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Severinus, the apostle of Austria, to make us trust that in him, too, wisdom was justified of all her children. You may remark, among the few words which have been as yet said of St. Severinus, a destruction, a plague, and a famine. Those words are a fair sample of St. Severinus's times, and of the circumstances into which he voluntarily threw himself.
Then Odoacer and his brother started over the Alps to seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service, after the fashion of young German adventurers, with the Romans; and they came to St. Severinus's cell, and went in, heathens as they probably were, to ask a blessing of the holy man; and Odoacer had to stoop and to stand stooping, so huge he was.
To this period of Severinus's life belongs the once famous story of his interview with Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, and brother of the great Onulph or Wolf, who was the founder of the family of the Guelphs, Counts of Altorf, and the direct ancestors of Victoria, Queen of England.
Severinus's labours in Austria were in vain, there were other hermits, in Gaul and elsewhere, whose work endured and prospered, and developed to a size of which they had never dreamed. The stories of these good men may be read at length in the Bollandists and Surius: in a more accessible and more graceful form in M. de Montalembert's charming pages.
Severinus's labours through some five-and-twenty years of perpetual self-sacrifice and, as far as this world was concerned, perpetual disaster. Eugippius's chapters are little save a catalogue of towns sacked one after the other, from Passau to Vienna, till the miserable survivors of the war seemed to have concentrated themselves under St. Severinus's guardianship in the latter city.
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