upon the heights, the constant resort of pilgrim-feet; noble cathedrals in the towns, convents or their ruins amidst a lovely country, and the frequent sounds of church bells, all this soothed while it roused me, because I felt for the first time that religion was a reality, which could speak to the heart of man."

Allowed by the ever-open doors of churches and road-side chapels (oh! why are our Protestant places of worship closed during six days, as if religion belonged alone to the seventh!) she often entered to pray, and found that her heart rose to its Creator with a fervour it had never known before. Still she was no Catholic; the leaven was at work, but the full time was not yet come.

Amidst the ruins of Kom-Ombos, in Upper Egypt she muses on the rise and fall of empires and religions, and asks her soul if Christianity, too, will pass away like other religions :

"Will it be with Christianity as it is with Kom-Ombos and its temples, its foundations be undermined by the majestic, irresistible stream of time; its pillars and its halls shaken by the waving sand which covers all from which life has departed? No; that thought is horrible-never! never! I fled for refuge to the holy Apostle Peter, and exclaimed with him, 'Lord whither shall I go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Such a longing seized my soul to found the perishable things of this world on the basis of eternity, that I perceived not how senseless it was to use the words of Peter without accepting his belief; that belief in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world, to whom we can only come through the revelation which that Church teaches, which is built upon St. Peter, which has the fulness of truth, and therefore alone possesses the power of making blessed."

Such logical deductions need no refutationGuarda e passa."

We would gladly give her account of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Naples, A.D. 1848, as a specimen of Countess Hahn's graphic powers of description, but our space forbids such digressions.

We must notice as another actuating influence in the change effected in her mind and heart, the views she takes of conventual life. In the Catholic Church she found claims made upon man to sacrifice worldly gains and present ease to religion: this fell in with the requirements of her nature

VOL. XLII.-NO. CCXLVIII.

Hers

and peculiar circumstances. was not a spirit to seek contentment in the secret places of the earth; her heart, wearied with the vanity and emptiness of the world, and crushed by the last heavy blow which had fatlen upon it, longed for some new sphere of exertion and excitement. The existence in the Catholic Church of those asylums for such shipwrecked human souls attracted her; her exaggerated feelings caused her to invest convents and monasteries with a halo which we fear seldom belongs to them. The Capuchins and Mendicant orders of friars had as great an influence over her feelings as the Jesuits possessed over her mind; in the one case she was attracted by the semblance of humility and self-sacrifice, in the other allured by the high intellectual and concentrated power of the order of Jesus. A few words quoted from her books will show her feelings on this subject:

"Oh! ye poor priests, ye poor monks! Ye think that, right or wrong, the Saviour meant what he said, Follow me.' Poor like him, who had not where to lay his head, selfdenying as He who turned from the pleasures of the world; obedient like Him who obeyed even unto death on the Cross; ye have through your love to him comprehended his spirit of self-sacrifice, and have made it your own. In one single day of your lives we find more depth, more love, more faith, more beauty, more value, than in the united lives of all the Reformers taken together."

A pretty arrogant assertion that! Strip off the poetical garment in which our idealising Countess delights to invest these classes of men, and the truth would be presented in a melancholy and humiliating contrast. Let but the walls of monasteries and convents reveal the tales of sin and selfindulgence they too often witness, and the sympathies even of the Countess Hahn would turn from these profligate and idle cumberers of the ground!

In the monastery on Mount Carmel, her gradually-increasing inclinations towards Catholicism first took a definite form. We find her expatiating on the beauty of the East-luxuriating in the free, unfettered, unconventional life in her tents; and, amidst many poetical imaginings, such as the following, we find a longing after the repose and simplicity of a cloister life :

Enough! I found in the whole character of the East, something so ennobling that, beside it all European civilisation seemed mean and insignificant.

