the exiles were in a state little removed from extreme poverty. All their little property had disappeared in the flames of Schweinfurt, even to the darling books and manuscripts of Olimpia. Grunthler was able to borrow twenty florins in gold and furnishing their rooms in a very modest manner, they went to housekeeping. It is sad to read the letters of Olimpia at this time, and learn the struggle between a necessary economy and a desire for those comforts which her broken health demanded. "My feebleness," she writes to John Sinapi, “has, within a few days, obliged me to take as a servant, the only woman whom I could find. She asks a florin a month, reserving the right of laboring for her own benefit. I pray you to aid me in procuring another servant, no matter whether young or old. I could give her five florins a year."

Olimpia might have escaped such poverty, for the Count of Erpach procured for her the post of lady of honor to the wife of the Prince Palatine. But the experience of Ferrara had given her a horror of the ensnaring life of courts, and she refused the brilliant position. Hubert Thomas, author of the Annals of Frederic II, affirms that the chair of Professor of Greek Literature was offered her in the Academy, and that, she only declined it on account of the feebleness of her health. The letters of Olimpia and her friends are silent on this point, and perhaps the assertion is an error.

Other testimonies of affection from new and old friends poured in upon her. John Sinapi sent her one of her own books, found among the ruins of Schweinfurt, a copy of the Lives of Plutarch, with her name written on the last page. "Do not be astonished," he wrote, "that God should demand of you what he himself lent you. Let those mourn who have no hope but in this world. Your treasure is in Heaven, where neither robbers shall lay waste, nor flames consume. Are you not like the sage, bearing all your goods with you, science, piety, honor, virtue and letters? Should the universe fall on our heads, its ruins might strike us, but not shake us."

"I send thee, O my dear Olimpia," wrote Celio Curione, "the Homer which thou hast desired, and also some of my own writings. Thou wilt receive from Francfort the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, which thou canst now more worthily meditate over the ruins of thy husband's native city. It is thine now to recommence interrupted labors, to compose a work worthy of Sophocles, and to obtain the sacred laurel which has long been promised thee."

The colleagues of Curione and the leading printers of Basle, united in forming and sending her a new library. "Thank

Oporinus, Hervagius and Frobenius," she writes in return, "for the gift which they have made me, of so many precious books. Nothing could ever make me forget their generous conduct towards me."

Some time previous to the siege of Schweinfurt, Theodora Sinapi had been called home by the death of her mother; and her father now proposed that Olimpia should once more take charge of her education. "I will receive her willingly," was the answer, "if thou preferest for her our humble dwelling to a court; but if she comes, she will have to bring her bed with her. Furniture is very expensive here, and we cannot afford to buy much of it."

She still continued the classical education of her brother; but her chief interest now was in the prosperity of the reformation and in the individual duties of religion. She deplored with bitterness the dispersion of the evangelical church at Ferrara. She wrote to the excellent Bishop of Vergerius, a native of the Italian Alps, begging him to translate Luther's Catechism into Italian, and circulate it in Italy. She wrote to her old friend, Anne of Este, urging her to use her influence in favor of the persecuted Protestants of France. She wrote to Lavinia di Rovere, still in Italy, recalling their old friendship and the brightness of that hope which they had together gained. "I conjure thee, in the name of the kindness which united us so many years, to dissipate by a few words the anxiety which thy long silence causes me. .. Let the word of God be the rule of thy life, the lamp upon thy path, and thou wilt not stumble. Be great and strong, O my friend; the cruelest evils are supportable when so short. . . . . I recommend to thee my sister with such earnestness that nothing could make it greater. I recommend her to thee, not that thou shouldst load her with riches or honors, but that thou shouldst share with her that priceless treasure-the knowledge of Christ. The fashion of this world passeth away. Farewell, my dear Lavinia. My husband and my little brother salute thee."

....

Her health failed constantly, but she was prepared for all things. "I desire to die," she said, "because I know the secret of death. I desire to die, that I may be with Jesus Christ, and find in him eternal life." Her ordinary demeanor was gentle and tranquil, and a smile full of melancholy usually played about her lips. "Never!" says her husband in a letter to Celio Curione, "never have I known a spirit more pure and sincere, nor a life more upright and holy."

The pest broke out in Heidelberg; and Grunthler, in his capacity of physician, was called day and night from her side.

Her own exhortations encouraged him in this perilous duty; but anxiety, and fatigue, and disturbed rest hurried on the progress of her disease. A burning fever consumed her; she could not sleep on account of racking pains; and at night she was in danger of smothering with an incessant cough. Consumption had laid a wasting hand on this brilliant and amiable. creature, and was conducting her slowly but surely to the grave.

It was at this time that she wrote with pain and difficulty her last letter, and directed it to one of the friends of her precious infancy, Celio Calcagnini. "As for me, my dear Celio, I must tell you that there is little hope that I shall live long. Medicine gives me no relief. Every day, every hour, my friends perceive more plainly my approaching end. It is not improbable that this is the last letter I shall write. I feel that strength is failing: the machine is near to its dissolution. But even to my last hour, my friends and the favors I have received from them will be always present with me. Do not be disturbed at my death, for I shall conquer in the end, and I desire to depart and be with Christ."

