so the scenes of his former life drifted in vivid pictures athwart his memory.  He saw his father’s palace,—­the wide, cool, marble halls,—­the gardens resounding with the voices of falling waters.  He saw the fair face of his mother, and played with the jewels upon her hands.  He saw again the picture of himself, in all the flush of youth and health, clattering on horseback through the streets of Florence with troops of gay young friends, now dead to him as he to them.  He saw himself in the bowers of gay ladies, whose golden hair, lustrous eyes, and siren wiles came back shivering and trembling in the waters of memory in a thousand undulating reflections.  There were wild revels,—­orgies such as Florence remembers with shame to this day.  There was intermingled the turbulent din of arms,—­the haughty passion, the sudden provocation, the swift revenge.  And then came the awful hour of conviction, the face of that wonderful man whose preaching had stirred all souls,—­and then those fearful days of penance,—­that darkness of the tomb,—­that dying to the world,—­those solemn vows, and the fearful struggles by which they had been followed.

“Oh, my God!” he cried, “is it all in vain?—­so many prayers? so many struggles?—­and shall I fail of salvation at last?”

He seemed to himself as a swimmer, who, having exhausted his last gasp of strength in reaching the shore, is suddenly lifted up on a cruel wave and drawn back into the deep.  There seemed nothing for him but to fold his arms and sink.

For he felt no strength now to resist,—­he felt no wish to conquer,—­he only prayed that he might lie there and die.  It seemed to him that the love which possessed him and tyrannized over his very being was a doom,—­a curse sent upon him by some malignant fate with whose power it was vain to struggle.  He detested his work,—­he detested his duties,—­he loathed his vows,—­and there was not a thing in his whole future to which he looked forward otherwise than with the extreme of aversion, except one to which he clung with a bitter and defiant tenacity,—­the spiritual guidance of Agnes.  Guidance!—­he laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his soul, as he thought of this.  He was her guide,—­her confessor,—­to him she was bound to reveal every change of feeling; and this love that he too well perceived rising in her heart for another,—­he would wring from her own confessions the means to repress and circumvent it.  If she could not be his, he might at least prevent her from belonging to any other,—­he might at least keep her always within the sphere of his spiritual authority.  Had he not a right to do this?—­had he not a right to cherish an evident vocation,—­a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord?  Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm which her influence once brought over him, and these wild desires might cease, and these feverish pulses be still.