The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 46, August, 1861

If there seemed somewhat mechanical in the number of times which Agnes repeated the "Hail, Mary!"—in the prescribed number of times she rose or bowed or crossed herself or laid her forehead in low humility on the flags of the pavement, it was redeemed by the earnest fervor which inspired each action. However foreign to the habits of a Northern mind or education such a mode of prayer may be, these forms to her were all helpful and significant, her soul was borne by them Godward,—and often, as she prayed, it seemed to her that she could feel the dissolving of all earthly things, and the pressing nearer and nearer of the great cloud of witnesses who ever surround the humblest member of Christ's mystical body.

 
"Sweet loving hearts around her beat,
Sweet helping hands are stirred,
And palpitates the veil between
With breathings almost heard."
 

Certain English writers, looking entirely from a worldly and philosophical standpoint, are utterly at a loss to account for the power which certain Italian women of obscure birth came to exercise in the councils of nations merely by the force of a mystical piety; but the Northern mind of Europe is entirely unfitted to read and appreciate the psychological religious phenomena of Southern races. The temperament which in our modern days has been called the mediïstic, and which with us is only exceptional, is more or less a race-peculiarity of Southern climates, and gives that objectiveness to the conception of spiritual things from which grew up a whole ritual and a whole world of religious Art. The Southern saints and religious artists were seers,—men and women of that peculiar fineness and delicacy of temperament which made them especially apt to receive and project outward the truths of the spiritual life; they were in that state of "divine madness" which is favorable to the most intense conception of the poet and artist, and something of this influence descended through all the channels of the people.

When Agnes rose from prayer, she had a serene, exalted expression, like one who walks with some unseen excellence and meditates on some untold joy. As she was crossing the court to come towards her uncle, her eye was attracted by the sparkle of something on the ground, and, stooping, she picked up a heart-shaped locket, curiously made of a large amethyst, and fastened with a golden arrow. As she pressed upon this, the locket opened and disclosed to her view a folded paper. Her mood at this moment was so calm and elevated that she received the incident with no start or shiver of the nerves. To her it seemed a Providential token, which would probably bring to her some further knowledge of this mysterious being who had been so especially confided to her intercessions.

Agnes had learned of the Superior of the Convent the art of reading writing, which would never have been the birthright of the peasant-girl in her times, and the moon had that dazzling clearness which revealed every letter. She stood by the parapet, one hand lying in the white blossoming alyssum which filled its marble crevices, while she read and seriously pondered the contents of the paper.

TO AGNES

 
Sweet saint, sweet lady, may a sinful soul
Approach thee with an offering of love,
And lay at thy dear feet a weary heart
That loves thee, as it loveth God above!
If blessed Mary may without a stain
Receive the love of sinners most defiled,
If the fair saints that walk with her in white
Refuse not love from earth's most guilty child,
Shouldst thou, sweet lady, then that love deny
Which all-unworthy at thy feet is laid?
Ah, gentlest angel, be not more severe
Than the dear heavens unto a loving prayer!
Howe'er unworthily that prayer be said,
Let thine acceptance be like that on high!
 

There might have been times in Agnes's life when the reception of this note would have astonished and perplexed her; but the whole strain of thought and conversation this evening had been in exalted and poetical regions, and the soft stillness of the hour, the wonderful calmness and clearness of the moonlight, all seemed in unison with the strange incident that had occurred, and with the still stranger tenor of the paper. The soft melancholy, half-religious tone of it was in accordance with the whole undercurrent of her life, and prevented that start of alarm which any homage of a more worldly form might have excited. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that she read it many times with pauses and intervals of deep thought, and then with a movement of natural and girlish curiosity examined the rich jewel which had inclosed it. At last, seeming to collect her thoughts, she folded the paper and replaced it in its sparkling casket, and, unlocking the door of the shrine, laid the gem with its inclosure beneath the lily-spray, as another offering to the Madonna. "Dear Mother," she said, "if indeed it be so, may he rise from loving me to loving thee and thy dear Son, who is Lord of all! Amen!" Thus praying, she locked the door and turned thoughtfully to her repose, leaving the monk pacing up and down in the moonlit garden.

Meanwhile the Cavalier was standing on the velvet mossy bridge which spanned the stream at the bottom of the gorge, watching the play of moonbeams on layer after layer of tremulous silver foliage in the clefts of the black, rocky walls on either side. The moon rode so high in the deep violet-colored sky, that her beams came down almost vertically, making green and translucent the leaves through which they passed, and throwing strongly marked shadows here and there on the flower-embroidered moss of the old bridge. There was that solemn, plaintive stillness in the air which makes the least sound—the hum of an insect's wing, the cracking of a twig, the patter of falling water—so distinct and impressive.

