VII. MACUGNAGA 377

long days, and mostly wakeful nights. I do not know if diphtheria had been, in those epochs, known or talked of; but I extremely disliked this feeling in the throat, and passed from dislike into sorrowful alarm, (having no Couttet now to give me tisane,) and wonder if I should ever get home to Denmark Hill again.

Although the poetical states of religious feeling taught me by George Herbert’s rhymes,¹ and the reading of formal petition, whether in psalter or litany, at morning and evening and on Sunday forenoon, were sincere enough in their fanciful or formal ways, no occasion of life had yet put me to any serious trial of direct prayer. I never knew of Jessie’s or my aunt’s sicknesses,² or now of my cousin John’s, until too late for prayer; in our own household there had been no instantly dangerous illness since my own in 1835;³ and during the long threatening of 1841 I was throughout more sullen and rebellious than frightened. But now, between the Campo Santo and Santa Maria Novella, I had been brought into some knowledge of the relations that might truly exist between God and His creatures; and thinking what my father and mother would feel if I did not get home to them through those poplar avenues, I fell gradually into the temper, and more or less tacit offering, of very real prayer.

Which lasted patiently through two long days, and what I knew of the nights, on the road home. On the third day, as I was about coming in sight of Paris, what people who are in the habit of praying know as the consciousness of answer, came to me; and a certainty that the illness, which had all this while increased, if anything, would be taken away.

Certainty in mind, which remained unshaken, through unabated discomfort of body, for another night and day, and then the evil symptoms vanished in an hour or two,

¹ [See above, ii. § 110 (p. 345).]

² [See above, i. § 78 (p. 71).]

³ [See above, i. § 176 (p. 151).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]