Page:William of Malmesbury's Chronicle.djvu/494

 head. After he had done thus, he beckoned for the cross to be presented to him, which, adoring with his head and indeed with his whole body, and embracing with his hands, he appeared to salute with joyful lips and to kiss with fond affection, when he distressed the standers-by with signs of departing, and, being caught up in their arms, was carried yet alive into the presbytery before the altar of St. Pancras. Here, surviving yet a time, and pleasing from the rosy hue of his countenance, he departed to Christ, pure, and freed eternally from every evil, at the same hour of the day on which, for his purification, he had been stricken with disease. And behold how wonderfully all things corresponded; the passion of the servant with the passion of the Lord; the hour of approaching sickness with the hour of approaching eternal happiness; the five days of illness which he endured for purifying the five senses of the body, through which none can avoid sin. Moreover, from his dying ere the completion of the fifth day, I think it is signified that he had never sinned in the last sense which is called the touch. And what else can the third hour of the day, in which he fell sick, and by dying entered into eternal life, signify, than that the same grace of the Holy Spirit, by which we know his whole life was regulated, was evidently present to him, both in his sickness and his death. Besides, we cannot doubt but that he equalled our fathers Odo and Odilo, both in virtue and in its reward, as a remarkable circumstance granted to them was allowed to him also. For as the Lord permitted them to die on the octaves of those festivals which they loved beyond all other, (as St. Odo chiefly loved the feast of St. Martin, and St. Odilo the nativity of our Lord, and each died on the octaves of these tides), so to Lanzo, who beyond all of this age observed the rule of St. Benedict, and venerated the holy mother of God and her solemnities with singular regard, it happened that, as, according to his usual custom, both on the demise of St. Benedict, and on the festival of St. Mary, which is called the Annunciation, he celebrated high mass in the convent: so on the eighth from the aforesaid anniversary of St. Benedict, being stricken with sickness, he also on the eighth day from the annunciation de-