In the terrible denunciations and warnings just uttered, he had been preaching to himself, striving to bring a force on his own soul by which he might reduce its interior rebellion to submission; but, alas! when was ever love cast out by fear?  He knew not as yet the only remedy for such sorrow,—­that there is a love celestial and divine, of which earthly love in its purest form is only the sacramental symbol and emblem, and that this divine love can by God’s power so outflood human affections as to bear the soul above all earthly idols to its only immortal rest.  This great truth rises like a rock amid stormy seas, and many is the sailor struggling in salt and bitter waters who cannot yet believe it is to be found.  A few saints like Saint Augustin had reached it,—­but through what buffetings, what anguish!

At this moment, however, there was in the heart of the father one of those collapses which follow the crisis of some mortal struggle.  He leaned on the windowsill, exhausted and helpless.

Suddenly, a kind of illusion of the senses came over him, such as is not infrequent to sensitive natures in severe crises of mental anguish.  He thought he heard Agnes singing, as he had sometimes heard her when he had called in his pastoral ministrations at the little garden and paused awhile outside that he might hear her finish a favorite hymn, which, like a shy bird, she sang all the more sweetly for thinking herself alone.

Quite as if they were sung in his ear, and in her very tones, he heard the words of Saint Bernard, which we have introduced to our reader:—­

  Jesu dulcis memoria,
  Dans vera cordi gaudia: 
  Sed super mel et omnia
  Ejus dulcis praesentia.

  “Jesu, spes poenitentibus,
  Quam pius es petentibus,
  Quam bonus te quaerentibus,
  Sed quis invenientibus!”

Soft and sweet and solemn was the illusion, as if some spirit breathed them with a breath of tenderness over his soul; and he threw himself with a burst of tears before the crucifix.

“O Jesus, where, then, art Thou?  Why must I thus suffer?  She is not the one altogether lovely; it is Thou,—­Thou, her Creator and mine!  Why, why cannot I find Thee?  Oh, take from my heart all other love but Thine alone!”

Yet even this very prayer, this very hymn, were blent with the remembrance of Agnes; for was it not she who first had taught him the lesson of heavenly love?  Was not she the first one who had taught him to look upward to Jesus other than as an avenging judge?  Michel Angelo has embodied in a fearful painting, which now deforms the Sistine Chapel, that image of stormy vengeance which a religion debased by force and fear had substituted for the tender, good shepherd of earlier Christianity.  It was only in the heart of a lowly maiden that Christ had been made manifest to the eye of the monk, as of old he was revealed to the world through a virgin.  And how could he, then, forget her, or cease to love her, when every prayer and hymn, every sacred round of the ladder by which he must climb, was so full of memorials of her?  While crying and panting for the supreme, the divine, the invisible love, he found his heart still craving the visible one,—­the one so well known, revealing itself to the senses, and bringing with it the certainty of visible companionship.