IV.

Well?

Well what?

Why, what came of M. de Beaumanoir showing his teeth?

Oh! that? Nothing—just nothing at all. That’s the trouble, you see, of telling a true story: one’s imagination is hampered at every step. It would have been most delightful and exciting to have invented a frightful tale of the count’s vengeance; how he slew his recalcitrant kinsman, immured his weeping bride in a dungeon for life, and laid waste the lands of Boisrobert with fire and sword, etc., etc. But the truth is, he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, his teeth were speedily drawn, and he was glad to get away with his worthless life. The false _curé_ confessed before his death that the count had suborned him to kill his kinsman as he returned from the fair, promising him a sum equal to that which he would be sure to find on M. de Boisrobert’s person, and even suggesting the disguise. He little thought that the very scheme he fondly imagined was to secure him his coveted inheritance was destined really to lose it to him for ever. So ever come to grief the machinations of the wicked! This last escapade was a little too much even for courtly morals, and Monsieur was quietly advised to hint to his murderous favorite that his health would probably be the better for a change of air.

And the fatal consequences resulting from this marriage?

Yes, yes, of course; how stupid to forget it! Well, a cynic might say that for a bachelor to marry at all, especially at forty-five—but never mind the cynic. Their married life was surely not unhappy? Let us hope not. Do Romeo and Juliet ever throw teacups at each other over the breakfast-table because that duck of a spring bonnet is not forthcoming? In romances certainly not; but in true stories—hem! Let us trust, however, that peace reigned eternal over the domestic hearthstone at the Château de Boisrobert. But his marriage had cost its owner an illusion—a life-long illusion; and that is a painful thing at forty-five. Disenchantment seems to come harder as one gets older and has anything left to be disenchanted of. He ceased to believe that rank and birth are the same as goodness, or even greatness, and it cost him many a pang, and no doubt a great deal of real though whimsical unhappiness, to be forced thus suddenly and radically to readjust his scheme of life. But, in spite of the adventure which gave him a wife, perhaps because of it, he never lost his faith in _curés_ or in Juliette; and the games of bowls and of _trictrac_ were all the pleasanter for the sweet face that thenceforth lit them up, and the romping curly-pates that disturbed them and in time effaced from their fond father’s memory his lingering regret for the loss of a noble heir.

TO AUBREY DE VERE. AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

I stood in ancient church, ruined and vast, Whose crumbling altar of its Lord was bare, Whose shattered windows let in all the glare Of noonday heat, and noise of crowds that passed With careless jest, of malice not assoiled. Within, fast-fading angels still lent grace Of art, believing, to the holy place That cruel hands of its best gift despoiled. With weary feet I trod the broken floor, With tearless eyes the maimèd aisles gazed down, When, lo! afar a waxen taper shone, Burning a hidden altar clear before: Here hastened I, here knelt—O poet true! Thine was the light that shone my sorrow through.

COLONIZATION AND FUTURE EMIGRATION.

God has apparently chosen the United States as the theatre for the demonstration of the truth that the Catholic Church is the church of the people. She has always been the church of the people; many of her most severe persecutions have been caused by the stand she has taken in behalf of popular rights and individual freedom against the tyranny of kings and the exactions of nobles. But never before has she been furnished with so large a field for the manifestation and development of her popular and democratic character as has been prepared for her here. It is her destiny, we believe, to save the republic from the ruin to which the sects and their offspring, the atheists, would lead her. Even those of our Catholic readers who may not fully share this belief will admit that, to all seeming, the Catholic Church is destined to play an important part in the future history of our country—at least that she has grown in numbers, material wealth, and social influence during the last thirty years to an almost marvellous degree.

A better or more certain method of accomplishing the work of the church in the United States could scarcely have been devised than the congregation of a large share of the Catholic emigration in our great cities. The Catholic Church in the United States is not “a foreign church” in any other sense than the Bible, or Shakspere’s plays, or Homer’s poems are “foreign” books; she is, as they are, and far more than they are, the common inheritance of all, and she is as much at home here, and as rightfully at home, as she is or ever was in any other land. Indeed, the church of God is not and cannot be foreign to any of God’s creatures. But a large proportion of her children in the United States at present are either of foreign birth or are the descendants of foreign-born persons in the first or second generation. These people did not bring the Catholic Church with them to America: they found her here; she had always had an existence here since Christopher Columbus planted the cross upon San Salvador, and since the Jesuit priests sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi rivers. If, however, the emigration which has poured into this country since 1840 had not arrived, or had it come from non-Catholic countries, and had the growth of the church here been dependent wholly, or even chiefly, upon the natural increase of American Catholic families and upon converts from Protestantism or heathenism, the church in America to-day would have been numerically insignificant; which is only the same as to say that, if emigration had ceased after the first European exodus, the population of the United States to-day would be equally insignificant.

We may form some idea of what the progress of the church under these conditions would have been here by remembering what it has been in England since the cessation of the active persecutions which followed the Reformation. There are about 1,800,000 Catholics in England to-day. Of these not less than 800,000 are Irish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian emigrants or their children; the remaining 1,000,000 represent all the converts of English birth, as well as the descendants of the old Catholic families who always retained the faith. Half a century has elapsed since the English Catholics were emancipated from the last remnant of the persecuting and restrictive legislation which had oppressed them since the days of Elizabeth. During this half-century the church in England has been free—free in its own government, free in its work of propagating the faith and of bringing back the English people to the religion which their fathers had cherished for a thousand years.

Yet, with some advantages that Catholics in the United States did not and do not yet possess, the growth of the church in England during the last fifty years has been vastly less than the progress she has made in this country during the same period. In 1830 there were more Catholics in England than in the United States; since then the church in both countries has been equally free, with the advantages at the start on the side of England. But now the Catholics in the United States outnumber those in England more than fourfold.

In 1830, according to the most trustworthy estimates, there were 600,000 Catholics in England and 475,000 in the United States; now they number two millions there and from six to seven millions here. In England to-day the church has a cardinal, twelve suffragan bishops, and 2,064 priests; in the United States she has a cardinal, 66 archbishops and bishops, and 5,297 priests. In England, according to the English _Catholic Directory_ for last year, there were 997 Catholic churches, 7 theological seminaries, 312 ecclesiastical students, 15 colleges, 38 asylums, and 5 hospitals. In the United States, according to the American _Catholic Directory_ for the same year, there were 5,292 Catholic churches, 34 theological seminaries, 1,217 ecclesiastical students, 62 colleges, 219 asylums, and 95 hospitals.[112]

Footnote 112:

These figures, as far as they relate to the institutions of the church in England, are probably not entirely correct. The _Register_ from which we have quoted contains no tabular statement of these institutions, and we have been compelled to arrive at the totals by an enumeration of our own, the accuracy of which has been rendered doubtful by the confused manner in which the statistics of each diocese were given. However, our figures cannot be very greatly at fault.

We have drawn out this comparison for the purpose of accentuating our former remark that the marvellous growth of the church in the United States during the last half-century has been mainly due to emigration from Catholic countries. Had it not been for these accessions, it is doubtful, in our opinion, whether the church in the United States would to-day equal in numbers the church in England. But would its growth have been so great, so pronounced, so commanding to the attention of all beholders, had this emigration been directed away from the cities and dispersed throughout the rural and agricultural sections of the country? A little reflection will, we think, show that this question must be answered in the negative. It would have availed the church nothing had these emigrants been placed in their new homes under conditions where the preservation of their faith in any practical form would have been almost impossible; where they would have been deprived of the care and counsel of their spiritual guides and of the sacraments necessary for salvation; where their children would have remained unbaptized, their marriages have been degraded to civil contracts, and their souls starved and enfeebled by the absence of the Bread of Life. Yet that this would have been the fate of the great majority of them, had they not congregated in the cities, cannot be doubted, unless, indeed, God had chosen to work another miracle in their behalf and to create for them a miraculous supply of priests—a supply so large that every little hamlet in the far-off wilds of the West and North should have been furnished with a spiritual director.

Some boast of having even nine millions of Catholics in the republic; but it can be shown that there are perhaps half as many more Americans now living who are the children of Catholic parents in the first or second generation, but who have lost their faith and grown up as Protestants or without any religion at all, chiefly because their parents had gone into districts where there were no priests, and where the exercise of their religion, save as a spiritual meditation, was impossible.[113] It was only when the Catholic emigrants began to arrive here in large numbers, and to dwell together by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands in the great cities, that it became possible, humanly, to provide for their religious wants and for their Catholic education. How nobly they have themselves furnished the material means for this work the statistics given above show. They have mainly done it for themselves. In England the Irish Catholics, in their works of charity and in the erection of their churches, have often been aided by the contributions of their wealthy English fellow-Catholics; but in America the foreign-born and the descendants of the foreign-born Catholics have for the most part built their own churches, their own convents, seminaries, and schools, and have received but little aid from their co-religionists of native ancestry. Indeed, in some instances within our own knowledge it is the latter who have been the beneficiaries of the former; and many an American Catholic to-day is indebted to the charity and self-denial of German, French, and Irish Catholics for the services of the priest who was the means of his conversion, and for the erection of the church in which he hears Mass. We repeat that all this was made possible by the congregation of our Catholic emigrants in the cities, and that the most deplorable consequences would have followed had not this congregation taken place.

