“My daily regime,” he writes to his brother and Mrs. Hecker, from Italy, “has not changed these two years which I have spent in Europe.  If I rise before nine I feel it the whole day.  In the morning I awake about seven for good, and take a cup of tea with some bread and butter.  I then read; sometimes, not often, I write a note in bed, and rise about nine or ten.  I take a lunch at twelve and dine at six.  My appetite is not much at any time.  My sleep, so so. [All through his illness he went to bed at nine or shortly after.] I feel for the most part like a man balancing whether he will keep on swimming or go under the water.  Sometimes I take a nap two or three times a day—­if I can get it.  There are weeks when I do not and cannot put my pen to paper.  To write a note is a great effort. . . .  Though my strength is so little my mind is not unoccupied, and I keep up some reading.”

Just in what way his spiritual difficulties accelerated his bodily decline it is hard to say, for he was generally extremely reticent as to his interior life.  A few words dropped unawares and at long intervals, and carefully taken down at the time, give fleeting glimpses into a soul which was a dark chamber of sorrow, though it was sometimes peaceful sorrow.  To this we can fortunately add some sentences written in an unusually confidential mood in letters from Europe.  Before his illness he was over-joyful, or so it seemed to some to whom this trait of his was a temptation.  “Why,” it was said, “religion seems to have no penitential side to Father Hecker at all.”  From the day of his ordination until his illness began he might have made the Psalmist’s words his own:  “There be many that say, Who shall show us any good?  Lord, Thou hast set upon us the light of Thy countenance, Thou hast put gladness in my heart.”  But now the light of that radiant joy had faded away, and the face of God, though as present as ever before, loomed over him dark, threatening, and majestic.  He had studied spiritual doctrine too well not to be ready for this trial, nor had it been sent to him without warning.  Nevertheless the sensible presence of God’s love had been so vivid and constant that he could alternate the joy of labor with that of prayer with the greatest ease.  And now it was an alternation, not of choice but of dire compulsion, between bitter, helpless inaction, and a state of prayer which was a mere dread of an all-too-near Judge.  It seemed to him as if he had boasted, “I said in my abundance I shall not be moved for ever,” and now he must end the inspired sentence, “Thou hast turned away Thy face from me and I became troubled.”  When this obscuration of the Divine Love first grew upon him the misery of it was intolerable and was borne with extreme difficulty.  The pain was lessened at intervals as time passed on, and before a year had elapsed, his letters from Europe, though they did not before complain of desolation, now show its previous existence by hailing the advent of seasons of interior