With glimmering lights in sunshine dim.
Mother of Purity and Peace!
They sing the Saviour’s name and thine:
Clothe them forever with the fleece
Unspotted of thy Lamb Divine!”
From one end of the immense procession to the other rose chants without discord—here from a band of maidens and innocent children, yonder from harmonious choirs of maturer years. From time to time a peal of trumpets drowned the murmur of the Gave and awoke the echoes of the mountains. In the procession were hundreds of men organized into pious confraternities as in the Middle Ages. They follow the path taken by Bernadette, when she was irresistibly led on to the place of the wondrous vision. They all stop to make a genuflection where she knelt before the Beautiful Lady, and begin the Litany of Loretto in the sweet plaintive air peculiar to the country. It is delightful to hear Mary’s name swelling along the valley and up the rocky heights! Thus chanting they ascend the winding path on the cliff, forming a living monogram of the Virgin’s name, among roses that give out their perfume, through cedars of Lebanon and other rare trees that bend down their branches laden with dew. And above this verdure, these perfumes, and these chanted supplications, the white marble Church of the Immaculate Conception sends heavenward the silent prayer of its gleaming walls, its pillars, its turrets and pinnacles. They wind around the church like a wreath and disappear within its sculptured portal chanting: Lætatus sum in his quæ dicta sunt mihi—I was glad at the things that were said to me. We will go into the house of the Lord.… Our feet were wont to stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem! Jerusalem which is built as a city that is at unity with itself.… Plenteousness be to them that love thee!
At the particular request of the Prince of Viana, one of the greatest benefactors to the church, his Holiness Pope Pius IX. has granted a partial indulgence to all who visit the church, and a plenary indulgence to those who here approach the sacraments and pray for concord among Christian princes the extirpation of heresies, and the exaltation of our holy Mother the Church.
A winding road leads from the church by gentle ascent up the picturesque mount behind, along which are to be built fifteen chapels in honor of the Mysteries of the Rosary, where the words once spoken by the angel will ascend the mountain side in one long and incessant Ave Maria! Along this holy way will continually ascend and descend the pious votary in “pilgrim’s cowl and lowly weed”
“Dropping on each mystic bead
To Mary, Mother Mild, a contrite tear.”