Footnote 113:

A very ingenious statement was published some time ago in one of our journals, setting forth what was believed to be “the constituent elements of the population of the United States in 1870.” This statement may be thus summarized: In 1784 the entire white population of the United States was 3,172,000 persons; of these 1,141,920 were of Irish birth, 751,280 were of other Celtic races, 841,800 were of Anglo-Saxon extraction, and 427,000 were of Dutch and Scandinavian birth. The total immigration to the United States from 1790 to 1870 was 8,199,000 persons, of whom 3,248,000 came from Ireland, 796,000 from Anglo-Saxon races; and 4,155,000 from all other sources. The total population in 1870 was 38,500,000; and this vast number was thus analyzed:

Joint product in 1870 of Irish colonial 14,325,000 elements and subsequent Irish immigration, including that from Canada

Joint product in 1870 of Anglo-Saxon 4,522,000 colonial elements and subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration

Joint product in 1870 of all other 19,653,000 colonial elements and all subsequent immigration, including the negroes

—————

38,500,000

From these figures was drawn the somewhat startling deduction that the population of the United States in 1870 was composed of 24,000,000 of Celtic birth or origin (Irish, Scotch, French, Spanish, and Italian), and that of these 14,325,000 were of Irish birth or origin, 4,522,000 of Anglo-Saxon birth or origin, and that the remaining 9,978,000 were of neither Celtic nor Anglo-Saxon extraction. We are not in any way responsible for the accuracy of these figures; but that they express at least an approximation to the truth we do not doubt.

It is not, moreover, in spiritual matters only that our emigrants have been wise in congregating in the cities. One must remember the condition in which the great majority of them landed here during the years when emigration was at the flood-tide, and then compare with that their present state and the future which is before them and their children. They were desperately, or apostolically, poor, because they came from lands where it was impossible for them to acquire anything beyond the means of bare subsistence. They were uneducated, because they had been the subjects of governments whose studied policy it was to keep them in ignorance. They had neither the capital nor the knowledge necessary to render them successful as independent agriculturists. Labor was most abundant in the cities, and in the cities they remained. What have they done there? If you seek their monument, look around you! Behold not only the 57 Catholic churches (12 of them built almost or quite exclusively by Germans, 1 by Poles, 1 by Italians, 1 by Bohemians, 1 by Frenchmen, and 30 by Irishmen), the 17 monasteries, the 22 convents, the magnificent Protectory, the theological seminary, the 3 colleges, the 22 select schools, the 19 asylums, the 4 homes for aged men and women, the 4 hospitals, and the 85 parochial schools of which the city and diocese of New York alone boast; but the great business houses, the large manufactories, the numberless smaller though important factories, stores, and shops belonging to the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of this metropolis; make a similar examination of what this class of our citizens have done in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Boston, Hartford, Portland, Springfield, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Albany, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and twoscore more of our large cities; and then compare these truly magnificent religious, moral, charitable, commercial, and industrial results with all that the same people could have accomplished had they been scattered as sheep without shepherds throughout our Western and Northern wilds, destined to lose their faith, deprived of the support and strength which common association and common interest afford, and doomed, most probably, to lives of hopeless poverty and unremunerative struggle. God has been too good to them, and to the country in which they have become so important a factor, to permit this, and what the arrogance of man has so often stigmatized as folly has proved to be the highest and best wisdom both for eternal and for temporal ends. The whole number of foreign emigrants who have landed in the United States during the first 75 years of this century was 9,526,966. We showed in a former article[114] what proportion of these has remained in the cities; and we have now pointed out some of the results of this congregation.

Footnote 114:

“The European Exodus,” THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1877.

We must not be understood, however, to convey the idea that a very considerable proportion of our foreign-born Catholic citizens have not made homes for themselves in the rural districts of the country, under conditions which rendered it possible for them to continue the active exercise of their religion, and that the happiest results have not followed. In the New England States, in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota, the number of Irish and German Catholic farmers—well-to-do, prosperous, and faithful—is very large. In the New England States the increase of this class has of late been marked. The farms throughout this section are generally small; their native owners, especially when they are young men, find it difficult to extract from them incomes large enough to supply their desire for the luxuries of life; they are often anxious to try their fortunes in the cities or in the West; whenever one of them offers his little estate for sale the purchaser is most likely a German or Irishman, whose wants are more modest, and who finds it quite possible to derive from a farm of twenty or thirty acres a comfortable subsistence for his family. This change in the proprietorship of the soil in New England has gone on to an extent much larger than is generally known; and one would labor under a serious mistake who supposed that the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of New England was altogether, or even unduly, congregated in the cities. There are in New England, according to the last _Catholic Directory_, 539 Catholic priests, 508 churches, 167 chapels and stations, with a Catholic population of about 890,000 souls; and it is evident from an examination of the list of the churches that a large proportion of them are in the small towns and rural districts of these States. It may be unwelcome news to our Protestant readers, but it is true, that nearly 25 per cent. of the present population of New England is composed of Roman Catholics. It may be still more unpleasant for them to learn that nearly 70 per cent. of the births in that region are those in Roman Catholic families. New England, indeed, promises to be the first portion of the country which is likely to become distinctively Roman Catholic. The immigration into New England is small, but it is mostly composed of Catholics; the increase of population is very largely Catholic; the emigration is almost entirely non-Catholic. From this digression from our main subject we return with the remark that the rural Catholic population in the Middle and Western States—a population largely composed of foreign-born citizens and their descendants—constitutes a most important factor in the material strength of the Catholic body, and that, as we shall show, the future course of foreign emigration should, and most probably will, tend mainly to increase this class.

The late decline in emigration to the United States, and the present lull, amounting almost to stagnation, which has taken place in it, together with the fact that there is abundant reason to suppose that this lull is but temporary and that emigration will again ere very long pour in upon us, suggest some reflections respecting the changed character which that emigration will probably assume, the changed conditions under which it will be carried on, and the changed duty of the Catholic body in the United States towards it. What was so essentially necessary in the past will be necessary, under these new conditions, no longer; what was so often impossible in the past will now become generally easy of accomplishment. The Catholic Church in the United States has passed through the stage of its infancy and feebleness, and has entered upon the period of its manhood and strength. Firmly planted throughout the land, it fears nothing and can watch over and abundantly protect the faith and the education of its children. In every State and Territory, save Alaska, at least one bishop; in seven States two bishops; in five States three bishops; in one State six, in another State eight bishops, and with more than 5,000 priests—surely with this army of shepherds the sheep and the lambs of the flock can be fed and guarded from the wolves of infidelity, sectarianism, and bigotry. God has built up his church in the republic in the manner, and chiefly through the agencies, which we have pointed out, and has thus fitted her, armed her, and made her strong for the great work which still lies before her. That work is the conversion of the non-Catholic portion of our fellow-citizens; the nurture of Catholic children; and the care, the protection, and, if need be, the conversion of the emigrants who, in the future, are to come to us from the Old World. It is only with this latter branch of her duty that we now deal. Emigrants to the United States have hitherto arrived here chiefly as isolated individuals, or at best as isolated families. There have been some attempts at colonization—that is, in bringing in one company a large number of individuals and of families, destined to migrate together to a spot already selected for them, and which they are to occupy as a community. Most frequently these attempts at colonization have been successful. Where they have failed the failure has been due to some incapacity or dishonesty on the part of the agents who had the matter in charge, and not to any vice in the system itself. There is evidence to show that emigration in future will be to a great extent, and may be almost wholly, conducted on the colonization principle. We have already said that emigration from Ireland in the future would most probably be confined within small limits; but if anything could stimulate it, it would be the development in Ireland of wise plans for colonization, carried out by men of probity, experience, and practical wisdom. Our chief sources of emigration, however, for some years to come, are likely to be England, Scotland, Germany, France, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Russia. There are causes at work which even now are stimulating emigration from each of these countries, and these causes may attain great strength. As an instance of the curious manner in which apparently insignificant causes, originating at a distance, produce large effects, we may mention the fact that the shipping of fresh meat from this country to Great Britain—an enterprise only in its infancy—has already so seriously unsettled the relations existing between landlords and farmers in England and Scotland that the latter are declaring their inability to make both ends meet, and are turning their thoughts towards emigration. So general and so serious is this feeling that the leading journal of Scotland has sent to this country a trusted member of its permanent staff (the editor of its agricultural department for many years), with instructions “to make the fullest possible inquiry into everything connected with the stock-raising department of agriculture” in the United States, extending his researches to Texas, “where he proposes to examine thoroughly the system of cattle and sheep breeding and raising carried on in that State on so immense a scale, and to obtain all the information that is to be had with respect to the breeds of cattle, the methods taken to improve the quality of the stock, and Texan agricultural methods and circumstances generally.” He is then to visit other States for the same purpose, and “all along his route he will take note of all the phases and conditions of agriculture, and of the suitability of the States for advanced farming.” The results of his investigations, published in Scotland and England, will enable the farmers there “to determine the full significance of the competition of American cattle-growers in the British dead-meat market,” and in all probability determine many of them to emigrate to this country, with their capital and their skill, to engage in this competition on the American side.

