ad no influence in leading her heart from God. She passed several
hours, every day, in devotional reading and prayer. She kept a very
careful register of her thoughts and actions, scrutinizing and
condemning with unsparing severity every questionable emotion. Every
sick bed of the poor peasants around, she visited with sympathy and as a
tender nurse. She groped her way into the glooms of prison dungeons to
convey solace to the prisoner. She wrought ornaments for the Church, and
toiled, even to weariness and exhaustion, in making garments for the
poor.

Claudia in three years died, and the emperor again was left a widower.
Again he applied for the hand of Eleonora. Her spiritual advisers now
urged that it was clearly the will of God that she should fill the first
throne of the universe, as the patroness and protectress of the Catholic
church. For such an object she would have been willing to sweep the
streets or to die in a dungeon. Yielding to these persuasions she
married the emperor, and was conveyed, as in a triumphal march, to the
gorgeous palaces of Vienna. But her character and her mode of life were
not changed. Though she sat at the imperial table, which was loaded with
every conceivable luxury, she condemned herself to fare as humble and
abstemious as could be found in the hut of the most impoverished
peasant. It was needful for her at times to appear in the rich garb of
an empress, but to prevent any possible indulgence of pride, she had her
bracelets and jewelry so arranged with sharp brads as to keep her in
continued suffering by the laceration of the flesh.

She was, notwithstanding these austerities, which she practiced with the
utmost secrecy, indefatigable in the discharge of her duties as a wife
and an empress. She often attended the opera with the emperor, but
always took with her the Psalms of David, bound to resemble the books of
the performance, and while the tragic or the comic scenes of the stage
were transpiring before her, she was studying the devout lyrics of the
Psalmist of Israel. She translated all the Psalms into German verse; and
also translated from the French, and had printed for the benefit of her
subjects, a devotional work entitled, "Pious Reflections for every Day
of the Month." During the last sickness of her husband she watched with
unwearied assiduity at his bed-side, shrinking from no amount of
exhaustion or toil, She survived her husband fifteen years, devoting all
this time to