It needs not to be explained how the Cavalier, following the steps of Agnes and her grandmother at a distance, had threaded the path by which they ascended to their little sheltered nook,—how he had lingered within hearing of Agnes's voice, and, moving among the surrounding rocks and trees, and drawing nearer and nearer as evening shadows drew on, had listened to the conversation, hoping that some unexpected chance might gain him a moment's speech with his enchantress.

The reader will have gathered from the preceding chapter that the conception which Agnes had formed as to the real position of her admirer from the reports of Giulietta was false, and that in reality he was not Lord Adrian, the brother of the King, but an outcast and landless representative of one branch of an ancient and noble Roman family, whose estates had been confiscated and whose relations had been murdered, to satisfy the boundless rapacity of Caesar Borgia, the infamous favorite of the notorious Alexander VI.

The natural temperament of Agostino Sarelli had been rather that of the poet and artist than of the warrior. In the beautiful gardens of his ancestral home it had been his delight to muse over the pages of Dante and Ariosto, to sing to the lute and to write in the facile flowing rhyme of his native Italian the fancies of the dream-land of his youth.

He was the younger brother of the family,—the favorite son and companion of his mother, who, being of a tender and religious nature, had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and devotion for the institutions of his fathers.

The storm which swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his times,—the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to the refinement and elevation of his nature.

In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius Scaevola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray his honor. If the legends of Rome's ancient heroes cause the pulses of colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what must their power be to one who says, "These were my fathers"? Agostino read Plutarch, and thought, "I, too, am a Roman!"—and then he looked on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of the old "Sanctus Senatus," and asked himself, "By what right does it hold these?" He knew full well that in the popular belief all those hardy and virtuous old Romans whose deeds of heroism so transported him were burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ; and he asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural luxury and vice which defiled the Papal chair and ran riot through every ecclesiastical order, whether such men, without faith, without conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized successors of Christ and his Apostles?

To us, of course, from our modern stand-point, the question has an easy solution,—but not so in those days, when the Christianity of the known world was in the Romish Church, and when the choice seemed to be between that and infidelity. Not yet had Luther flared aloft the bold, cheery torch which showed the faithful how to disentangle Christianity from Ecclesiasticism. Luther in those days was a star lying low in the gray horizon of a yet unawakened dawn.

All through Italy at this time there was the restless throbbing and pulsating, the aimless outreach of the popular heart, which marks the decline of one cycle of religious faith and calls for some great awakening and renewal. Savonarola, the priest and prophet of this dumb desire, was beginning to heave a great heart of conflict towards that mighty struggle with the vices and immoralities of his time in which he was yet to sink a martyr; and even now his course was beginning to be obstructed by the full energy of the whole aroused serpent brood which hissed and knotted in the holy places of Rome.

Here, then, was our Agostino, with a nature intensely fervent and poetic, every fibre of whose soul and nervous system had been from childhood skilfully woven and intertwined with the ritual and faith of his fathers, yearning towards the grave of his mother, yearning towards the legends of saints and angels with which she had lulled his cradle slumbers and sanctified his childhood's pillow, and yet burning with the indignation of a whole line of old Roman ancestors against an injustice and oppression wrought under the full approbation of the head of that religion. Half his nature was all the while battling the other half. Would he be Roman, or would he be Christian? All the Roman in him said "No!" when he thought of submission to the patent and open injustice and fiendish tyranny which had disinherited him, slain his kindred, and held its impure reign by torture and by blood. He looked on the splendid snow-crowned mountains whose old silver senate engirdles Rome with an eternal and silent majesty of presence, and he thought how often in ancient times they had been a shelter to free blood that would not endure oppression; and so gathering to his banner the crushed and scattered retainers of his father's house, and offering refuge and protection to multitudes of others whom the crimes and rapacities of the Borgias had stripped of possessions and means of support, he fled to a fastness in the mountains between Rome and Naples, and became an independent chieftain, living by his sword.

The rapacity, cruelty, and misgovernment of the various regular authorities of Italy at this time made brigandage a respectable and honored institution in the eyes of the people, though it was ostensibly banned both by Pope and Prince. Besides, in the multitude of contending factions which were every day wrangling for supremacy, it soon became apparent, even to the ruling authorities, that a band of fighting-men under a gallant leader, advantageously posted in the mountains and understanding all their passes, was a power of no small importance to be employed on one side or the other; and therefore it happened, that, though nominally outlawed or excommunicated, they were secretly protected on both sides, with a view to securing, their assistance in critical turns of affairs.