Farming in England and Scotland—especially in Scotland—has long been a precarious and hazardous business; and now the reduction of four or six cents a pound in the price of beef which has been caused by the importation of about 1,000 tons of American beef and mutton every week at Glasgow and Liverpool, threatens to be the last straw to break the back of at least the Scotch farmer. Irish agriculturists likewise depend to a great extent for their profits upon the money received for their cattle, and they, too, will feel as severely as their Scottish friends the ruinous consequences, to them, of a reduction of twenty-five per cent. in the market value of their principal commodity. Thus the emigration of the well-to-do farmers of the United Kingdom is likely to be stimulated, and these agriculturists, most probably, would need but little persuasion to induce them to emigrate, if they emigrated at all, in colonies, and not as isolated families or individuals. So, also, as respects the future emigration from the Continent of Europe. Different causes are at work in each of the countries above named, but they all tend to the same result.

We have already hinted that the emigration of the future will be of a different class from the emigration of the past. At the present moment, and probably for some time to come, it would be dishonest, cruel, and unwise to encourage the emigration to this country of people without capital—those who must earn daily wages in order to live. Hitherto the great majority of our emigrants have been people of this class, and most fortunate is it that they came in such vast numbers. The time will again arrive, no doubt, when this class will be once more necessary and welcome among us, and when they will come, as they have come before, in thousands and tens of thousands. But at present they are not needed here; to bring them hither would be cruel to us as well as to themselves. The emigrants whom we need, and who are for some time most likely to come, are those who possess considerable worldly wealth at home, but who, like the English, Scotch, and Irish farmers of whom we have spoken, find it difficult to provide sufficiently for their increasing families, or wish to secure for them, in the New World, better fortunes than they can hope for in the Old. On the European Continent, and especially in Germany, other causes are at work which are morally certain to promote emigration. The war in the East may be localized—although all the probabilities point to a different conclusion—but even now it has increased the burdens which oppress the German people, and rendered the “blood-tax” that they are compelled to pay heavier and harder to bear. There is probably no intelligent man in Germany who does not look forward to a not distant day when that country will be again engaged in a desperate conflict; and meanwhile the military service exacted from every German citizen, and the cost of maintaining the army, press with a crushing weight upon the country. A thoughtful and experienced writer in one of our daily journals—a writer who, if we mistake not, has himself had extensive experience in the organization of emigration enterprises—thus treats of this subject:

“But it is in Germany that the fears awakened throughout Continental Europe will contribute most powerfully to a renewal of interest in the subject of emigration among classes to whom this country even now presents all requisite advantages. The stern methods employed by Bismarck to repress emigration movements—his interference with the freedom of American citizens who dared to speak of the attractions held out by the fertile West, and his suppression of whatever seemed likely to facilitate emigration to the United States—were all called forth by the anxious desire of people to escape the liability to military service. The military glories of the empire had charms for the cities, which acquired delusive appearances of prosperity. Among the population of rural districts the situation was different. The burdens and penalties of war, and of a system which exacts incessant preparation for war as a condition of national safety, have among these people stimulated the feeling in favor of emigration to a degree which the action of the Imperial Government has imperfectly controlled. The dread, vague before, will now be a reality. What, as a mere contingency, has sufficed to foster the wish to leave the Fatherland is now so near a certainty that the movement in favor of emigration needs but a guiding hand to assume large proportions. And the emigration available is of the description which, discreetly operated upon, should be attracted rather than repelled by the considerations which have driven wage-earners back to Europe. Those who would gladly get out of Germany to save their sons from service in the army look to the land for a livelihood, and would form valuable accessions to the Western States. As far as Germany is concerned, the difficulty is in reaching this class. Agencies that might be freely used in England or Holland are in Germany unavailable. All that seems possible there is to provide authentic information through channels which would not conflict with local law or incur the suspicion which, in view of recent experience, interested representations are likely to excite. Might not our consular agencies be utilized, not as emigration bureaux, but as means of supplying to those who seek it information in reference to lands and farms in the West and South, and to other matters connected with the opening or purchase of farms, and stocking and working them? The laborious head of the Statistical Bureau some years ago compiled a volume of statistics which to the working-men of the Old World was invaluable. The manual at present needed would deal with the phases of the emigration question, and would be much more than an accumulation of figures. It would be more legitimate than half the matter which emanates from the department and is printed at the public cost; and it would contribute to a revival and increase of the only immigration which can be honestly encouraged in the face of hard times.”

The French have never shown much anxiety for emigration; but the arrivals of emigrants from that country have increased during late years, and were slightly larger last year than in 1875. In France the burdens which are felt in Germany are also a cause of suffering, if not of complaint; and emigration from France, if the proper means for stimulating and directing it were employed, might reach large proportions. In Holland causes like those to which we have alluded as potent in Great Britain exist. The emigration from Russia has hitherto been of a peculiar character; it has consisted mainly of the Mennonites, whose anti-war principles impelled them to escape from the military service exacted from all Russian subjects, and from which only the temporary and partial concessions of the czar exempted some of them. The mission now undertaken by Russia is of a character which will compel her ruler, ere he has finished his task, to press every one of his subjects into the military service, directly or indirectly. The desire for emigration from Russia may be expected to increase, although some time will probably elapse before large results can be hoped for from it. The emigration from Austria has thus far been small. The total arrivals of emigrants from that country at the port of New York during the last 30 years have been only 21,677, of whom 1,210 came last year and 1,088 in 1875. But Austria is a country especially fit to emigrate from, and the incentives which are powerful in Germany will ere long be felt in Austria also. From Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland emigration of the better class may with reason be anticipated; and even from Italy, which has sent us 42,769 emigrants since 1847, considerable accessions may be expected.[115]

Footnote 115:

During the year ended December 31, 1876, 157,440 immigrants arrived in the United States, of whom 102,960 were males and 54,480 females. Their ages were: under fifteen years, 26,608; fifteen and under forty, 111,764; forty years and upward, 19,068. The countries of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were: England, 21,051; Ireland, 16,506; Scotland, 4,383; Wales, 294; Isle of Man, 8; Guernsey, 1; Germany, 31,323; Austria, 6,047; Hungary, 475; Sweden, 5,204; Norway, 6,031; Denmark, 1,624; Netherlands, 709; Belgium, 454; Switzerland, 1,572; France, 6,723; Italy, 2,980; Malta, 2; Greece, 24; Spain, 597; Portugal, 816; Gibraltar, 16; Russia, 6,787; Poland, 854; Finland, 22; Turkey, 59; Arabia, 13; India, 22; Burmah, 9; China, 16,879; Asiatic Russia, 83; Japan, 6; Asia, not specified, 14; Egypt, 3; Liberia, 14; Algeria, 9; Africa, not specified, 17; Quebec, 15,545; Nova Scotia, 3,200; New Brunswick, 1,494; Prince Edward Island, 437; Newfoundland, 58; British Columbia, 484; Mexico, 532; Central America, 14; U. S. of Colombia, 20; Venezuela, 37; Guiana, 3; Brazil, 28; Argentine Republic, 6; Chili, 20; Peru, 11; South America, 10; Cuba, 880; Porto Rico, 17; Jamaica, 23; Bahamas, 559; Barbados, 32; other West India Islands, 43; Curaçoa, 14; Azores, etc., 960; Bermudas, 29; Iceland, 30; Mauritius, 3; Sandwich Islands, 20; Australasia, 1,261; East Indies, 16; and born at sea, 23.

During the month ended April 30, 1877, there arrived at the port of New York 7,353 immigrants, of whom 4,553 were males and 2,800 females.

