en Herod's sword swept its nurseries
of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard
at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in
household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns; oftentimes
rising to the clouds; oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a
diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go
abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the
thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer
clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than Papal
at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my
knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him
that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight
years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play
and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her
afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the
spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he
recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over
_her_; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is
locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is _now_
within a second and a deeper darkness. This _Mater Lachrymarum_ also has
been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the
Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished
to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less
profound. By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a
ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women,
sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi.
And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest
empire, let us honour with the title of "Madonna."

The second sister is called _Mater Suspiriorum_, Our Lady of Sighs. She
never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no
diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor
subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with
perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises
not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for
ever; for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But