Among the common people of the towns and villages their relations were of the most comfortable kind, their depredations being chiefly confined to the rich and prosperous, who, as they wrung their wealth out of the people, were not considered particular objects of compassion when the same kind of high-handed treatment was extended toward themselves.

The most spirited and brave of the young peasantry, if they wished to secure the smiles of the girls of their neighborhood, and win hearts past redemption, found no surer avenue to favor than in joining the brigands. The leaders of these bands sometimes piqued themselves on elegant tastes and accomplishments; and one of them is said to have sent to the poet Tasso, in his misfortunes and exile, an offer of honorable asylum and protection in his mountain-fortress.

Agostino Sarelli saw himself, in fact, a powerful chief; and there were times when the splendid scenery of his mountain-fastness, its inspiring air, its wild eagle-like grandeur, independence, and security, gave him a proud contentment, and he looked at his sword and loved it as a bride. But then again there were moods in which he felt all that yearning and disquiet of soul which the man of wide and tender moral organization must feel who has had his faith shaken in the religion of his fathers. To such a man the quarrel with his childhood's faith is a never-ending anguish; especially is it so with a religion so objective, so pictorial, and so interwoven with the whole physical and nervous nature of man, as that which grew up and flowered in modern Italy.

Agostino was like a man who lives in an eternal struggle of self-justification,—his reason forever going over and over with its plea before his regretful and never-satisfied heart, which was drawn every hour of the day by some chain of memory towards the faith whose visible administrators he detested with the whole force of his moral being. When the vesper-bell, with its plaintive call, rose amid the purple shadows of the olive-silvered mountains,—when the distant voices of chanting priest and choir reached him solemnly from afar,—when he looked into a church with its cloudy pictures of angels, and its window-panes flaming with venerable forms of saints and martyrs,—it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over the wafer they consecrated,—he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the sacramental wine,—and yet God had kept silence and not struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, "Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. Is there a God that judgeth in the earth?"

The first time he saw Agnes bending like a flower in the slanting evening sunbeams by the old gate of Sorrento, while he stood looking down the kneeling street and striving to hold his own soul in the sarcastic calm of utter indifference, he felt himself struck to the heart by an influence he could not define. The sight of that young face, with its clear, beautiful lines, and its tender fervor, recalled a thousand influences of the happiest and purest hours of his life, and drew him with an attraction he vainly strove to hide under an air of mocking gallantry.

When she looked him in the face with such grave, surprised eyes of innocent confidence, and promised to pray for him, he felt a remorseful tenderness as if he had profaned a shrine. All that was passionate, poetic, and romantic in his nature was awakened to blend itself in a strange mingling of despairing sadness and of tender veneration about this sweet image of perfect purity and faith. Never does love strike so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature; there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its interlacing fibres.

In this case it was not merely Agnes that he sighed for, but she stood to him as the fair symbol of that life-peace, that rest of soul which he had lost, it seemed to him, forever.

"Behold this pure, believing child," he said to himself,—"a true member of that blessed Church to which thou art a rebel! How peacefully this lamb walketh the old ways trodden by saints and martyrs, while thou art an infidel and unbeliever!" And then a stern voice within him answered,—"What then? Is the Holy Ghost indeed alone dispensed through the medium of Alexander and his scarlet crew of cardinals? Hath the power to bind and loose in Christ's Church been indeed given to whoever can buy it with the wages of robbery and oppression? Why does every prayer and pious word of the faithful reproach me? Why is God silent? Or is there any God? Oh, Agnes, Agnes! dear lily! fair lamb! lead a sinner into the green pastures where thou restest!"

So wrestled the strong nature, tempest-tossed in its strength,—so slept the trustful, blessed in its trust,—then in Italy, as now in all lands.

