from which the soul came, and, in its depths of fear, it pleads silently that its friends in Christ may pray for it. The dread of annihilation is upon it; it fears "the great deep"[1] to which it goes. And, in the agony of its rending from the beloved body, it thinks--for it can no longer speak--of the horror of nothingness. All its physical supports are gone. Its eyes are darkening and glazing; its feet motionless and cold; its arms and hands rigid. To those in the sick-room the body once so beautiful, "from the graced decorum of the hair Ev'n to the tingling sweet Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,"[2] is now white as white marble and as lifeless. But the soul is not dead, though the earthly parts of the body appear to be, and it hears the prayers of the Church for the dying as the supreme moment of its departure from the body is at hand. Some of these prayers, translated from the Latin, the author puts into the mouths of the assistants. They have all the refreshing strength that the Church gives; they represent the supplication of millions of devout souls bound to this dying brother in the communion of saints. The soul gains new strength from these prayers; it arouses itself; sees God through the ruin of the world, and wills to be wholly His. The assistants by the bedside redouble their supplications in the sacred words of the Litany for the Dying, which Cardinal Newman again interprets in English verse, though the Litany is in the Latin tongue. Again, the soul gains strength for a moment, and calls, in the universal speech of the Church, for strength, and that, "out of the depths,"[3] the holy God might save it. Then it uses its will to believe, and within itself asserts the creed of the Church, which is musically interpreted by the poet: "Firmly I believe and truly God is Three, and God is One, And I next acknowledge duly Manhood taken by the Son." The moment of agony, the moment of the realization of the soul that it is alone, bereft of its support, is terrible but short. In the "Inferno" of Dante, with all its objective horrors, there are no lines so terrible as these, which show the spirit naked, wild with horror and dismay: "And worse and worse, Some bodily form of ill Floats on the wind, with many a loathsome curse Tainting the hallowed air, and laughs and flaps Its hideous wings." We can imagine the scene in the room in which Gerontius is dying. The priest, in his surplice and violet stole, has sprinkled the chamber and the persons present with holy water, using the form of the cross, and has said the _Asperges_: "Thou shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow."