31st January, 1834. Crown of thorns.
An altar is in the room, at which the bishop allows mass to be celebrated once or twice every week, according to the convenience of the priest, and on saints' days.
We spoke of the bishop. She was much interested also in all that the doctor said. He kept fanning her with a large feather fan: her only relief. She suffers most on Thursdays. The issue of blood Fridays unaccompanied with pain: rather a relief. A woman and boy came to see her. Cheerful when freer from pain (she always suffers). Was told we were English. Looks very intently at one. Light blue or blue gray eyes; hair fine,—a cold brown. Face awfully wasted. Her smile sweet. Says, when most in pain, "Dio mio, mio Dio!" Friday morning, at five, we were again with her. She was in an insensible state: waking up at intervals. The hands still clasped, but the head shaking, and her teeth chattering. The blood was bright red and fresh (flowing) from all the upper row of holes and the rest, though clotted below generally, for she suffers great heat of fever. The wounds of the hands were open and ran, but outside (on the surface) the blood had run down the back of the hand in a broad stream to a little below the wrist, and there stopped; one small current had trickled across to the bottom of the hand. It was clotted. I looked as close as I could by stooping to the inside of the left hand. My impression was of an open wound, much deeper; long, with lips standing out upon the upper side; much blood had run over the inside of her hand: it ran to the wrist and all over the palms. Her teeth whole, though the two centre much apart. Her face, above and below the blood, was not livid, but of a good complexion. Her voice when she spoke was much stronger than yesterday. She saw me trying to draw the outline of her face, and said, she supposed a portrait would appear of her. We commended ourselves and England to her prayers. All English (she said) who had seen her had done the same. She commended herself by us to the Bishop's blessing and intercession with "Il vescovo di tutti," (something she said quite indistinct). This is the substance of my notes written on the spot. I must add to it, that every Friday since the date above, and only on Friday, the wounds have bled; that the doctor told us he had seen her feet a hundred times, which are marked like the hands, but the blood runs up towards the toes; as it does up the nose, which we saw. Her side wound has been seen by several women, her sister among others, whom we talked much to. She was perfectly simple, wanted no money, and treated her sister more as an invalid than anything else. The Dr. Yoris's presence was, I think, a very great advantage to us. It put all reserve out of the question, if any would otherwise have been observable, and enabled us to see her more as she always is, and no doubt to stay longer, to draw the curtain aside, &c. My impression was of great awe at the sight: the day Friday, and the supernatural facts of the flow of blood from a person taking no nourishment or food of any kind, the course taken by the blood,—but the sight of the dark mask of blood was what first and most painfully struck me. The simplicity, and apparent domesticity, of her way of speaking—her smiling and answering the doctor's questions—struck me next. As he said, a secular question is answered in the tone of this world, a religious one in that of the other. She seems conscious herself of nothing beyond God's chastisement for her sins; therefore she is shy of showing or speaking of herself beyond what is necessary as information to serious inquirers. The wound in her side she refused to show any man, though she said any number of women, physician's wives, if they would, might see it, for it needed no medical treatment. She does not seem conscious of being in any extraordinary or miraculous way the vehicle, as such, of Divine Grace; but she is patient, exceedingly, and strives, as she says, to do all God's will. Nothing remarkable in a religious way is recorded of her early character. "Una buona ragazza," the doctor called her, but no more; he said especially not "bigotta." Is it not a palpable evidence of our Lord's presence to us in His sufferers, to bring home the actuality of what is taught us of the spiritual things we have been born into, yet to confound spiritual pride? "Thy ways are in the sea, and Thy paths are in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known."
Next morning we went to Caldaro, a beautiful village about nine miles or eight from Neumarkt, and, by aid of the Bishop of Trent's letter, saw Maria Mörl, the Estatica, but were only allowed to see her for five minutes. She knelt on her bed, with her hands together under the chin: her attitude was leaning forward, and inclined to the right in such a position as I cannot keep myself in without support; nor do I think, from the overbalance of the body, it could be done naturally. Her face has much beauty, her eyes are dark and full, hair long and black, and her skin as pale as that of a dead body or a wax figure; not a muscle moved; and except a very slight oscillating motion of the body occasionally, and the breathing, there were no signs of life in her, though I saw once the eyelid quiver slightly. The friar who took us in, a Franciscan, told her to lie down; which, after a moment or two, she did; only falling back in the bed, with her legs from the knee unmoved. She gave two slight sort of groans or sighs. Her hands remained just as they were, and the eyes were fixed on the same spot. After a short visit, the friar took us out,—talking a German which we could none of us understand. When we got to the door of the house, we asked him, in Latin, if we could see her again: he answered, "Eam vidistis, eam vidistis," and left us.
