Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine. It was the
maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred. Much stranger stories are
told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric; another man
was engaged "to sell words" to the students of Milan. Being now
converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of
his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I
alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of
our lodging at Ostia." They
"Came on that which is, and heard
The vast pulsations of the world."
"And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able
to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and
we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower
of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again,
where words are begun and ended."
Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie
beside her husband in Africa, she said: "Lay this Body where you will.
Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will
remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be." "But upon the
ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and
the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."
The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been at
the death of his friend.
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