The countries or islands of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were as follows:

England, 1,500; Scotland, 191; Wales, 46; Ireland, 1,364; Germany, 2,184; Austria, 286; Sweden, 415; Norway, 67; Denmark, 171; France, 241; Switzerland, 183; Spain, 58; Italy, 350; Holland, 60; Belgium, 26; Russia, 35; Poland, 34; Hungary, 37; Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, 25; Cuba, 19; Sicily, 18; India, 14; Mexico, 8; U. S. of Colombia, 4; Venezuela, Bermuda, and born at sea, 3 each; Greece, China, and Peru, 2 each; Turkey and Iceland, 1 each.

We have before us a collection of documents relating to colonization in the West and Northwest. One of them describes the admirable plan of the Coadjutor-Bishop of St. Paul for Catholic colonization in Minnesota. In a powerful letter addressed, on the 16th of September last, to the President of the Board of Colonization of the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, the bishop dwells upon the evils which have followed the settlement of our Irish emigrants in the large cities—evils which we have no wish to belittle; but he also confesses that the misfortunes of those who went into the rural districts were equally deplorable. He remarks:

“Those who—exceptions to the rule—did move forward into the country, in search of homes on the land, suffered in many instances from the absence of proper and systematic direction no less than their companions in cities. They lost their faith. They strayed away from church and priest, from Catholic associations, and in certain States to-day there are whole districts where you hear the purest of Celtic names, and where, nevertheless, not one man proclaims himself a Catholic or smiles at the mention of the old land.”

And then, after a charming picture of a certain little Irish Catholic colony in the West, of which he says that, beginning in poverty and hardship twenty years ago,

“To-day those families are prosperous—rich; their children are as innocent and as true as if they had always breathed the atmosphere of the most Catholic of lands; the number of families has doubled, through mere natural increase; their district of country is for ever secured to the church,”

Bishop Ireland goes on to say that the results of his own colonization labors in Minnesota may be thus described:

“We began last February. Our first step was to secure the control of 117,000 acres of land, situated in Swift County, belonging to the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. There was at the time in the county about as much more vacant government land open for settlement under the pre-emption and homestead acts. The price of the railroad land was fixed, so that during the time it was to remain under our control the company could not advance its figures. We at once placed a priest in the colony, whose duty it was to direct and advise the immigrant as well as to minister to his spiritual wants. An office was opened in St. Paul, where the immigrant would be received on his arrival from the East, and where all letters of inquiry would be answered. Two weeks after publication of our plans had been made in the Catholic press, immigrants commenced to arrive, and up to the date at which I am writing over eight hundred entries have been made by our people on government land, and about 60,000 acres of railroad land have been occupied. We permit no speculation, so that each quarter section generally represents a family, persons, as a rule, being allowed to take more land only when they have grown sons, who soon will themselves need a home.”

He then gives a letter from the register of the Land Office, showing that the number of land entries made in Swift County from January 1 to June 1, 1876, was 1,317, and saying that over 800 of these were made by “your people.” The register adds:

“In this connection allow me to bear testimony to the intelligence, integrity, and good order always manifested by your colonists in all their business relations with this office. I can now call to mind no instance in which one under the influence of liquor has been in this office. Cases of profanity are extremely rare; in no instance have we had trouble or contention with any one. They are model colonists. I know this opinion to be shared by all who come in contact with them.”

The bishop adds:

“We have already in the colony two churches; one more will be built in spring. Two promising towns have sprung up—De Graff and Randall. In De Graff there are some forty houses, stores or residences, a large brick-yard, a grist-mill; a grain elevator and a convent school are to be put up during the winter. The settlers, whom I had the pleasure of visiting a month ago, are full of hope and delighted with their prospects. Last spring Swift County was a wild, untenanted prairie; to-day on every side new houses and freshly-broken ground meet the eye. Our expenses in organizing and directing the colony were large; still, we were able to meet them by direct revenue from the colony itself. Each settler paid a small entrance fee, and we sold town lots. We have also reserved from sale some choice sections of land, which can at any time, if there is need, be disposed of at a high advance over the original price; so that we are safe against all losses in our enterprise. As soon as a settlement is formed the land advances at once in value; one farm bought in Swift County last spring at two dollars per acre has been sold since at nine dollars per acre, and a settlement that embraces three or four hundred families always affords room for a valuable town-site. The two excellences which I deem our Minnesota plan possesses are the following: We had control of the land; this is necessary to ward off speculation and preserve the land for our own colonists. No sooner would twenty families be settled in a district than the surrounding land would be bought up by speculators or strangers, if you had not complete control over it in some manner. Next, we began the colony with a priest on the spot; the presence of a priest does more than any other agency to attract immigrants and to encourage them in their difficulties. We have been so well satisfied with our work in Swift County that our programme for next year includes the opening of two new colonies.”

Our space does not permit us to summarize even the accounts of the other Catholic colonization movements which have come under our notice. These movements are serious and important, and those engaged in them should take every possible precaution to prevent them from falling into the hands of careless, incompetent, or dishonest persons. The work, it appears, will have two chief departments—the home and foreign agencies. The former will undertake and supervise the task of selecting and securing proper localities for colonies, and of procuring as settlers families and individuals already resident here, but whose interests would be promoted by their translation to these new homes; the foreign agencies would be employed in diffusing the necessary information among the classes in Europe who would be most likely to emigrate, and who would be the most desirable emigrants, and in inducing them to join new colonies already established or to form others of their own. The _Catholic Advocate_, of Louisville, Ky., in some well-considered remarks on the subject, says:

“Now, it is our opinion that a great impetus could be given to this good work if the directors of the colonization project could so manage as to awaken the Irish people at home to the value of the movement; if they could have their plans placed in all their development before that class in Ireland from which emigration recruits its numbers. This could be best and most efficiently done by inducing the formation of corresponding organizations in the old country. There are very many thousands of people in Ireland, with farming-stock worth two and three and four hundred pounds sterling, holding their lands by an insecure tenure and at a rack-rent, who would come out to this country to-morrow, with all their valuables converted into gold, if they knew or understood the advantages of the colonization scheme. As it is now, they only hear about it. It comes to them by newspapers, as a kind of far-off echo. It is not brought forcibly to their notice. Its benefits are not urged upon them personally. There is no persuasion about it, and it is as a dead interest to the great majority of the people, who, if they only knew and understood it thoroughly, would grasp at it. The British government was very earnest in its efforts to colonize Australia and New Zealand some years ago, and the advantages it had to offer were far and far away from those offered by the Catholic colonization movement amongst us. But how did the British government act? It sent agents amongst the Irish and English and Scotch, prepared with maps and pamphlets and lectures, to impress the value of their project upon the people at home and put it immediately before their eyes. What was the consequence? Numbers of emigrants came forward, and of a class which had the means to colonize, and they settled in Brisbane, Queensland, and New Zealand, where they are to-day prosperous and promising. We do not say that paid agents should be sent to Ireland for the purpose we indicate, but it would be very easy to communicate with influential persons there to put before them the value of forming organizations in connection with Bishop Ireland’s scheme, with the St. Louis scheme, and any others that may be started. What is required is emigrants with some capital, and this is the way to get them.”

Bishop Ireland, in the letter from which we have already quoted, sets forth at some length what such a body as the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union could do in this work. It could constantly agitate the subject of colonization, and it could establish a national bureau of information, which would collect information, publish pamphlets, secure the co-operation of bishops and priests, and open colonies of their own. But the “crowning stone in the work of colonization,” in the bishop’s opinion, would be “the formation of joint-stock colonization societies.” He says:

“By no other means can the poor among our people—those most in need of homes—be colonized. However successful our Minnesota plan may seem to have been, it does not reach the poor. We have received hundreds of letters from most deserving persons, to whom we were obliged to answer that we had no place for them in our colony. How many there are who have simply means to bring them West, but who can neither pay for land nor maintain themselves while waiting for the first crop! A joint-stock company would give them land on long time, at reasonable rates of interest, and would also advance them small sums to assist them in opening their farms. The plan might be somewhat as follows: The executive power of the company should be in the hands of most reliable business men. Stockholders would be promised that their money would be paid back in five years, with interest at six per cent. per annum, and, in order that men of all classes might take part in the work, shares would be put at low figures. The inducement to take shares is that good is done to our fellow-countrymen without any loss to ourselves. The company purchases a tract of land; cash in hand, the land would cost but little. Immigrants, in purchasing it from the company, would give back a mortgage, promising to pay the full price in four or five years, with interest at eight per cent. per annum. An industrious settler could not fail to meet such obligations. If he failed to do so, the land reverts to the company, worth much more than it was when first purchased. The company derives its expenses from the two per cent., which it charges the settlers over what it pays its shareholders; but to protect itself the better it could sell the land at a slightly increased figure, especially a few choice pieces; it could also lay out for its profit a town-site, and sell the lots.

