for a vehement struggle which should set all right again: but, alas! how shall a man struggle who finds his whole inner nature boiling in furious rebellion against the dictates of his conscience,--self against self? It is true, also, that no passions are deeper in their hold, more pervading and more vital to the whole human being, than those that make their first entrance through the higher nature, and, beginning with a religious and poetic ideality, gradually work their way through the whole fabric of the human existence. From grosser passions, whose roots lie in the senses, there is always a refuge in man's loftier nature. He can cast them aside with contempt, and leave them as one whose lower story is flooded can remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with a purer air and wider prospect. But to love that is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and Immortal nature, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what refuge but the grave,--what hope but that wide eternity where all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime? A man of the world may struggle by change of scene, place, and employment. He may put oceans between himself and the things that speak of what he desires to forget. He may fill the void in his life with the stirring excitement of the battlefield, or the whirl of travel from city to city, or the press of business and care. But what help is there for him whose life is tied down to the narrow sphere of the convent,--to the monotony of a bare cell, to the endless repetition of the same prayers, the same chants, the same prostrations, especially when all that ever redeemed it from monotony has been that image and that sympathy which conscience now bids him forget?