Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/241

Rh violated no sense of beauty even during his most fervent effusions; his voice, his words, his look, found their way to the soul. They seemed to proceed from the depths of the soul, as the natural expression of its life.

Many conversions to Catholicism occurred in Rome at this time. An American lady of a Quaker family, and belonging to the highest society in Boston, may be mentioned as amongst them. I had known this lovely and intellectual woman during my residence in Boston, and seen her as one of the ornaments of its social circles. I saw her again in Rome, found her enraptured by the eloquence of the Carmelite monk, enraptured by all the beauty and poetry wherewith the Catholic Church adorns its apparent unity. She drew comparisons between this and the bald nakedness of the Friends' meeting-houses and the Unitarian churches; she remarked what a contrast between the splitting-up of the churches in her native land, and the imposing unity of the Catholic church; she compared the dogmatical rigidity which prevailed amongst some of the religious teachers there, with the winning, insinuating manners of the Catholic prelates. Ill health had led her to seek its restoration in the south of Europe; ill health had excited her sensibility; she needed nourishment, unity, harmony for her soul, and she fancied that she should find in the Catholic Church, all that which she had hitherto been seeking for in the dark.

I found her more dazzled by the Catholic ecclesiastical life than clear regarding its relationship to the spirit. I besought her, after a long and earnest