d out of place, they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon
the walls.

The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-colored
marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and
shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly
garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,
filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after
centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal
comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider
sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and
warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can
satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human
necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not
here?

As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New
England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to
one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty
cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon
her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her
finger-tips. She felt as if her mother's spirit, somewhere within
the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan
forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy
superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the
hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman;
a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter,
who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright
with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same,
the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda's eyes. But again she
went onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right transept,
and thence found her way to a shrine, in the extreme corner of the
edifice, which is adorned with a mosaic copy of Guido's beautiful
Archangel, treading on the prostrate fiend.

This was one of the few pictures, which, in these dreary days, had not
faded nor deteriorated in Hilda's estimation; not that it was better
than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtile
delicacy of the painter's genius was peculiarly adapted to her
character. She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a
great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause