nearest shelter.

On Sunday, I went to see a nun take the veil. She was a person of high
family; a princess gave her away, and the Cardinal Ferreti, Secretary
of State, officiated. It was a much less effective ceremony than I
expected from the descriptions of travellers and romance-writers.
There was no moment of throwing on the black veil; no peal of music;
no salute of cannon. The nun, an elegantly dressed woman of five or
six and twenty,--pretty enough, but whose quite worldly air gave the
idea that it was one of those arrangements made because no suitable
establishment could otherwise be given her,--came forward, knelt, and
prayed; her confessor, in that strained, unnatural whine too common
among preachers of all churches and all countries, praised himself for
having induced her to enter on a path which would lead her fettered
steps "from palm to palm, from triumph to triumph," Poor thing! she
looked as if the domestic olives and poppies were all she wanted; and
lacking these, tares and wormwood must be her portion. She was then
taken behind a grating, her hair cut, and her clothes exchanged for
the nun's vestments; the black-robed sisters who worked upon her
looking like crows or ravens at their ominous feasts. All the while,
the music played, first sweet and thoughtful, then triumphant strains.
The effect on my mind was revolting and painful to the last degree.
Were monastic seclusion always voluntary, and could it be ended
whenever the mind required a change back from seclusion to common
life, I should have nothing to say against it; there are positions of
the mind which it suits exactly, and even characters that might choose
it all through life; certainly, to the broken-hearted it presents a
shelter that Protestant communities do not provide. But where it
is enforced or repented of, no hell could be worse; nor can a more
terrible responsibility be incurred than by him who has persuaded a
novice that the snares of the world are less dangerous than the demons
of solitude.

Festivities in Italy have been of great importance, since, for a
century or two back, the thought, the feeling, the genius of the
people have had more chance to expand, to express themselves, there
than anywhere else. Now, if the march of reform goes forward, this
will not be so; there will be also speeches made freely on public
occasions, without having the life pressed out of them by the
censorship. Now we hover betwixt the old and the new;