to us; that all are responsible for what happens to it, and that all, according to their light, are bound to labor constantly for its prosperity, to take care that it be submitted only to beneficent, respectable, and lawful authorities....  This is what I wish should be inculcated on men, and especially on women.  Nothing has more struck me, in an experience now of considerable length in public affairs, than the influence that women always exercise in this matter,—­influence so much the greater as it is indirect.  I do not doubt that it is they above all who give to every nation a certain moral temperament, which shows itself afterwards in politics.”—­Vol.  II. p. 348.  Tocqueville’s services to France, to liberty, did not end with his life.  The example, no less than the writings of such a man, bears fruit in later times.  It belongs to no one land.  Wherever men are striving in thought or in action to support the cause of freedom and of law, to strengthen institutions founded on principles of equal justice, to secure established liberties by defending the government in which they are embodied, his teachings will be prized, and his memory be honored.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MONK’S STRUGGLE.

The golden sunshine of the spring morning was deadened to a sombre tone in the shadowy courts of the Capuchin convent.  The reddish brown of the walls was flecked with gold and orange spots of lichen; and here and there, in crevices, tufts of grass, or even a little bunch of gold-blooming flowers, looked hardily forth into the shadowy air.  A covered walk, with stone arches, inclosed a square filled with dusky shrubbery.  There were tall funereal cypresses, whose immense height and scraggy profusion of decaying branches showed their extreme old age.  There were gaunt, gnarled olives, with trunks twisted in immense serpent folds, and boughs wreathed and knotted into wild, unnatural contractions, as if their growth had been a series of spasmodic convulsions, instead of a calm and gentle development of Nature.  There were overgrown clumps of aloes, with the bare skeletons of former flower-stalks standing erect among their dusky horns or lying rotting on the ground beside them.  The place had evidently been intended for the culture of shrubbery and flowers, but the growth of the trees had long since so intercepted the sunlight and fresh air that not even grass could find root beneath their branches.  The ground was covered with a damp green mould, strewn here and there with dead boughs, or patched with tufts of fern and lycopodium, throwing out their green hairy roots into the moist soil.  A few half-dead roses and jasmines, remnants of former days of flowers, still maintained a struggling existence, but looked wan and discouraged in the effort, and seemed to stretch and pine vaguely for a freer air.  In fact, the whole garden might be looked upon as a sort of symbol of the life by which it was surrounded,—­a life stagnant, unnatural, and unhealthy, cut off from all those thousand stimulants to wholesome development which are afforded by the open plain of human existence, where strong natures grow distorted in unnatural efforts, though weaker ones find in its lowly shadows a congenial refuge.