We walked back to Neumarkt, and yesterday evening started in the Bolzano omnibus back to this place. Fare you well. * * * I have given you as short as I could this marvellous account.
* * * * *
J. H. Pollen.
My dear ——.
* * * We staid at Verona one clear day: it has very interesting churches, and a noble river, the Adige, "exulting and abounding," as Byron says; and many Shakspearian associations, besides very quaint and mediæval bits of architecture. But my time is waxing short, and a greater attraction was near. So yesterday we squudged ourselves into a merciless omnibus, which carried twelve insiders thirty miles in the space of six hours to the railway at Vicenza; and the said railway brought us on just in time to reach Venice by the last light of day. Very striking indeed is the approach to Venice, on a bridge two miles long over the Lagune, very striking because so appropriate to a city which is like no other. The evening was unfavourable, for it rained, which has scarcely happened to us before; notwithstanding, our excitement was great; I do not think I have felt so much curiosity about a place since I entered Rome nearly thirteen years ago, and could scarcely believe I was there. Though a great part of to-day has been rainy Venice does not disappoint me. The Doge's palace, the piazza, and piazzetta of St. Mark, and his church, are quite unique; so is the great canal, with its host of middle age palaces. We have been to-day both in the pozzi and the piombi, the ancient prisons of the republic, the former terrible for their darkness, the latter for their heat; both seldom disgorging the prisoner save to death; and what a death, at least in its circumstances, and in the case of political offenders. The cells were all cased in wood, with hardly any light; but when the criminal in politics had confessed his fault, and was condemned, he was transferred to another cell in the middle of the night, a foreign priest was admitted, received his confession, and absolved him. The priest issued from the cell, and turned to the left, the criminal to the right, and rounding a corner not a yard off, was placed on a seat, a cord passed round the neck, and strangled. Behind the seat a door opened, a gondola received his corpse (for it is just at the level of the water), carried it to the cemetery, and no one, wife or child, knew more of his destiny than this: that the invisible inquisition of state had laid its hand upon him, and that he was not. I said to the old guide, who had a fine Venetian head, "I suppose you do not regret not living in those times?" "But I do regret it," he replied; "Venice was then a republic; there was more commerce, and life was easier; and it was just owing to her wise treatment of criminals that she maintained herself so long; and had she kept that treatment to the end, she would not have fallen: mine was a very ancient Venetian family. It is to foreigners," he added, "that I say all this; writers have greatly exaggerated about these prisons." As I stood on a spot at which hundreds of human beings, during the long course of that terrible rule, had yielded up their lives in the darkness of a gloomy passage, more fearful at least to the thought than the gaze of a furious multitude, or the rack itself, I could not agree with the old man, though I was surprised at such a flash of old Venetian spirit. That same ducal palace, which is among palaces what the great mediæval cathedrals dedicated to Notre Dame are among churches, has these dungeons below; the state reception apartments of the Doge above; and over them again those other prisons of the piombi, or leads—a somewhat strange position for the drawing-rooms of the head of a state. Italian churches are as unlike ours as two things called by the same name can well be. They are full of marbles on floor and walls, paintings, gildings, shrines, images, tapers, perpetual services, and seldom wanting at least in some worshippers. St. Mark much exceeds my expectation. It has five domes covered with mosaic and figures in rich gilding, columns of finest marble, bronzes, multitudes of precious objects, but with a solemnity far beyond all these, which makes one feel that one is in a temple, a place of worship, of bowing down to the Infinite, not of addressing man himself through a part of him which has shared in his general fall—the understanding. This, I think, is the main difference between Catholic and Uncatholic churches. Then, again, that vision of the Blessed Virgin and Child, so often repeated, and under so many different phases, is inexpressibly consoling. It really seems to me that the more men dwell upon the Incarnation, the more they will associate the Blessed Virgin with our Lord, and the saints with Him and with her; they will not analyse and divide, but rather always seem to be touching the skirts of His robe of glory, in every one of those who have suffered and conquered in His name; and most of all in the Mother, who was and is so unspeakably near to Him. Thus the Protestant sees in her "a dead woman worshipped;" the Catholic, the mother of all Christians; the Protestant sees in the saints "deified sinners;" the Catholic, living members of His body, in whom His virtue now dwells without let of human corruption. In short, I think Keble is no less true than beautiful when he says,