I came to Nazareth, and was led from the convent to the sanctuary.
Long fasting will sometimes heat my brain and draw me away out of
the world--will disturb my judgment, confuse my notions of right
and wrong, and weaken my power of choosing the right: I had fasted
perhaps too long, for I was fevered with the zeal of an insane
devotion to the heavenly queen of Christendom. But I knew the
feebleness of this gentle malady, and knew how easily my watchful
reason, if ever so slightly provoked, would drag me back to life.
Let there but come one chilling breath of the outer world, and all
this loving piety would cower and fly before the sound of my own
bitter laugh. And so as I went I trod tenderly, not looking to the
right nor to the left, but bending my eyes to the ground.
The attending friar served me well; he led me down quietly and all
but silently to the Virgin's home. The mystic air was so burnt
with the consuming flames of the altar, and so laden with incense,
that my chest laboured strongly, and heaved with luscious pain.
There--there with beating heart the Virgin knelt and listened. I
strived to grasp and hold with my riveted eyes some one of the
feigned Madonnas, but of all the heaven-lit faces imagined by men
there was none that would abide with me in this the very sanctuary.
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