MAIL-CLAD STEAMERS

Exposed as we are to treason at home and jealousy abroad, it becomes the policy as well as the duty of our country to prepare with promptitude for every contingency by availing itself of all improvements in the art of war. Superior weapons double the courage and efficiency of our troops, carry dismay to the foe, and diminish the cost and delays of warfare. The match-lock and the field-piece in their rudest form triumphed over the shield, the spear, and the javelin, while the long-bow, once so formidable, is now rarely drawn, except by those who cater for sensation-journals. The king's-arm and artillery of the last war cannot stand before the Minié rifle and Whitworth cannon any more than the sickle can keep pace with the McCormick reaper, or the slow coach with the railway-car or the telegraph. Mail-clad steamers, impervious to shells and red-hot balls, and almost, if not quite, invulnerable by solid shot and balls from rifled cannon at the distance of a hundred yards, have been launched upon the deep, and already form an important part of the navies of France and England. They have been adopted by Russia, Austria, and Spain; and yet, although our country furnishes iron which has no superior,—although it has taken the lead in the steamship, the telegraph, and the railway,—although at this moment it requires the mail-clad steamer more than any other nation, to relieve its fortresses, to recover the cotton ports, and to defend its great cities from foreign aggression, not a single one has yet been launched, or even been authorized by Congress. For years we have had no more efficient Secretary of the Navy, or more able and energetic chiefs of the bureaus, if we may judge from what has already been accomplished; but it depends on Congress to give the proper authority to construct a mail-clad navy, and to provide the necessary funds.

The importance of defensive armor has ever been felt. The warriors of ancient times went to the field in coats-of-mail, and both Homer and Virgil dilate upon the exquisite carving of the shield. The hauberk and corselet were used by the Crusaders, and the chain-armor of Milan was nearly or quite impervious to the sword and spear. Mexico and Peru were won in great part by coats-of-mail. They were used until gunpowder changed the whole course of war,—and the Chevalier Bayard, that knight "sans peur et sans reproche," who had borne himself bravely and almost without a scar in a hundred battles, in his last Italian campaign, as he was borne from the field, after being struck down by a cannon-ball, mourned that the days of Chivalry were ended. And Shakspeare tells us that this villanous saltpetre had prevented at least one sensitive gentleman from being a soldier.

Defensive armor is still used by tribes who are destitute of powder; and Barth and Barkie, in their African expeditions, found Moorish horsemen pressing down from the North into the interior of the Soudan, arrayed in coats-of-mail of the same description with that which figured in the Crusades.

In the naval contests of the last century armed ships were inferior in size to those of modern times, and their tough oak sides were not easily pierced by the six- and nine-pound balls then in general use, and twelve-pounders were considered of unusual dimension. During the war between France and America, a merchantman, armed with nine-pounders, actually beat off a sloop-of-war and several Spanish privateers; but now frigates, and even sloops-of-war, are armed with Dahlgren guns of eight- to eleven-inch bore, which throw balls of sixty to one hundred pounds,—also with superior rifled cannon. Whitworth and Armstrong guns are in use that throw shot or shell distances of three to five miles, which "the wooden walls" of neither England nor America are able to resist.

We have recently seen the Freeborn, the Pawnee, and the Harriet Lane, when assailing the rebel batteries on the James and the Potomac, compelled to take positions at the distance of two miles, and to keep constantly moving, and compelled consequently to throw away most of their costly ammunition in uncertain shots, at the same time that they were constantly exposed to shots which might destroy their engines and explode their boilers. There was no lack of courage on the part of their gallant officers; but, from the insufficiency of the vessels, they were obliged to use a wise discretion, and to take all reasonable precautions for the safety of their ships, so important and yet so inadequate to the service of the country. And when Fort Sumter was about to fall, and when a single shot-proof gun-boat could have defied the rebel batteries, and without the loss of a man have conveyed to the fortress stores for six months and a whole battalion of troops, that single gun-boat,—a mere gun-boat, which need not have passed within one thousand yards of any batteries on her way,—could not be commanded by the Government, and the gallant Anderson was compelled to lower to treason that flag whose fall has aroused the nation to arms.

The earliest experiments upon the power of iron plate to resist the force of cannon-balls appear to have been made in France by M. de Montgery, an officer in the French navy, as far back as 1810. He proposed to cover the sides of ships with several plates of iron, of the aggregate thickness of four inches, which he alleged would resist the force of any projectile. But Napoleon had not confidence in his navy; he had lost the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar; ever successful on the land, his ships had been swept by Nelson from the deep; and he had neither time nor disposition to investigate new plans for the restoration of the navy, or even to take up Fulton's new discovery. It was reserved for the third Napoleon to develop the original idea of a Frenchman, and thus to place France on the sea nearly or quite upon a footing with England.

Some twelve years later, General Paixhans, who gave his name to the large guns of modern times, (although their prior invention was claimed by the late Colonel Bomford,) again commended plate-armor for ships to his Government; but his advice was not then adopted.

With the improvement of cannon the importance of plate-armor became more and more apparent; and at length Mr. Stevens, under the sanction of our Government, instituted a series of experiments upon iron plates, and soon after commenced building an immense floating battery for the defence of New York, at Hoboken, which is still unfinished, but which, it is rumored, will, if Congress appropriates the means, be completed the present season.

