l words" to the students of Milan. Being now
converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of
his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I
alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of
our lodging at Ostia." They

"Came on that which is, and heard
The vast pulsations of the world."

"And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able
to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and
we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower
of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again,
where words are begun and ended."

Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie
beside her husband in Africa, she said: "Lay this Body where you will.
Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will
remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be." "But upon the
ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and
the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."

The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been at
the death of his friend. But he could remember how "she related with
great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind word
to be darted out of my mouth against her." And to this consolation was
added who knows what of confidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a
kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart very
often tried and inured to every pain. For it is certain that "this green
wound" was green and grievous for a briefer time than the agony of his
earlier sorrows. He himself, so earnest in analysing his own emotions,
is perplexed by the short date of his tears, and his sharpest grief: "Let
him read it who will, and interpret it as it pleaseth him."

So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint Augustine. The most
human of books, the "Confessions," now strays into theology. Of all
books that which it most oddly resembles, to my fancy at least, is the
poems of Catullus. The passion and the tender heart they have in common,
and in common the war of flesh and spirit; the shameful inappeasable love
of Lesbia, or of the worldly life; so delightful and dear to the poet and
to the saint, so despised in other moods conquered and victorious again,
among the