There (on Mount Carmel), I first experienced a grief not to belong to the Catholic Church; there, in the pilgrim-house, where I was received with such hospitality, I saw what was the life of these humble-minded men, who had come from Spain and Italyhad studied Oriental languages, in order to teach little children, and shelter pilgrims. Now that I saw the Catholic Church in all her glory-that is to say in love and poverty-now did I begin indeed to love her. A wonderful holiness hovers around this spot-a peace wholly ideal, such as in no other place I had yet found. . . I knew the Church as yet neither in her foundation, which is the Redeemer, nor in her dogmas, which he taught; nor in her ideas, in which time and eternity are blended; I knew but her external surface, yet it did my heart good, for she spoke to that ideal of heavenly love which I have ever borne about within my soul, like a veiled and holy picture; and so I began to love her."

Returning from the East, A.D. 1844, where she had spent her days amidst the ruins of cities and empires, floating along the Nile in dreamy indolence, or travelling across the calm and silent desert, she found the activity and luxury of European life press heavily upon her. The heavings of the nations, in their efforts to obtain freedom, were beginning to be felt, and, aristocrat to the heart's core, Countess Hahn-Hahn recoiled from all idea of progress. She looked upon the struggle taking place with a burning heart, shut her eyes upon the political and social evils they were intended to redress, shrank terrified from the threatened convulsions, seeing in them hopelessly-destructive anarchy alone. To find the clue to such mighty movements was beyond her power, and her spirit sinking beneath the pressure, she fell into despair.

Hear now what roused her from this lethargy :

"From this torpor I was saved by a circumstance which caused a wonderful sensation in Northern Germany-the exhibition of the holy coat at Treves! People comprehend it not. 'What did it mean?'-what portend? How astonishing and incomprehensible, that thousands and tens of thousands wandered up the Rhine and down the Rhine, as pilgrims to the shrine; and these, not from the lower classes alone, but from the higher and enlightened!

I was

amazed like the rest at this religious excitement, to which Protestants had not the

faintest clue; but instead of ridiculing it as they did, it refreshed my spirit. Whether it were indeed the holy coat, I knew not; but as I wrote at the time, it is the same faith which in former days cast the sick woman at the feet of Christ, that by touching the hem of his garment, she might be healed.' My instinct was ever right, and my reasoning false."

False, indeed, poor weak-minded woman! When such things had power to sway your opinions, we can but pity

and be silent.

Two years later, we find her still restlessly seeking peace in outward things, travelling to England, Scotland, and Ireland; and while political influences were now at work, in conjunction with others, to lead her to her final goal, she speaks of the state of England, where, she says, the deathworm is diligently at work; and in proof of this her profound wisdom cites the "corn bill," which had just passed the two houses of Parliament. "The corn bill," she says, "is a work of the death-worm; it will change entirely the ancient centre of gravity by which this land has become strong within, and mighty without." We are the last people who desire to exclude women from a share in political, as in all other discussions; we would only require that ignorance should know how becoming silence is.

In the English Church Countess Hahn finds only "noble cathedrals standing empty," "married bishops," and her "ideal vanishes." She examines the outside merely, but is compelled, perhaps unwittingly, to acknowledge that "the English have need of faith, and a veneration for religion as God's law." She visits Scotland, the puritanical strictness and simplicity of whose Church found little favour in her eyes, and passes thence to Ireland

poetical fancies all, and false as poetical.

After this journey the Countess returned to Germany, more hopelessly unhappy than ever. "I was like one swimming in the wide ocean, dreaming of a harbour of refuge, and ever exclaiming, It is not here, it is not here! these waves can never bear me thither!" She visits Italy again, and speaks of her journey as a melancholy one. Weary and dispirited she returned: the revolutionary spirit had for an hour conquered; princes trembled on their thrones, and nobles stood helpless and confounded around; Austria had been beaten on the plains of Italy, and monarchy tottered in the high places of the earth. The proud nature of the Countess, too weak to grapple with the times, writhed in tortures beneath them :

"I lived like the salamander, in the fire of an inextinguishable hatred of democracy and its leaders" (a truly Christian sentiment!) "Spring came (1849); over that May death spread a mourning veil so thick and black that for a long time I neither felt nor saw anything, neither in heaven above, nor on the earth beneath, neither within me, nor around me. Every Sunday I went to Dresden to mass, and then I wept as if I were melting away in tears; it was as though a spring breeze were dissolving the ice in my breast, as if a warm hand laid itself upon my benumbed heart. Whither was this leading me? I knew not then, now I see it all clearly. With eternal love do I love thee; therefore, am I merciful unto thee, and draw thee to myself.""

