Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: longs to the Arians, and need not turn white into black as that pert young gosling piped. CHAPTER IV. Next morning the sun shone brightly into the little bay-window of the palace chamber occupied by Felice Laurenzano. Before him, veiled in the blue mist, stood Ottheinrichsbau and beyond it the dim outlines of the Konigstuhl. Fragrant odors from the palace gardens floated into the open windows and the joyous songs of countless birds lured him into the fresh morning air. The young sculptor’s spirits rose as, while dressing, his eyes rested steadily on the fa$ade which was to be his future life-task. But to-day his first step must be to see the brother from whom he had so long been separated, and who now occupied a room in the chapter-house of Neuburg. The young Jesuit’s appointment in the evangelical institution of Neuburg had its history. The convent, half an hour’s walk above Heidelberg, was so richly endowed with lands and so immediately under the elector’s eye that it could not possibly have long escaped the
Reform. Frederick II. had already stretched his hands towards it and Ottheinrich enforced the abolition of processions and cloister life, and informed the nuns that they were no longer bound by their vows. A member of the Electoral Council was appointed superintendent, who confiscated the property of the convent for the electoral treasury, allowing the ladiesa moderate income. But when he attempted to also re-arrange their lives he encountered an unexpected power of resistance on the part of the persistent, obstinate sisterhood. As was the case everywhere, the nuns clung far more tenaciously to the old forms than the monks and priests. Women’s minds found little pleasure in the dogmatic controversies of the reformers, and the Reformation wrested from the pious S…