--corridors where Fra
Angelico's frescoes, delicate as the rainbow on the melting cloud,
startled the unaccustomed eye here and there, as if they had been sudden
reflections cast from an ethereal world, where the Madonna sat crowned
in her radiant glory, and the Divine infant looked forth with perpetual
promise.

It was an hour of relaxation in the monastery, and most of the cells
were empty. The light through the narrow windows looked in on nothing
but bare walls, and the hard pallet and the crucifix. And even behind
that door at the end of a long corridor, in the inner cell opening from
an antechamber where the Prior usually sat at his desk or received
private visitors, the high jet of light fell on only one more object
that looked quite as common a monastic sight as the bare walls and hard
pallet. It was but the back of a figure in the long white Dominican
tunic and scapulary, kneeling with bowed head before a crucifix. It
might have been any ordinary Fra Girolamo, who had nothing worse to
confess than thinking of wrong things when he was singing _in coro_, or
feeling a spiteful joy when Fra Benedetto dropped the ink over his own
miniatures in the breviary he was illuminating--who had no higher
thought than that of climbing safely into Paradise up the narrow ladder
of prayer, fasting, and obedience. But under this particular white
tunic there was a heart beating with a consciousness inconceivable to
the average monk, and perhaps hard to be conceived by any man who has
not arrived at self-knowledge through a tumultuous inner life: a
consciousness in which irrevocable errors and lapses from veracity were
so entwined with noble purposes and sincere beliefs, in which
self-justifying expediency was so inwoven with the tissue of a great
work which the whole being seemed as unable to abandon as the body was
unable to abandon glowing and trembling before the objects of hope and
fear, that it was perhaps impossible, whatever course might be adopted,
for the conscience to find perfect repose.

Savonarola was not only in the attitude of prayer, there were Latin
words of prayer on his lips; and yet he was not praying. He had entered
his cell, had fallen on his knees, and burst into words of supplication,
seeking in this way for an influx of calmness which would be a warrant
to him that the resolutions urged on him by crowding thoughts and
passions were not wresting him away from the Divine support; but the
previsions and