Stevens was the first to carry out the idea of a mail-clad steamer; and it is alone due to the apathy of the late Administration, which has neglected our navy while indulging in its Southern proclivities, that our nation has not the honor of launching the first steamer in a coat-of-mail. The frame, however, of such a vessel has been long in place, the hull is nearly complete, the engines are far advanced, and the finishing stroke may soon be given.

Stevens, in the course of his experiments, made the important discovery, that a single plate of boiler-iron, five-eighths of an inch in thickness, and weighing less than twenty-five pounds to the superficial foot², when nailed to the side of a ship, was impenetrable by shell and red-hot shot, the two missiles most dangerous to wooden walls. When a solid shot strikes the side of a wooden ship, it passes in and usually stops before it reaches the opposite side. The fibres of the wood yield and close up behind it, and it often happens, from the reunion of the fibres, that it is difficult to find the place perforated by the ball, and if found, it is often easy to remedy the injury by a simple plug. But if a red-hot shot enter the ship, it may imbed itself in the wood or coils of cordage or sails, or reach the magazine, and thus destroy the whole structure, while the shell may explode within the ship and carry destruction to both men and vessel. If, then, the iron-plate had answered no other purpose, the discovery by Stevens of its capacity to resist the two most formidable weapons of his day would alone have been of great value to the country; but he went farther, and demonstrated by actual construction the idea of Montgery, that successive plates of iron would resist the cold spherical shot thrown by the best artillery, and his floating battery or frigate is protected by plate within plate of iron armor.

While our Government slept upon its unfinished frigate, and forgot the honor and interest of the country in the lap of the siren of the South,—of that South which sixty years since broke down the navy of John Adams, and left us to encounter the embargo and war with England without a navy, or, at most, with a few frigates which sufficed to show what the navy of Adams might have effected,—the honor of launching the first iron-clad steamer, the Gloire, was resigned to the French. The first Napoleon made the army of France the best in Europe, if not in the world; the third, while he maintains the standing of the army, aspires to give the same position to her navy.

In 1854, Napoleon, who had long studied the art of war, and during his stay in New York had doubtless seen or heard of the floating battery, determined to construct two such batteries, and accordingly built the Lave and Tonnerre. With one of these, the Lave, during the Russian War, he assailed and destroyed in the brief space of one hour the strong fortress of Kinburn, near Sebastopol; and in striking contrast to this success, a large British steamship, heavily armed, but constructed of wood, was actually captured near Odessa by a small party of Russians with two or three thirty-two-pounders worked through a gap in an embankment.

The invulnerable battery of France anchored close under the fortress. Before its cannon, granite walls are shivered into fragments most dangerous to the gunners, while the shells, burying themselves two or three feet deep in the brickwork, by their explosion shake the walls to pieces. Iron, protected by iron, triumphed over both bricks and granite, which had defied the fleet of England.

The Emperor was not slow to realize the result of the problem he had solved. He at once proceeded to test the strength of the best kinds of plate made in his dominions, and found, by actual trial, that plates of the best iron, but four and three-fourths inches in thickness, were able to resist repeated shocks of solid balls fired at the distance of twenty metres (less than four rods) from his sixty-eight-pounders, and from rifled guns throwing shot of nearly the same calibre,—and this, too, when the balls were impelled by more than one-fourth their weight of powder. But ships rarely engage at such close quarters either with vessels or fortresses, and the effect of the ball is greatly diminished by distance, a single inch plate sufficing to stop a spherical shot at a long distance.

As the result of these experiments, the Emperor proceeded to construct the Gloire, an iron-clad frigate, which has been completed, has made several voyages, been tried in a severe gale, for nearly a year has been the pride of the French navy, and has recently run from Toulon to Algiers in the brief space of sixty-six hours.

The Gloire is a steam-frigate cased in five-inch plates; she is two hundred and fifty feet in length by twenty-one in width, mounts thirty-eight rifled fifty-pounders, is moved by engines of nine hundred horse-power, is manned by six hundred men, has a speed of twelve and a half knots, and a capacity for five days' coal,—a capacity which might be easily increased by a little more breadth of beam, but which is sufficient for a passage to Algiers, or along the coast of Spain, England, or Italy. This vessel is considered invulnerable by balls discharged from rifled cannon at the distance of four hundred yards.

Encouraged by his continued success, the Emperor at once ordered the construction of nine such frigates, several of which are already finished. He has since ordered ten more iron-cased frigates and gun-boats, which are now in course of construction. Before the present season closes, his iron navy will be composed of twenty steamships and four floating batteries.