. However foreign to the habits of a Northern mind
or education such a mode of prayer may be, these forms to her were all
helpful and significant, her soul was borne by them Godward,--and often,
as she prayed, it seemed to her that she could feel the dissolving of
all earthly things, and the pressing nearer and nearer of the great
cloud of witnesses who ever surround the humblest member of Christ's
mystical body.

"Sweet loving hearts around her beat,
Sweet helping hands are stirred,
And palpitates the veil between
With breathings almost heard."

Certain English writers, looking entirely from a worldly and
philosophical standpoint, are utterly at a loss to account for the power
which certain Italian women of obscure birth came to exercise in the
councils of nations merely by the force of a mystical piety; but the
Northern mind of Europe is entirely unfitted to read and appreciate the
psychological religious phenomena of Southern races. The temperament
which in our modern days has been called the mediistic, and which with
us is only exceptional, is more or less a race-peculiarity of Southern
climates, and gives that objectiveness to the conception of spiritual
things from which grew up a whole ritual and a whole world of religious
Art. The Southern saints and religious artists were seers,--men and
women of that peculiar fineness and delicacy of temperament which made
them especially apt to receive and project outward the truths of the
spiritual life; they were in that state of "divine madness" which is
favorable to the most intense conception of the poet and artist, and
something of this influence descended through all the channels of the
people.

When Agnes rose from prayer, she had a serene, exalted expression, like
one who walks with some unseen excellence and me