She opened the Bible, as was often her habit, to see on what passage her eyes would first alight. They fell upon these words in the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah "Arise! shine! for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.' This accident so forcibly impressed her mind, that she sate unconscious of time, her head buried in her hands, gazing upon the open book "A ray of morning light glided into the black, iron night of my soul; faint, and pale, and deep, below the horizon it began to dawn." After this she writes thus::

"I can no longer make illusions to my soul, saying, Try this-prove that! perhaps now the world may yet have something hidden for thee! The cry of experience is sounding within me. No-no! it has nothing! Then what remains? God?""

And here we take leave of Countess Hahn-Hahn. That her book has had the smallest influence over sensible minds it is difficult to conceive, and yet we hear that converts have been added to the Romish Church by its perusal. That Roman Catholicism must and will gain ready listeners in Germany, is, we fear, a sad truth. To the soul

thirsting for religion, for a living, ac

tive faith, this Church offers a ready asylum from the chilling coldness of Lutheranism; and unless greater reforms are quickly introduced, and a more vital spirit breathed into the dull mass, we may look for many followers in the way which has led Countess Hahn-Hahn "from Babylon to Jerusalem."

IF I could have turned my thoughts from my own desolate condition, the aspect of Paris on the morning after the battle might well have engaged my attention. The very streets presented a scene such as never can be forgotten! The government had adventured on the bold experiment of employing the masses to control the few, and the fruits of this dangerous alliance might be seen in the various groups that passed along. Officials wearing their badges of duty, officers in full uniform, walked arm in arm with leaders of the popular party; men high in the state talked familiarly in the midst of little groups of working men; parties of the popular force, rudely armed, ill dressed, and disorderly, presented arms as some officer of rank rode by. All attested the existence of that strange compact by which the nation was again to be subjugated, and terror made the active principle of a government. The terrific songs of the bloody days of the Revolution were once more heard, and the cruel denunciations of the mob again rang aloud in the open streets! I heard and saw all these like one in a dream, as, with my portfolio of officepapers under my arm, I held my way to the Tuileries; nor was it till I had reached the wooden stockade in front of that palace that I became collected enough to ask myself, whither I was going, and for what?

The machinery of government to which I belonged was annihilated and destroyed; they who had guided and controlled it were gone; and there I stood alone, friendless, and without a home in that vast city, not knowing which way to turn me. I wandered into the garden of the Tuileries, and sat down upon a bench in one of the less frequented alleys. The cries and shouts of the populace rung faintly in my ear, and the noises of the city came dulled and indistinct by distance. From the quiet habits of my simple life, I had

scarcely learned anything whatever of Paris. My acquaintances were limited to the few I had seen at the bureau, and these I only met when there. My means were too scanty to admit of even the cheapest pleasures; and up to this my existence had been one uniform but contented poverty. Even this humble provision was now withdrawn from me. What was I to do? Was there a career by which I could earn my bread? I knew of none save daily labour with my hands, and where to seek for even this I did not know! In my little lodging behind the bureau I possessed a few articles of clothes and some books: these, if sold, would sup port me for a week or two, and then -ay, then! But who can tell? thought I, a day has marred-who knows but another day may make my fortune ?

It was night when I turned homeward. To my surprise the stair was not lit up as usual, and it was only after repeated knockings that the door was opened to me, and old Lizette, my landlady's servant, with a voice broken by sobs, bade me pass in, quietly, and to make no noise. I asked eagerly if any misfortune had occurred, and heard that Monsieur Bernois, my landlord, had been mortally wounded in the affray of the night before, and was then lying at the point of death.

