This ravine, with its dizzy depths, its waving foliage, its dripping
springs, and the low murmur of the little stream that pursued its way
far down at the bottom, was one of those things which stimulated her
impressible imagination, and filled her with a solemn and vague delight.
The ancient Italian tradition made it the home of fauns and dryads, wild
woodland creatures, intermediate links between vegetable life and that
of sentient and reasoning humanity. The more earnest faith that came in
with Christianity, if it had its brighter lights in an immortality of
blessedness, had also its deeper shadows in the intenser perceptions it
awakened of sin and evil, and of the mortal struggle by which the human
spirit must avoid endless woe and rise to endless felicity. The myths
with which the colored Italian air was filled in mediaeval ages no
longer resembled those graceful, floating, cloud-like figures one sees
in the ancient chambers of Pompeii,--the bubbles and rainbows of human
fancy, rising aimless and buoyant, with a mere freshness of animal life,
against a black background of utter and hopeless ignorance as to man's
past or future. They were rather expressed by solemn images of
mournful, majestic angels and of triumphant saints, or fearful, warning
presentations of loathsome fiends. Each lonesome gorge and sombre dell
had tales no more of tricky fauns and dryads, but of those restless,
wandering demons who, having lost their own immortality of blessedness,
constantly lie in wait to betray frail humanity, and cheat it of that
glorious inheritance bought by the Great Redemption.

The education of Agnes had been one which rendered her whole system
peculiarly sensitive and impressible to all influences from the
invisible and unseen. Of this education we shall speak more particularly
hereafter. At present we see her sitting in the twilight on the
moss-grown marble parapet, her distaff, with its silvery flax, lying