“There should be colonies in every State where cheap lands are to be found. The movement should be made general, our entire Irish Catholic people entering into it: one class coming forward with advice and money, the other profiting, for their own good and that of their religion, of the assistance offered to them. What is to be done must be done quickly. The time is fast passing when cheap lands can be had in America. Already the tide of immigration—bearing, alas! but a small number of our people—has crossed the Missouri, leaving in its wake but inconsiderable portions of unoccupied land, and reaching even now the limits of the arable lands of the continent. Patriotism and religious zeal are two great incentives to

## action for Irish Catholics. Colonization is a work upon which both

can be most easily brought to bear.”

Already one such joint-stock company has been formed—on the 10th of April last—in St. Paul, in which the bishop and the coadjutor-bishop of that see have taken shares.

It will henceforth be the duty of the church in America to see that no Catholic family landing on our shores and seeking a new home in our Western States and Territories shall be permitted to stray beyond her control, but shall be conducted to localities where her priests are already prepared to receive them, and where their fellow-citizens will be bound to them by the ties of faith. Catholics in this land are already about as one in six. We receive accessions every day from the ranks of the Protestant sects; few, if any, of our own number fall away from us; the emigration of the future, to a great extent, will be in our hands. Thus will the church in America—where to-day, to use his own words, our Holy Father “is more truly Pope than in any other land”—grow in strength and beauty, and thus will she be prepared, when the hour comes, to save the republic for which her sons, from the hour of her birth until now, have shed their blood, and given their toil and their prayers, in unstinted measure.

A THRUSH’S SONG.

Underneath a leafy cover, Green with morning-wealth of June, Wanting still, like gift of lover Craving even greater boon, Deeper chords of light to perfect summer’s fulness, love’s high noon;

Just apart from all the glitter Of a busy crystal world Where, amid quick human twitter, Pond’rous engine huge arms hurled, Leaping shuttle wrought bright fancies, girded wheels obedient whirled;

Just a little from the glimmer, From the footfalls’ tuneless tread— With the distance ever dimmer— Rose, so calm o’ershadowèd, Sound of lusty drum and hautboy, with clear flute voice interlaid,

Notes exultant loud outpouring Chant of nations, lightly bound With frail melody, up soaring O’er the people gathered round, Resting from the glare a little, from the wearing sight and sound.

Ears of loyal Briton tingling Hark’ning there, “God save the Queen”; Erin’s children’s tears commingling At “The Wearing of the Green,” Thinking of a loveless bondage, truer trust that might have been.

Sounds of wrathful people seeming Storming through the “Marseillaise,” Stirred a land, nigh dead in dreaming, Through Hortense’s song of praise, Through its wailing sadness tolling bells of old chivalric days.

Through sad France’s slumber breaking Germany’s triumphant hymn, Armed peoples, eager waking, Watching Rhine-lights growing dim, Hearing clear a weary nation struggling sore with spectres grim.

In the nations’ anthems swelling Ever twanged some chord of wrong: Broken notes in anguish welling Even in our starlit song— Shadowy notes from swamp and prairie mingling with the suffering throng.

Stilled at last the music’s clamor, Drum and hautboy laid to rest, Softly through the silence’ glamour Stole the light wind of the west, Gently parted the green branches, tenderly each leaf caressed.

And a sudden thrill of sweetness, Mellow, careless, glad, and clear, Love’s noon-song in its completeness, Poured in peaceful nature’s ear From a thrush’s throat of silver—happy song without one tear—

Fell like precious, heav’n-dropped token 'Mid the elements of strife, 'Mid the melodies, grief-broken, Blare of trumpet, shriek of fife— Only with undarkened blessing was the thrush’s singing rife.

Where the ways were broad and ordered England’s Indian blossoms flamed; Here, where guarding thickets bordered, Bloom of May June’s sunshine claimed, Lifting, 'mid the throngs of people, glance, half-fearing, half-ashamed;

Trembling at the cymbals’ crashing Through the ancient solitude, Till the thrush’s sweetness flashing, With its wild-wood joy imbued, Seemed a covenant from heaven, arc of promise, rainbow-hued.

In the upper silence singing, Hidden minstrel, unafraid, In the sunlit branches, swinging, By the west wind, whispering, swayed, All the lower tumult silenced in the clear, blue depths o’erhead;

Whence the peace of heav’n, descending, Filled the bird’s song, true and clear, Lightsome duty sweetness lending, Joy o’erbrimming in its cheer, Freedom on his pinions resting, sunshine soft, and heaven near.

Careless strength and free heart blending In each note’s melodious mirth, Calm within a pure soul bending Praising for its heavenly birth, For its gift of soaring pinions, lightening so the bonds of earth.

With that clear and sudden sweetness Sober fancies swept along, And its wild-wood, perfect meetness Seemed our country’s truer song— Sunshine soft, and heaven near it, and no undertone of wrong.

So, methought, her clear voice, ringing, Should in strength of freedom rise, With the sweetness of its singing Every evil exorcise; Blessing for her children winning through her nearness to the skies.

PHILADELPHIA, June, 1876.

THE CONGREGATION OF CLUNY. TRANSLATED FROM SCHOEPPNER’S “CHARACTER-BILDER DER GESCHICHTE DES MITTELALTERS.”

At the close of the ninth century the great wealth of the Benedictine Order in France had produced a relaxation of discipline and a departure from regular observance in many of its monasteries which brought it into a state of decadence. One principal source of this degeneracy lay in the want of all organic union binding together the distinct monasteries, each one of which was exclusively subject to its own abbot. It is true that in earlier times the bishops exercised a certain jurisdiction over them; but this was seriously impeded by the fact that the abbot was frequently equal to the bishop in power and in external consideration. The pope was too distant; disorder could strike deep root before any information would reach him, and even then he was ordinarily able to employ only indirect methods of remedying the evil. This seems to have been felt by all those who, from the tenth century onwards, endeavored, by various additional statutes, explanations, and stricter applications of the Rule of St. Benedict, to bring back those who were subject to it to a more conscientious fulfilment of the obligations of their religious profession. At the time when the Carlovingian dynasty, represented in the person of Charles the Simple, was verging toward extinction, William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Auvergne, in concert with his duchess, Ingeburga, formed the plan of founding a new monastery. He took counsel respecting the carrying out of his design with Hugh, Abbot of St. Martin’s at Autun.

In company with the duke and duchess Hugh made an exploration of their domains in search of a suitable location, and selected a meadow on the banks of the little river Grosne, near an agreeable cascade, where a chapel in honor of the Blessed Virgin and St. Peter had been already erected. The duke objected that this was his favorite hunting-ground, and that the noise and tumult of deer-chasing would frequently disturb the quiet of the monastery. “Well, then,” replied the abbot, “drive away the hounds and bring in the monks; you well know which of the two will bring you the most favor with God.” The duke cheerfully assented to this proposition, and took measures for the erection of a monastery in honor of the apostles SS. Peter and Paul upon this territory, of which he had but recently acquired the possession.

At the recommendation of Hugh, Berno was invited from a neighboring monastery to become the first abbot. He was succeeded by Odo, the son of a Frankish knight, who had been brought up at the court of Duke William, had afterwards devoted himself to the religious state, and was at the time of his election in the maturity of his manhood. Odo saw that in many monasteries the end of the religious vocation had been entirely forgotten, and, in order that he might restore the primitive discipline of St. Benedict, he determined to reform the monastic state in accordance with its original spirit and intention, and to induce the monasteries in his own vicinity to adopt his reformation. He was a man well fitted to undertake such a task, by his personal austerity, his self-devotion to the good of others, and his extraordinary charity, which was so great that he was ready at any time to bestow all he had upon the poor, without any thought of reserving on one day what might be necessary for the next. The influence of his personal character, and the effect of his active efforts during a prolonged life, were so great that a number of monasteries became affiliated to the one over which he immediately presided. He is, therefore, properly speaking, the founder of the Cluniac Order.

His meek and humble successor, Aymard, won for himself by his amiable virtues the confidence of all the brethren of the order, and the favor of the great and powerful, who were profuse in conferring upon it liberal gifts, charters of protection and privilege. His successors in office, Majolus, Odilo, and Hugh I., were all equally eminent by their able administration, their great influence in all the most important ecclesiastical and political movements of their time, and their high favor with emperors, kings, and princes. Emperors, kings, popes, and bishops maintained intimate relations with the abbots of Cluny, and all the great and powerful nobles of the country sought their advice in matters of importance. Three Sovereign Pontiffs were taken from Cluny to fill the chair of St. Peter. When the son of a king was obliged to become a fugitive, he sought for a refuge at Cluny, and princes who were weary of life and disturbed by remorse of conscience came there to do penance among the brethren. The rulers of foreign countries were lavish of their donations to the order, the popes were equally munificent in conferring marks of their high favor, and bishops were eager for the affiliation of the most important monasteries in their dioceses with Cluny. The immense revenues which flowed into its coffers from all countries in the world became at last proverbial.

