see no wisdom but in thy
eternal law, no beauty but in holiness. Then they shall lead the way
before the nations, and the people from the four winds shall follow
them, and be gathered into the fold of the blessed. For it is thy will,
O God, that the earth shall be converted unto thy law: it is thy will
that wickedness shall cease and love shall reign. Come, O blessed
promise; and behold, I am willing--lay me on the altar: let my blood
flow and the fire consume me; but let my witness be remembered among
men, that iniquity shall not prosper for ever." [See note at the end.]

During the last appeal, Savonarola had stretched out his arms and lifted
up his eyes to heaven; his strong voice had alternately trembled with
emotion and risen again in renewed energy; but the passion with which he
offered himself as a victim became at last too strong to allow of
further speech, and he ended in a sob. Every changing tone, vibrating
through the audience, shook them into answering emotion. There were
plenty among them who had very moderate faith in the Frate's prophetic
mission, and who in their cooler moments loved him little; nevertheless,
they too were carried along by the great wave of feeling which gathered
its force from sympathies that lay deeper than all theory. A loud
responding sob rose at once from the wide multitude, while Savonarola
had fallen on his knees and buried his face in his mantle. He felt in
that moment the rapture and glory of martyrdom without its agony.

In that great sob of the multitude Baldassarre's had mingled. Among all
the human beings present, there was perhaps not one whose frame vibrated
more strongly than his to the tones and words of the preacher; but it
had vibrated like a harp of which all the strings had been wrenched away
except one. That threat of a fiery inexorable vengeance--of a future
into which the hated sinner might be pursued and held by the avenger in
an eternal grapple, had come to him like the promise of an unquenchable
fountain to unquenchable thirst. The doctrines of the sages, the old
contempt for priestly Superstitions, had fallen away from his soul like
a forgotten language: if he could have remembered them, what answer
could they have given to his great need like the answer given by this
voice of energetic conviction? The thunder of denunciation fell on his
passion-wrought nerves with all the force of self-evidence: his thought
never went beyond it into questions--he