Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

136ТПЕ HISTORY OF THELENEF.

knows that liis son has been saved, and saved by Xenie !

A goat follows her to nourish the infant. The virgin mother may sometimes be seen, a living picture, seated in the sun among the dark ruins of the eastle in which she was born, and smiling fondly on the child of her soul, the son of the hapless exile.

She cradles the little one upon her knees with a virgin graee, and his awaking brings a smile of angelic delight upon her eountenanee. Without knowing or hating the world, she has passed from eharity to love, from love to madness, from madness to maternity. God watches over her!

Sometimes she appears struck with some sweet and sad remembrance : then her lips, the senseless echoes of the past, murmur mechanically these mysterious words — the last and only expression of her intellectual life, and of which not one of the inhabitants of Vologda can divine the meaning, — " It is I, then, whom he loved ! "

Neither the Russian poet nor myself have shrunk from the expression of virgin mother as applied to Xenie, and neither of us think that we have been wanting in respect for the sublime verse of the Catholic poet —

" О Vergine Madre, figlio del tuo figlio," *

or profaned the profound mystery that is indicated in those few words.

* II Paradiso of Dante, cant. 33. i. v.