"Is it the surgeon, Lizette?" cried Marguerite, a little girl of about fourteen, and whose gentle "good day" had been the only thing like welcome I had ever heard during my stay there; is it the surgeon ?"

"Helas, no! mademoiselle, it is the lodger!"

I had not even a name for them! I was simply the occupant of a solitary chamber for whom none cared or thought; and yet at that instant I felt my isolation the greatest blessing of heaven, and would not have exchanged my desolate condition for all the ties of family!

"Oh, sir," cried Marguerite, "have pity on us, and come to papa. He is bleeding on the bed here, and none of us know how to aid him!"

"But I am no less ignorant, mademoiselle," said I; "would that I could be of any use to you!"

"Oh come," cried she; "come, and heaven may direct you how to succour us, for we are utterly deserted!"

Scarcely knowing what I did I followed the little girl into a darkened room, where the long-drawn breathings of the wounded man were the only sounds. By the dim half light, I could see a figure seated at the foot of the bed. It was my hostess, pale, stern-looking, and collected; there she sat, gazing at the gasping object before her, with a terrible composure.

"Mamma, it is monsieur; monsieur who lives here, is come to see papa," whispered Marguerite timidly.

The mother nodded her head, as if to imply that she had heard her, but never spoke. I drew nigh the bed, the rather to show my sympathy with the sorrow, than that I could be of any service; and the dying man's eyes met mine. Glazed and filmy as they seemed at first, I fancied they grew bright and lustrous as he continued to stare. Such at all events was their fascination, that I could not look away from them, and so I stood under that steadfast gaze, forgetful even of the state of him who bestowed it. At last the orbs slowly turned, at first towards where his wife sat, then to Marguerite as she knelt by the bedside, and then back again to me, with an expression that needed no words to convey. I took the clammy hand in my own, and felt the fingers give a faint pressure. I squeezed them gently, and saw that his lips parted: they moved, too, as though with an effort to speak, but without avail. The attempt had evidently cost him a severe pang, for his features were convulsed for a few seconds, at the end of which he gently drew me a little towards him, and with a sigh so faint as to be scarcely heard, uttered the words, "pauvre femme !”

It was not until some minutes had elapsed that I saw he had ceased to breathe, for his eyes seemed to stare with meaning on me, and his countenance remained unchanged. At length, however, I became conscious that the

struggle was over, and his spirit had passed away for ever. The stillness of the room was terrible, for not a stir broke it; and I knelt down beside Marguerite to pray.

"Here is the surgeon, mademoiselle," said Lizette, hurriedly, and an old man drew nigh the bed, and touched the wrist of the dead man.

"Ma foi !" said he, "this is the fourth time I have been sent for to-day on a like errand;" and so saying, he tapped me on the shoulder, and motioned me to follow him.

"His nephew?his clerk, then ?" "Neither; I am a lodger here, and do not even claim acquaintance with the family."

"No matter," resumed he drily, "you will do as well as another; give me pen and paper."

I took some from an open portfolio on the table, and laid it before him, and he wrote rapidly a few lines in a straggling hand

"we

"The citizen Louis Bernois, age ; domiciled, Rue Neuve de Viardot, No. 318, Avocat," may call him avocat, though he was only a writer," said he, looking up, “wounded fatally in the lungs and heart, and attended till his death, on this morning, by the doctor Joseph Caillot, surgeon and licentiate. The above verified by me." Sign here," added he, handing me the pen, "and put your quality. Say, 'Friend of the family.""

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"But I never knew them; I have only lodged in the house for some months back."

"What signifies that? It is a mere form for the authorities, to whom his death must be reported, or his family exposed to trouble and annoyance. I will take it to the bureau myself."

I signed my name, therefore, as he directed me, and sealed the "act" with a seal I found on the table. The doctor pocketed the paper, and withdrew, not even bestowing on me a good-bye as he left the room.

Lizette came to me for instructions as to what was to be done. Madame had never recovered consciousness from the very first moment of the misfortune; mademoiselle was too young