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a star, do you think that I could see her?"

This astronomical apotheosis startled me for a moment, but I said unhesitatingly, "Yes," feeling sure that the lustrous eyes that looked in mine could certainly see as far as Dante's, when Beatrice was transferred from his side to the highest realm of Paradise. I put my head beside hers upon the pillow, and stayed till I thought she was asleep.

I then followed Kenmure into Laura's chamber. It was dusk, but the after-sunset glow still bathed the room with imperfect light, and he lay upon the bed, his hands clenched over his eyes.

There was a deep bow-window where Laura used to sit and watch us, sometimes, when we put off in the boat. Her clian harp was in the casement, breaking its heart in music. A delicate handkerchief was lodged between the cushions of the window-seat, — the very handkerchief she used to wave, in summer days long gone. The white boats went sailing beneath the evening light, children shouted and splashed in the water, a song came from a yacht, a steam-whistle shrilled from the receding steamer; but she for whom alone those little signs of life had been dear and precious would henceforth be as invisible to our eyes as if time and space had never held her; and the young moon and the evening star seemed but empty things, unless they could pilot us to some world where the splendor of her loveliness could match their own.

Twilight faded, evening darkened, and still Kenmure lay motionless, until his strong form grew in my moody fancy to be like some carving of Michel Angelo, more than like a living man. And when he at last startled me by speaking, it was with a voice so far off and so strange, it might almost have come wandering down from the century when Michel Angelo lived.

"You are right," he said. "I have been living in a dream. It has all vanished. I have kept no memorial

of her presence, nothing to perpetuate the most beautiful of lives."

ter.

Before I could answer, the door came softly open, and there stood in the doorway a small white figure, holding aloft a lighted taper of pure alabasIt was Marian in her little nightdress, with the loose, blue wrapper trailing behind her, let go in the effort to hold carefully the doll, Susan Halliday, robed also for the night.

"May I come in?" said the child. Kenmure was motionless at first, then, looking over his shoulder, said merely, "What?"

"Janet said," continued Marian, in her clear and methodical way, "that my mother was up in heaven, and would help God hear my prayers at any rate; but if I pleased, I could come and say them by you."

A shudder passed over Kenmure ; then he turned away, and put his hands over his eyes. She waited for no answer, but, putting down the candlestick, in her wonted careful manner, upon a chair, she began to climb upon the bed, lifting laboriously one little rosy foot, then another, still dragging after her, with great effort, the doll. Nestling at her father's breast, I saw her kneel.

"Once my mother put her arm round me, when I said my prayers." She made this remark, under her breath, less as a suggestion, it seemed, than as the simple statement of a fact.

Instantly I saw Kenmure's arm move, and grasp her with that strong and gentle touch of his that I had so often noticed in the studio, a touch that seemed quiet as the approach of fate, and as resistless. I knew him well enough to understand that iron adoption.

He drew her toward him, her soft hair was on his breast, she looked fearlessly in his eyes, and I could hear the little prayer proceeding, yet in so low a whisper that I could not catch one word. She was infinitely solemn at such times, the darling; and there was always something in her low, clear tone, through all her prayings and phi

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in. Marian's baby breathing grew deeper and more tranquil; and as all the sorrows of the weary earth might be imagined to exhale themselves in spring through the breath of violets, so it seemed as if it might be with Kenmure's burdened heart. By degrees the strong man's deeper respirations mingled with those of the child, and their two separate beings seemed merged and solved into identity, as they slumbered, breast to breast, beneath the golden and quiet stars. I passed by without awaking them; I knew that the artist had attained his dream.

I

THE RELIGIOUS SIDE OF THE ITALIAN QUESTION.

I.

HAVE of late frequently been asked by my English friends why it is that I decline to return to my country, and to associate my own efforts for the moral and political advancement of Italy with those of her governing classes. "The amnesty has opened up a path for the legal dissemination of your ideas," they tell me. "By taking the place already repeatedly offered you among the representatives of the people, you would secure to those who hold the helm of the state the support of the whole Republican party. Do you not, by throwing the weight of your name and influence on the side of the malcontents, increase the difficulties of the government, and prolong the fatal want of moral and political unity, without which the mere material fact of union is barren, and unproductive of benefit to the people?"

The question is asked by serious men, who wish my country well, and is therefore deserving of a serious answer.

Before treating the personal matter, however, let me say that, since 1859,

the Republican party has done precisely what my English friends required it to do. The Italian Republicans have actually assisted and upheld the government with an abnegation worthy of all praise, — sacrificing even their right of Apostolate to the great idea of Italian unity. Perceiving that the nation was determined to give monarchy the benefit of a trial, they have-in that reverence for the national will which is the first duty of Republicans—patiently awaited its results, and endured every form of misgovernment rather than afford a pretext to those in power for the nonfulfilment of their declared intention of initiating a war to regain our own territory and true frontier, a war without which, as they well knew, the permanent security and dignity of Italy were impossible, and which, had it been conducted from a truly national point of view, would have wrought the moral redemption of our people.