The internal discipline and external splendor of Cluny were maintained in an undisturbed permanence and stability for a period of two centuries. At the end of that time both were grievously shattered by the disastrous administration of the unworthy Abbot Pons, a man of worldly levity in character and manners, haughty and ambitious in his disposition, whose whole course of official conduct was such as to threaten the complete downfall of the order. After a length of time he was formally impeached and tried at the tribunal of Rome, by which he was deposed from his office as abbot. Disregarding this sentence, he seized anew on the possession of the monastery of Cluny by force of arms, but was soon after overpowered and cast into a prison, where he was carried off by a sudden attack of fever.

After a short period of only three months, during which the abbatial chair was occupied by Hugh II., Peter the Venerable was placed over the Cluniac Order, which he ruled for thirty-nine years, precisely during the period of St. Bernard, who was his intimate friend, and whom he survived about three years. His activity, prudence, and universal reputation, the intellectual power, deep learning, and exalted virtue which merited for him the appellation of Venerable by which he is designated in history, sufficed not only to heal Cluny from the wounds inflicted on it by the Abbot Pons, but to raise the whole order to its highest summit of importance, and to make the monastery which was its centre flourish in a state of unexampled spiritual and temporal prosperity. If we consider the many journeys which this great abbot undertook on affairs of the utmost importance connected with the public interests of the day, it would seem that he was exclusively a statesman; his vast correspondence seems sufficient to have employed the time of one whose whole attention was given to counselling all sorts of persons seeking his advice by letters; his theological works are like the productions of one actively occupied in study; the strictness with which he observed and enforced upon his subjects in the cloister the monastic rule indicates a contemplative ascetic; his administration of the temporalities of his monastery presents him in the light of an able financier and man of business. The world was filled with his fame, and his order attained the highest zenith of its glory during his administration, which ended at his death, during the Christmas-tide of the year 1156.

All the special rules of the Cluniac Order were based upon the Rule of St. Benedict. The ecclesiastical chant and the service of the choir employed much more time and attention, according to the customs of Cluny, than in other Benedictine monasteries. As far as possible, uniformity was enforced in the different houses after the model of the mother-house. Besides the special prayers which each one said according to his own devotion, one hundred and thirty-eight psalms were prescribed to be recited daily, which was usually done while engaged in performing the various tasks; and even in the great heats of summer, on the days when talking was permitted, there was only time for a recreation of half an hour. Every negligence or mistake in the choir-service received instantly a reproof. This was regarded as a spiritual military service, in which no individual caprice or negligence could be tolerated. Special care was exacted on the greater festivals of the church, and their high importance was recognized by the greater length of the choral song, the reading of longer lessons, and a more fervent devotion. During High Mass no Low Masses were allowed to be said, so that no one could in that way consult his own convenience and escape from the public and solemn celebration. The moment of the departure of one of the brethren from this world was treated as a specially solemn occasion. As soon as he had received Extreme Unction a wooden cross was put under his head in place of a pillow. All who could possibly attend were obliged to assist at the last agony of the dying man, and, although at other times running through the corridors was strictly forbidden, it was specially ordered whenever the passing-bell announced that one of the brethren was about to depart this life. Special revenues were devoted to all charitable purposes, and their conscientious expenditure strictly enjoined. There was a particular endowment for eighteen poor men who were perpetually supported by the mother-house. Six brothers were appointed for the service of the poor, one of whom waited on them, another acted as porter of their hospital, two others furnished the wood out of the forest for their fires, and two had charge of ovens for baking bread, to be given away in alms to the poor. Everything remaining on the tables of the refectory after the meals was taken by the almoner for distribution among the poor. A cover was laid for each one of the most distinguished benefactors at every meal, even though they were living at a great distance or had been long dead, and all their portions were taken for the poor. Twelve loaves, each weighing three pounds, were prepared each day for widows, orphans, feeble and aged persons. On Holy Thursday the ceremony of foot-washing was performed for as many poor men as there were brothers in the community, all of whom were afterwards served at dinner. On certain special occasions, and on all the festivals when the table of the brethren was better served than usual, more abundant alms were distributed. The almoner was bound to make a weekly visitation of the houses in the village near the monastery, that he might find out every poor person who was sick, and furnish him with food, wine, and medicines. The number of poor persons who regularly received aid was estimated at seventeen thousand. The Abbot Odilo sold the ornaments of the church and a crown presented by the German emperor Henry II. in order to relieve the wants of the people during a famine. The subordinate monasteries were required to imitate in this generous alms-giving the example of Cluny, and a similar observance of hospitality was also exacted. Precise rules were laid down for the reception of visitors of different ranks and conditions, who were continually arriving at the monastery on foot or on horseback. If they were ecclesiastics, they were not only invited to partake of the hospitality of the monastery, but also to participate in its religious exercises. Every one who travelled on foot received a certain amount of bread and wine on his arrival and at his departure. If the poverty of the house did not permit anything more than a temporary shelter and a friendly reception, this, at least, was to be cheerfully given to every one. The prior was not to consider what was within his means, but to go beyond them in providing for the wants of strangers. Frequently, when they had consumed all the provisions of the larder, the monks had to endure hunger until new supplies, which often came unexpectedly, were furnished by royal and noble benefactors.

The life of the monastic brethren was austere. Besides the regular and very long choir-service, which no one was dispensed from attending, the fasts were frequent. The flesh of quadrupeds was never allowed, and on the ferial days and the entire period from Septuagesima to Easter, not even fat could be used in preparing the food. The principal article of their daily diet was beans, with an occasional allowance of eggs and cheese, and more rarely of fish. After night prayers no one could taste food or drink anything without special necessity and permission. The violation of these rules and of the law of strict poverty was considered as a grievous transgression, exposing the offender to excommunication and privation of Christian burial.

Obedience, the pivot of all the virtues of an ecclesiastic, was regarded as having a higher and more extended obligation for religious. Its disregard was esteemed worthy of the severest punishment, and the incorrigible were subject to expulsion. Priors and other officials were twice admonished, and afterwards deposed without any hope of restitution. The observance of a strict rule of silence was regarded as a specially efficacious help to the acquisition of perfect spiritual virtues, and, in the opinion of the Abbot Odo, monastic life was utterly worthless without it. Absolute silence was invariably observed during meal-times, and during all times of the day throughout Lent and several other penitential seasons. The Cluniac monks became so expert in the use of the sign-language through their disuse of speech that they might have dispensed with talking altogether without the least inconvenience. The most perfect silence and stillness, undisturbed even by hasty and noisy walking through the cloisters, reigned throughout the monastery.

Every fault must be expiated by penance, or at least an acknowledgment before the abbot. Those who were late must remain standing or prostrate until a sign was given to them to repair to their places. The tardy at table received also a penance. Public offences received public penances, in order that every one might have sensible evidence that the community was vigilant in observing the behavior of each individual member. Smaller offences were punished by solitary confinement, making a station at the church-door, or exclusion from the common exercises. Those which were more serious were punished by flagellation, and, if the offence had been public, the penance was administered at the door of the church while the people were assembling for Mass, and the cause of it announced to them by an official of the monastery. For the gravest faults the culprit was put in irons or imprisoned in a dark, underground dungeon. St. Hugh’s maxim was that a monastery is not dishonored by the faults of its members, but by their impunity. Several brothers were appointed to make the rounds of the monastery at intervals, and to declare in chapter every disorder which they observed, whereupon due penance was inflicted on the delinquents. This duty devolved on the prior for the first hour of the night, and at intervals during its progress, with a special charge of watching that all the doors were properly closed and fastened.

Such a special care was observed in regard to cleanliness that the most

## particular housekeeper could not be more thorough or exact in a

well-regulated private family than were these monks of Cluny in their domestic arrangements. This care for cleanliness showed a deep psychological insight into the close connection between this exterior virtue and interior purity, which is often endangered and damaged by a slovenly disregard of outward propriety. Articles of clothing and all the bed and table furniture were regularly changed according to an invariable rule. Careful supervision was observed towards the novices in respect to their personal neatness in such minute particulars as washing, combing their hair, etc., and conveniences for these purposes were provided in abundance for all, that they might easily make use of them when they came in from work to go to the choir or the refectory.

The clothing was very plain, in contrast to the worldly elegance and vanity in dress which prevailed in many other religious communities, but all the different articles of dress were provided in abundance, with two complete outfits for each one. The winter clothing was made to suit the season and the climate, warm and comfortable; for the men who made the regulations of Cluny were not so narrow-minded as to adhere scrupulously to purely exterior customs which were suitable to Italy but utterly unfit for the ruder climate of the North.