This letter was her farewell to the world. She read it over with the intention of making some corrections, but felt that it was too late. She laid down her pen, and, looking at her husband with a most touching smile, she said: "I see that I cannot do it." She retired to her bed, and, with Grunthler and Emilio usually beside her, she tranquilly awaited her last moments. For her, death had no sternness, and wore the guise of a seraph. Pain might still occasionally agitate her bodily senses, but her soul was calm with the serenity of heaven. In her dreams, and in those waking moments when life seemed to be fluttering between two worlds, she sometimes appeared to catch glimpses of the Land of Beulah and of the Holy City. Once, as her husband stood beside her, she woke from a brief slumber, and smiled upon him with a mysterious air as if ravished by some ineffable vision. He asked her why she smiled thus. "I dreamed," she said, "that I saw a place which was filled with the brightest and purest light." "Courage, my dearly loved one," he replied, "thou shalt soon live in the bosom of that pure brightness." She smiled again and slightly moved her head in token of assent. "I am happy," she murmured once more, "entirely happy." Soon after her sight began to fail, and she added: "I can hardly see you my dearly-loved ones; but every thing around me seems adorned with the most beautiful flowers." These were her last words. She appeared to fall asleep, and before they knew it she was dead. It was the 7th of November, 1555, and she was not yet twenty-nine

years old. In the course of a few weeks after, her husband and her brother, both struck down by the plague, were borne to the cathedral, and laid by her side. It was mercy to take her before she could be stricken by this new misfortune, so terrible yet unfelt, so near yet so entirely escaped.

Such was the life and such the death of one of the most accomplished, brilliant, and amiable women of any age or any nation. The news of her decease attracted attention throughout a large portion of Europe, and was answered from many famous pens by epitaphs, by eulogies, and by Greek and Latin elegiac verses. The regrets of men of genius and learning who personally knew her, mingled with the regrets of others, who knew nothing of her but her writings. Melchior Adam, rector of the University of Heidelberg, included her biography in his Lives of the German philosophers. Theodore Beza praised her wonderful learning and her fortitude under misfortune; and his praises were echoed by those of Josiah Simler, the biographer of Peter Martyr, and of De Thou, the historian of France. "In our own days," says Simler, "two most distinguished women, Jane Grey, of England, and Olimpia Morata, of Italy, have shown what the genius of their sex can accomplish when applied to the study of eloquence." In modern times these eulogiums have been reinforced by the almost unwilling commendation of the great historians of Italian literature, Tiraboschi. "Olimpia Morata was born," he says, "to be the honor of her sex and of Italy, if her devotion to the errors of the Protestants, besides darkening her fame, had not rendered her unhappy, and, by shortening her days, had not prevented her from making the still greater progress which she would otherwise have made."

ART. V.-A VISION OF AN ANDOVER STUDENT. OUR professor was a good man, but he did not understand my case. I had been visited with a severe turn of the typhus fever, which had brought my life to the verge of the grave, and almost entirely destroyed my memory. I lay six weeks in a state of almost total insensibility-moving between life and death; my friends giving me over, the doctors returning am

biguous answers, and I losing all sense of what was taking place around me. At length I began slowly to mend, my physicians asserting that with the most scrupulous care it might be possible to preserve my life. I gradually recovered my consciousnes and was asked to take some beef tea, or chicken broth-those detestable substitutes which art has discovered for our better food. I refused. I can live on roast beef-I can starve: but I mortally detest those intermediate slops, with which the medical tyrants think it their prerogative to afflict_us, when our corporeal weakness subject sus to their power. I remember when I was recovering that the doctor told me-no doubt secundum artem-that I might have a little small piece of chicken breast, boiled to rags and chopped fine, eating perhaps the hundredth part of an ounce avoirdupois weight. "Mother," said I, addressing the good old lady, "go and have our old rooster killed; wring off his head, strip off his feathers, roast him, and boil a good parcel of potatoes and onions make some black gravy, and bring it to me in a full and christian dish, and let me eat like a man that will hold to the Declaration of Independence even on his deathbed." The doctor strongly remonstrated; my mother weakly complied; and from that moment, I began to mend. I got well according to the course of nature, though I believe it was contrary to all the laws of Galen. I say I got well; though whether it was owing to my submission, or rebellion to the rules of medicine, has never been determined from that day to this. I think much of the rooster.

I say again, I got well. But when a man has been so long sick, his recovery is but a doubtful good. He is like a ship stranded on the rocks, in a rolling sea, she cannot be got off, without losing some of her important timbers. I never was the man I was before. Before my sickness, I had been a decent scholar, standing, about the middle of my class-below admiration and above contempt. I had just got through college with a decent reputation. I was a good Latin scholar, not remarkable in Greek-above par in the mathematics, and nothing at all in the metaphysical branches. I was a seriousminded youth, and destined by my friends full as much as by my own election, to study divinity and be a preacher of the Gospel. But in that sad sickness which seized me just after I had graduated, and to which I have alluded-I lost my memory, and could scarcely retain a hundredth part of what I read. I would read and re-read; underscore the book and tie strings around my fingers. I used all the artificial helps I could find. I studied all the topical memories. I endeavored