And now the sun bows down still more, and shines still more within the dome; its rays are kissed by countless water-drops, and changed by that caress from white to all the colors of the bow or prism. But, strange, no bow is formed; but in its stead a circle of the varied hues is poised within the midst of all this splendor, as though the sun and flood had come to crown the Indian maid, and vie with the ice-king in doing fullest homage to his ward.
Such is the legend realized. The time, the accidents, and every impediment we overcame seemed but steps so prearranged that we might see complete the efforts of the cold, the light, the water, all combined to create The Beautiful. It was the meeting of extremes in harmony for common end, instead of conflict. Here was a grand display of powers without jealousy. The cold took irresistible possession of the water, mist, and spray, and reared a work that art can scarcely copy. But all was cold and chaste and white. The light possessed itself of the water also, but with a touch so delicate and warm that color mantled the coldest, chastest, whitest ice.
Do you, dear reader, imagine this a fancy sketch? Be undeceived. Three of the “four” still verify its truth. The fourth has fallen upon the outstretched arm of the great Father of mankind. It is in tribute to his memory that I write; for never soul more chaste, or heart more warm, or life more full of love for all the beautiful, made up a man.
A Russian Sister Of Charity.
By The Rev. C. Tondini, Barnabite
On the fifth of August died in Paris Sister Nathalie Narishkin, a Russian by birth, and descended from the same family from which sprang the mother of Peter the Great. Born on the 1/13th of May, 1820, Sister Nathalie Narishkin abjured the Greek Church August the 15th, 1844. This first step had cost her a fearful struggle—that struggle of heart for which Jesus Christ prepared us when he said, “I came to set a man at variance against his father, and a daughter against her mother” (S. Matt. x. 35). We mean that endurance which is perhaps the hardest of martyrdoms, at least when God requires it of a soul whose love of him is combated by an unusual tenderness of affection towards the authors of her being. Such was Nathalie Narishkin.
But as any sacrifice we offer to God enables us, by strengthening our will, to make fresh sacrifices for his love, she had not yet attained the age of twenty-eight when she resolved to follow more closely the footsteps of our Lord, and in March, 1848, she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity in Paris. A few years afterwards she was named superioress of the convent in the Rue St. Guillaume, where she died.
Foreigners who visit Catholic countries often imagine themselves acquainted with Catholicity when they have hastily glanced through the streets of our capitals, visited the museums, the public buildings, and theatres, and inspected the Catholics in the churches at some mid-day or one o'clock Mass on Sundays. Hence it follows that in reality they have nothing to relate concerning the influence of the Catholic faith in the sanctification of souls. What would have been their edification, and perhaps surprise, had they visited that convent of the Rue St. Guillaume, and had the good-fortune to converse with Sister Nathalie! No one who approached her could help feeling that he was in presence of a soul in continual union with God, and in whom self-abnegation and the profoundest humility had grown, as it were, into a second nature. With these qualities, which at once struck the beholders, she combined the most refined gentleness of manners and language—a gentleness which, let us remark, was in her the same when soliciting from the Emperor Alexander II., at the Elysée, in 1867, permission to enter Russia for the purpose of nursing the sick attacked with cholera, as when answering the meanest beggar asking at her hands a morsel of bread. “Every one who had to deal with Sister Narishkin departed satisfied”—this is the general testimony of all who ever had occasion to speak with her.
It is needless to add that, with regard to charity—that virtue which is the special vocation of the daughters of S. Vincent de Paul, and the surest token of true Christianity, as pointed out by Christ himself—Sister Nathalie was second to no one; and this was made manifest on [pg 429] the day of her funeral by the multitude of poor who accompanied her remains to the cemetery, and the tears they shed on their way to the grave. What is the pomp of the sepulture of kings and the great ones of the nations when compared to this tribute to the memory of a Catholic Sister?