The sick were cared for with the most tender solicitude, six brothers were deputed to the service of the infirmary, and the best ass in the stables was set apart to haul wood for the fire. The infirmarian was always provided with spices and wholesome herbs to make the food of the sick more appetizing and wholesome. Meat was provided for them every day, and even on fasting-days. A certain part of the presents made to the monastery was assigned to the purchase of comforts and delicacies for the sick and weakly. They were dispensed from the rule of silence, and only required to refrain from abusing the privilege of talking. The abbot and grand-prior were required to make frequent visits to the sick, and the cellarer was bound to see each one, in company with the infirmarian, every day, and inquire what kind of food he wished for and in what way it should be prepared. As soon as one was released from the infirmary he came to the chapter, and, standing up, said to the prior: “I have been in the infirmary and have not kept the rules of the order according to our obligation.” The prior answered: “May God pardon you!” whereupon the convalescent brother went to the place of the penitents and recited the seven penitential psalms or seven _Pater Nosters_.

As for the interior legislation and administration of the order, a general chapter was held at Cluny once a year, where all the abbots, priors, and deans of the entire congregation were bound to appear under pain of deposition, those only who lived in distant countries being exempted from attendance oftener than once every two years. Every question which related to the rules was submitted to this chapter, and to the votes of all the brethren of the monastery of Cluny. Each one was obliged to make known in the chapter, without any regard to personal considerations, whatever he had noticed in any of the houses or in any individual member of the order which was worthy of censure, and was protected from any unpleasant consequences which might possibly ensue afterwards to himself from his disclosures. All priors whose administration or personal conduct was censurable were deposed by the chapter; and, finally, they made an examination of all the novices of the congregation.

As soon as the chapter was dissolved the supreme power reverted to the abbot of Cluny. He appointed all the priors and confirmed all the abbots-elect, being strictly forbidden to receive any presents or perquisites in connection with any such official act. He could make such regulations as he saw fit in all the houses; all his sentences upon individual delinquents which were in conformity with the canons were binding; and in the interval between the capitular assemblies he could depose from all offices without appeal. He was bound to share as much as possible in the common life of the other monks, to be with them in the common dormitory and at the common table, and to use the same food, the only mark of distinction being that he was served with wine of a better quality and with two loaves at dinner.

Next in rank and authority came the grand-prior, appointed by the abbot with the counsel of the elders of the monastery and the assent of the chapter. Under the abbot’s supreme direction he presided over all the spiritual and temporal offices of the monastery, with a special oversight of those brothers who were charged with out-door employments on the cloistral domains. Every year, after the vintage, he made an inspection of all the farm-lands, examined the stores laid up in the barns and cellars, and directed the division of the fruits of the harvest for the use of those who resided in the outlying farm-houses, and for the general use within the monastery.

The interior order of the house was under the oversight of the prior of the community, who had several assistants, and in case of absence a deputy. The rule prescribed that no account should be taken of birth or other personal considerations of human respect in the choice of prelates and officers, but only of moral virtue, experience, and prudence. No abbot or prior, not even the abbot-general of the congregation, was allowed to travel without some of the brethren in his company, as witnesses of his conduct and associates in fulfilling the devotions prescribed by the rule.

We can form some estimate of the extent of the monastic buildings of Cluny from the circumstance related in history, that in the year 1245 Pope Innocent IV., with twelve cardinals and his entire suite; also two patriarchs, three archbishops, eleven bishops, with their respective suites; farther, the king of France, with his mother, wife, brother, and sister, and the whole of their retinue; the emperor of Constantinople, the crown-princes of Aragon and Castile, several dukes and counts, and a crowd of knights, ecclesiastics, and monks, were accommodated within the precincts of the monastery without encroaching on any part of it which was ordinarily occupied by the community or incommoding any of the brethren.

The fine arts were made to contribute to that which is their highest end—the service of religion—in the Cluniac Order more than in any other contemporary institute. They were all employed in harmony and unity with each other to enhance the splendor of the divine service. The candles and lamps by which the church was lighted were placed in costly hoops beset with precious stones. Instead of candelabra, trees artistically wrought in bronze stood near the altar, having the lighted candles prescribed for the solemn ceremonies blazing among their branches. Paintings covered the walls; the windows were richly ornamental and filled with colored glass. Costly tapestry and hangings, beautifully-carved stalls, a decorated pavement, chimes of bells of unusual size, reliquaries of gold whose beauty of workmanship even surpassed their costliness, chalices, ciboriums, and monstrances of gold, sparkling with jewels, vestments heavy and stiff with cloth of gold, and all else that was magnificent in sacred art and decoration, made the church of Cluny a theme of praise and admiration throughout all France. It was probably at the date of its erection the largest in the world, and rested upon sixty-eight columns, each eight and one half feet in diameter. Thirty-two of these pillars supported the vast dome, and the whole edifice, which was built in the peculiar form of an archiepiscopal cross, was regarded as one of the most splendid monuments of the Roman style of architecture in France. Sculpture, carving, and painting rivalled each other in the decoration of this magnificent church, and there still remained at the beginning of the present century a representation of the Eternal Father on a gold ground in the vaulting of the apse, ten feet in height, which retained all its original brilliancy of color. The choir-stalls, which were of a comparatively late period, were two hundred and twenty-five in number at the time of the suppression—showing how numerous the community had become—and the towers were filled with a great many bells, the largest of which were melted down to cast cannon during the religious wars. At present but little remains of this grand structure in a state of ruin. During the French Revolution the whole was sold for building material for the sum of twenty thousand dollars, and thus rude force destroyed this grand work of the spirit of Christianity.

The cultivation of science was fostered in the Cluniac Order with much greater care and zeal than in some of the other monastic bodies. Its founders were more solicitous for the promotion of intellectual labor than for material industry. The Abbot Peter wrote: “In virtue of a special privilege, the abbots of Cluny from ancient times promoted literary occupations with zeal and energy. It is not the desire of winning a high reputation which stimulates them to write books, but the feeling that it would be shameful to neglect the imitation of their predecessors, the holy Fathers of the church, and thus to prove themselves degenerate sons.” Under such superiors the brethren were not deterred by any ill-grounded scruple from applying themselves to the study of the heathen classics, and in fact considered this study as a valuable auxiliary to the investigation of the Sacred Scriptures. The works of the great ecclesiastical writers were fully appreciated and diligently perused, and the valuable manuscripts collected in the library of Cluny were not considered as a mere assortment of curiosities for the sake of show, but as useful implements for the cultivation of science, and in a generous spirit of liberality were freely lent to other monasteries for the sake of making copies or recensions. The books used for the church service were written out in a beautiful, ornamental text, richly adorned with initial letters executed in the most elaborate style of art; and those who were engaged in this kind of work, if it would not admit of interruption, were excused from choir for the time being. The ability and industry of the Cluniac monks in collecting manuscripts and preserving precious monuments of ancient history have been recognized even in later times, and abundant documents of that zeal for the promotion of science which was not damped by the earnestness with which religious discipline was enforced have come down to our own day.

The confraternity of Cluny, which had speedily risen to a high consideration throughout France, attained to a higher and more solidly-established reputation during the period extending through nearly forty years of the administration of Peter the Venerable. The renovation of the Benedictine Order in its original spirit which had been effected by the Cluniac reform became renowned in other countries as well as in France, and awoke the desire of attempting to accomplish the same happy results elsewhere by the use of similar methods. Every founder of a new monastery in France desired to introduce the rule and submit to the supremacy of Cluny. Kings, princes, and bishops urged upon the already existing monastic communities, especially when they had fallen into disorder, incorporation with the Cluniac congregation. During the rule of Peter the Venerable it was increased by the addition of three hundred and fourteen monasteries, collegiate foundations, and churches, and at its most flourishing period it embraced within its limits more than two thousand distinct houses. At the time of the Crusades it extended itself even beyond the sea. Cluniac houses were founded in the valley of Josaphat and on Mt. Tabor, and in the time of Abbot Peter a monastery in a suburb of Constantinople was united to the mother-house, over which he presided.

Men of all conditions who desired to do penance for their sins, to seek a refuge from the dangers of the world, or to find spiritual direction and come under a holy influence for their own sanctification, sought to make reparation and deserve the grace of God by rich gifts to Cluny, to consecrate themselves to God in some house of the order by the religious vows, or to secure for themselves by becoming affiliated to it a share in the sacrifices and prayers perpetually offered within its sacred enclosures. It is related that Count Guy of Macon, who had been a bitter persecutor of the order, one day presented himself at the gates of Cluny in company with his son, several grandsons, thirty knights, and the wives of each one of the noble group respectively, all of whom demanded permission to take the vows of religion. Under the sixth abbot, Hugh I., three thousand monks were present at one general chapter. The crowd of applicants for admission became so great that Hugh VI. was once compelled to issue an edict forbidding the reception of any new candidates during a term of three years. Under Peter the Venerable the number of monks resident at Cluny increased from two hundred to four hundred and sixty, some of whom, however, led a solitary life as hermits in the neighboring forests.

