Purgatory: Doctrinal, Historical, and PoeticalSadlier, J., Mrs.
Religion
Purgatory: Doctrinal, Historical, and Poetical
Sadlier, J., Mrs.
Purgatory
"I promised you that, if I died before you, I would come to tell you. I
was drowned yesterday in the river at Caen, about this hour. I was out
walking; it was so warm that we took a notion to bathe. A weakness came
over me in the river, and I sank to the bottom. The Abbé de Menil-Jean,
my companion, plunged in to draw me out; I seized his foot; but whether
he thought it was a salmon that had caught hold of him, or that he felt
it actually necessary to go up to the surface of the water to breathe,
he shook me off so roughly that his foot gave me a great blow in the
chest, and threw me to the bottom of the river, which is there very
deep."
Desfontaines then told his friend many other things, which he would not
divulge, whether the dead boy had prayed him not to do so, or for other
reasons.
Bezuel wanted to embrace the apparition, but he found only a shadow.
Nevertheless, the shadow had squeezed his arm so tightly, that it
pained him after.
He saw the spirit several times, yet always a little taller than when
they parted, and always in the half-clothing of a bather. He wore in
his fair hair a scroll on which Bezuel could only read the word
_In_. His voice had the same sound as when he was living, he
appeared neither gay nor sad, but perfectly tranquil. He charged his
friend with several commissions for his parents, and begged him to say
for him the Seven Penitential Psalms, which had been given him as a
penance by his confessor, three days before his death, and which he had
not yet recited.
The apparition always ended by a farewell expressed in words which
signified: "Till we meet again! (_Au revoir!_)" At last, it ceased
at the end of some weeks; and the surviving friend, who had constantly
prayed for the dead, concluded from this that his Purgatory was over.
This Monsieur Bezuel finished his studies, embraced the ecclesiastical
state, became _curé_ of Valogne, and lived long, esteemed by his
parishioners and the whole city, for his good sense, his virtuous life,
and his love of truth.
THE PENANCE OF DON DIEGO RIEZ.
_A Legend of Lough Derg._ [1]
[Footnote 1: Lough Derg, in Donegal, was a place famous for pilgrimage
from a very early period, and was much resorted to out of France,
Italy, and the Peninsula, during the Middle Ages, and even in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Mathew Paris, and Froissart, as
well as in our native annals, and in O'Sullivan Beare, there are many
facts of its extraordinary history.]
T. D. MCGEE.
There was a knight of Spain--Diego Riaz,
Noble by four descents, vain, rich and young,
Much woe he wrought, or the tradition lie is,
Which lived of old the Castilians among;
His horses bore the palm the kingdom over,
His plume was tall, costliest his sword,
The proudest maidens wished him as a lover,
The _caballeros_ all revered his word
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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