The monarchy, however, which, as I pointed out in my article on "The Republican Alliance," had had five years to prepare, and was in a position to take the field with thirty-five thousand regu

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I may be told that a people of twenty-four millions who tamely submit to dishonor deserve it.

I admit it; but it must not be forgotten that our masses are uneducated, and that it is the natural tendency of the uneducated to accept their rulers as their guides, and to govern their own conduct by the example of their soidisant superiors; and I assert that, if our people have no consciousness of their great destiny, nor sense of their true power and mission, if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the present day grouped around, I will not say the conception of unity, but the mere unstable fact of union, the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire, cause is to be found in the immorality and corruption of our rulers.

the

The true life of a people must be sought in the ruling idea or conception by which it is governed and directed.

The true idea of a nation implies the consciousness of a common aim, and the fraternal association and concentration of all the vital forces of the country towards the realization of that aim.

The national aim is indicated by the past tradition, and confirmed by the present conscience, of the country.

The national aim once ascertained, it becomes the basis of the sovereign power, and the criterion of judgment with regard to the acts of the citizens.

Every act tending to promote the national aim is good; every act tending to a departure from that aim is evil.

The moral law is supreme. The re

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ligion of duty forms the link between the nation and humanity; the source of its right, and the sign of its place and value in humanity.

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Such are the essential characteristics of what we term a nation at the present day. Where these are wanting, there exists but an aggregate of families, temporarily united for the purpose of diminishing the ills of life, and loosely bound together by past habits or interests, which are destined, sooner or later, to clash. All intellectual or economic development among them, regulated by a great conception supreme over every selfish interest, instead of being equally diffused over the various members of the national family, leads to the gradual formation of educated or financial castes, but obtains for the nation itself neither recognized function, position, dignity, nor glory among foreign peoples.

These things, which are true of all peoples, are still more markedly so of a people emerging from a prolonged and deathlike stupor into new life. Other nations earnestly watch its every step. If its advance is illumined by the signs of a high mission, and its first manifestations sanctified by the baptism of a great principle, other nations will surround the new collective being with affection and hope, and be ready to follow it upon the path assigned to it by God. If they discover in it no signs of any noble inspiration, ruling moral conception, or potent future, they will learn to despise it, and to regard its territory as a new field for a predatory policy, and direct or indirect domination.

Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone, among the nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the rôle of Italy in the world to be a work of

moral unification, - the utterance of the synthetic word of civilization.

Italy is a religion.

And if we look only to the immediate. national aim, and the inevitable consequences that must follow the complete, constitution of Italy as a nation, we see that to no people in Europe has been assigned a higher office in the fulfilment of the educational design, to the evolution of which Providence guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be of itself a potent initiative in the world. The mere fact of our existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification of the external and internal life of Europe.

Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a Slavo Magyaro - Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.

We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming, for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined within Biblical limits.

Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however, God alone knows the grief with which I write it, sense with us is wanting.

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And now a word as to the amnesty. Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of oblivion and pardon for having loved Italy above all earthly things, and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a dream.

But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence; and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of my last years possible, it would be useless.

My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political regeneration of my country have been, are, and will be governed by a religious idea.

The past, present, and future of our rulers have been, are, and will be led astray by materialism.

Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political questions are necessarily secondary and derivative.

They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority - in a religion of duty, of which politics should be the application — cannot, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest.

Our rulers have no great ruling conception, no belief in the supremacy of the moral law, no just notion of life, nor of the human unity, no belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the duty of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the logical consequence of their want of all faith in God and his law are the substitution of the idea of interest for the idea of duty, — of a paltry notion of tactics, for the fearless affirmation of the truth,—of opportunity, for principle.

It is for this that they protest against, without resisting, wrong, - for this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous by-paths, fascinated by the thought of displaying state-craft, and forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into slavery. It is for this that our government has reduced Italy to the condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition copies the wretched tactics of the Left in the French Chamber, which prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the

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On the one side we have-as our only form and semblance of religionthe Papacy.

I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other dared openly to venture on the problem, - when the boldest contented themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of Catholicism, - I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence of quite another death.

I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.

Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion, — a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and ex

ample of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to know the cause of this.

All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in falsehood, not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in indulgences three centuries ago, not because this or that Pope trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion, not because they have governed and persecuted men according to their arbitrary will; but because they cannot do other, even if they would.

These evils and these sins are not causes, but consequences.

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Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals should be converted; that the Jansenists, or other Reformers, should recall the misguided Popes to the charity and humility of their ancient way of life, - they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater dignity; - it can never again be what once it was, the ruler and director of the conscience of the peoples.

The mission of the Papacy - a great and holy mission, whatever the fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the contrary is fulfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power of genius, no miracle of will, can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal governments of the spirit over matter, of God over Cæsar-an organic social fact.

And such was in truth the mission of the Papacy, the secret of its power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron

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