It is true, also, that no passions are deeper in their hold, more pervading and more vital to the whole human being, than those that make their first entrance through the higher nature, and, beginning with a religious and poetic ideality, gradually work their way through the whole fabric of the human existence.

From grosser passions, whose roots lie in the senses, there is always a refuge in man’s loftier nature.  He can cast them aside with contempt, and leave them as one whose lower story is flooded can remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with a purer air and wider prospect.  But to love that is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and Immortal nature, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what refuge but the grave,—­what hope but that wide eternity where all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime?  A man of the world may struggle by change of scene, place, and employment.  He may put oceans between himself and the things that speak of what he desires to forget.  He may fill the void in his life with the stirring excitement of the battlefield, or the whirl of travel from city to city, or the press of business and care.  But what help is there for him whose life is tied down to the narrow sphere of the convent,—­to the monotony of a bare cell, to the endless repetition of the same prayers, the same chants, the same prostrations, especially when all that ever redeemed it from monotony has been that image and that sympathy which conscience now bids him forget?

When Father Francesco precipitated himself into his cell and locked the door, it was with the desperation of a man who flies from a mortal enemy.  It seemed to him that all eyes saw just what was boiling within him,—­that the wild thoughts that seemed to scream their turbulent importunities in his ears were speaking so loud that all the world would hear.  He should disgrace himself before the brethren whom he had so long been striving to bring to order and to teach the lessons of holy self-control.  He saw himself pointed at, hissed at, degraded, by the very men who had quailed before his own reproofs; and scarcely, when he had bolted the door behind him, did he feel himself safe.  Panting and breathless, he fell on his knees before the crucifix, and, bowing his head in his hands, fell forward upon the floor.  As a spent wave melts at the foot of a rock, so all his strength passed away, and he lay awhile in a kind of insensibility,—­a state in which, though consciously existing, he had no further control over his thoughts and feelings.  In that state of dreamy exhaustion his mind seemed like a mirror, which, without vitality or will of its own, simply lies still and reflects the objects that may pass over it.  As clouds sailing in the heavens cast their images, one after another, on the glassy floor of a waveless sea,