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Updated: May 31, 2025
I thought the procession passed under my window and went on to the church, which was soon crowded, leaving numbers of people to kneel on the path in front, as far down as the crumbling gate piers which lean towards each other, their foundations having given way. Then I thought Benediction began, and when the congregation sang I sang also. I heard myself singing: "Mater purissima, Ora pro nobis."
At the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the favorite oath is Maria Purissima. This is a time of especial interest to young girls. It is a period of compulsory confession, conscience-cleaning, as they call it. They are all very pious in their way.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the same artist who painted a Leda, or a Psyche, or a Venus one day, painted for the same patron a Virgin of Mercy, or a "Mater Purissima" on the morrow.
There was some Thing. There was the reason of this unspoken warning in the air. There lay the object of their search. In a flash the revolvers covered the cowering figure of the giant, who, prone upon his knees, was now raving, gibbering, praying, calling upon long-forgotten saints to save him from this sight, "O Santa Maria! O Purissima!
Cannon roared, and bull fights, tournaments, and banquets celebrated this triumph of the votaries of the Virgin. Spain and its dependencies were solemnly placed under the protection of the "Immaculate Conception," thus personifying an abstract idea; and to this day, a Spaniard salutes his neighbour with the angelic "Ave Maria purissima!" and he responds "Sin peccado concepida!"
"See," he went on, "how close is the concordance between the epithets in the sentences and the quality assigned to the gems. "Does not the emerald, which in this sequence is emblematical of incorruptible purity, reflect in the sparkling mirror of its water the Mater Purissima of the Litanies to the Virgin? Is not the chrysolite, the symbol of wisdom, a very exact image of the Sedes Sapientiae?
Arrived at the gate he shouted Ave Maria purissima in a loud voice, then proceeded to give an account of himself, informing us that he was a blind man and obliged to subsist on the charity of his neighbours.
The Saxon has done vastly more, it is true; but, in some ways, he has done much less. The very names which he bequeathed to places not previously christened by the Spaniards, such as Gold Gulch, Hell's Bottom, and Copperopolis, tell a more forcible, though not as beautiful a tale, as the melodious titles, San Buenaventura, San Francisco Dolores, Santa Clara, San Gabriel, and La Purissima.
Go with you from Canada as my wife, and fly the honours with which this revolution will crown my brows? No, by the Mater purissima. You have been too scornful my pretty maiden; you have not concealed your preference for this English dog; you have held your rebellious pistol in my face.
The blank pages at the beginning and the end were filled up with pious reflections, besides some few words, which spoke volumes as to one period of his existence. The first words inscribed were: "Julia, obiit A.D. 1799. Virgo purissima, Maris Stella. Ora pro me." On the following leaf was written: "Antonio de Campestrina, Convient. Dominicum. In Roma, A.D. 1800."
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