The popes were lavish in their grants of privileges to Cluny and the monasteries connected with it. Alexander II. decreed that no bishop or prelate should have the right of excommunication in respect to the Cluniac congregation. Urban II. allowed the use of episcopal insignia to the abbot, and Calixtus II. conceded to him the special privileges of a cardinal. The brethren of the order were even permitted to have the celebration of Mass continued for their own benefit during an interdict.

There is nothing which shows more clearly the high esteem in which Cluny was held than the decree of Pope Innocent IV. in the third session of the Council of Lyons: that accredited copies of all the official documents relating to the diplomatic intercourse of emperors, kings, and other princes with the Roman Church should be deposited in its archives. This important and precious collection was still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution.

The history of Cluny has a very great importance in connection with the general history of the mediæval period, but especially with the great ecclesiastical reformation of Gregory VII., which was prepared by the interior working of the order within the church. For many prudential reasons the fact that the great ecclesiastical movement of the eleventh century had its source in the monastery of Cluny was kept out of sight as much as possible; but it is proved by abundant evidence, and Gregory VII. himself, who was its prior when St. Leo IX. persuaded him to return with him to Rome in 1049, speaks of the peculiar and intimate relations between Cluny and the Holy See.

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

VII. ST. AGATHA.

“She hath no breasts—is cruelly maimed withal: What shall we do for her, when spoken for, Our little sister? Sheathe her, if a door, In boards of cedar; if she be a wall, Build up a house of silver,[116] and instal Her worship”—so the monks. O bleeding core Of maidenhood, thy Spouse and King shall pour Balm in thy wounds, the lilies’ growth recall!

When Etna belched forth Phlegethon, and rolled Its molten flanks upon Catania, The saint’s veil they did reverently unfold And wave it in the face of fire—Behold! Piled black against the convent’s wall to-day, That Red Sea curdled by Saint Agatha!

Footnote 116:

Song of Solomon viii. 8, 9.

VIII. ST. LUCIA.

“What’s this? Two human eyes upon a dish? Wretch! what dost mean?” “Lucia sends thee these; She greets thee: 'Be no longer ill at ease; They are thine! When mine, a spirit devilish, With them, with pink bloom and pale limbs, did fish For men’s souls.’” Quick! to her—ere horror freeze. Her wan lips smiled beneath the bandages: “Thou hast languished for mine eyes—have, then, thy wish!”

She raised the fillet—the youth dropped as dead. “Look up!” a sweet voice spake, “and praise the Lord!” He obeyed trembling—O illumined head! Low with an altered spirit he adored. Thenceforth an angel’s eyes, her own instead, Lighted her to her martyrdom’s reward.

IX. ST. URSULA.

A bower of woven palms! In white arrayed, Marshalled beneath that verdant canopy By fair-haired Ursula of Brittany, Eleven thousand martyrs, each a maid! For England’s heir, Etherius, had obeyed His bride’s will, honoring her virginity. To Rome on pilgrimage, by river and sea, They sailed, and prettily the bold mariner played.

Saint, dear to tender years! thou and thy doves Fell pierced with many arrows, and the Rhine With blood of innocents ran red as wine— Still teach that to the pure Death’s kiss is Love’s! Still teach it, though thy mortuary shrine May moulder, while the stream to ocean moves!

THE UNKNOWN EROS.[117]

Footnote 117:

_The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes._ London: George Bell & Sons. 1877.

There seems a growing and lamentable tendency among English poets in these days to divide themselves up into schools. We have the Tennysonian, the Swinburnian, the Rossettian, as a little earlier we had the Lake school, the Byronic, and so on. In these schools of poetry, as in schools of painting, there are certain marked features peculiar to each and forming, as it were, the common property of that one. Certain tones and colors belong to this: subdued grays, royal purples, dim and far-away lights on meadow and mere. Another is a lustier flesh-and-blood school: its men and women are decidedly, though musically, improper. The choice expressions and tender care that the other lavishes on the beauties of nature this one devotes to a maiden’s hair, or her cheek, or her nose, the droop of her lashes, or the arch of her brow. A third affects the mystic in matter and form; the more incomprehensible it is, the finer the poetry. It is like the “vague school” in painting. One is sometimes puzzled to know whether the picture be a battle-piece, a landscape, a portrait, or a nightmare on canvas. And so they go on.

This follow-my-leader tendency is unquestionably a mark of feebleness. It would be so in any art; it is obviously so in an art that springs from inspiration, and is thus necessarily original. A poet is comprehensible; a school of poets is absurd. Imagine a school of Homers, of Virgils, of Dantes, of Shaksperes, of Miltons, of Byrons! Why, the world could not hold them.

Weak as our days may be in original poets, they are strong at least in numbers. Probably, unless in the days of good Queen Anne, never before did such a constant and voluminous stream of English verse roll through the press. Most of it falls still-born on the market; yet nothing seems to discourage the poets. From Tupper to Tennyson they publish and publish and publish all the time. Yet there is not a living English poet to-day—unless Aubrey de Vere, whose best work has been his latest—who did not establish whatever fame he has almost a quarter of a century ago, and whose poems since that period have not shown a marked and steady decline.

In the author of _The Unknown Eros_ we find a man who has certainly something new to say; who follows no leader; who has thoughts, and a mode of expressing them, all his own; who cares less for how than for what; whose work compels attention, and who depends in nowise on the jingle of words, the tricks of adjective and rhyme—the ballet-dancing, so to say, of the English language—for his attraction. Indeed, in respect of form he is far behind the other poets of the time. He almost disregards it. Yet, as will be seen, the strange dress that he has chosen for his creation fits it admirably, and moulds itself at will to the strenuous freedom of the combative athlete, the scorn of a man of fine feelings and bright intelligence, the meditative mood of the student, or the softer movements of a lover. His instrument is now a clarion call to battle, now a lover’s lute, now a dirge. It has the strength and simplicity of the Gregorian chant, which in a few notes and changes expresses the heights of inspiration and exultation, the depths of dread, the saddest sorrow of the human heart.

The volume is a collection of odes, written at various and long intervals apparently, and in a style of metre resembling somewhat that of the minor poems of Milton. It has often the regular irregularity of the Greek chorus, with much of the latter’s elasticity, brightness, flexibility, and crystalline texture. In all this it is novel—markedly and successfully so. It is more novel, however, in subject-matter. It is refreshing to come across a man, a poet especially, who can drop out of the commonplace, and do it without affectation. So accustomed have we grown, however, to the commonplace that we follow him at first with difficulty. His “Eros” is indeed an unknown god to the run of readers. He is no Cupid rosy-red, with flowery bow and fire-tipped dart to smite and melt the hearts of sweet young lovers. He does not slumber in summer meads, or rove listlessly by laughing streamlets, or roguishly haunt the bosky dells, or float adown the slanting sunbeam to flame on the unwary and capture their hearts and kindle them into passion while they languish in the soft arms of Mother Nature. His God is not this pagan deity. He is remote, obscure, harsh-seeming. The poet’s song is no pleasing love-tune. It is martial, high, far away, up on crags remote and to be reached only by thorny paths with bleeding feet and straining eyes, and hearts that faint many times on the way. True love is banished from the earth, the poet seems to think; and in place of him, high, pure, serene, with his head lifted up and bathed in the clear light and refulgence of heaven, and his feet only touching the earth, men have set a toy, a plaything, a fair bestiality.

“What rumored heavens are these,” he asks,

“Which not a poet sings, O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze Of sudden wings Speeding at far returns of time from interstellar space To fan my very face, And gone as fleet, _Through delicatest ether feathering soft their solitary beat_, With ne’er a light plume dropp’d, nor any trace To speak of whence they came, or whither they depart?

* * * * *

O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss, What portent and what Delphic word, Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird, Is this? In me life’s even flood What eddies thus? What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood Like a perturbed moon of Uranus Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid; And whence This rapture of the sense Which, by thy whisper bid, Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine; This subject loyalty which longs For chains and thongs Woven of gossamer and adamant, To bind me to my unguess’d want, And so to lie, Between those quivering plumes that thro’ fine ether pant, For hopeless, sweet eternity?”

The hard questions here put the poet answers, to some degree at least, in other odes. In the “Legem Tuam Dilexi” (p. 43) he sings:

“The 'Infinite.’ Word horrible! at feud With life, and the braced mood Of power and joy and love; Forbidden, by wise heathen ev’n, to be Spoken of Deity, Whose Name, on popular altars, was '_The Unknown_,’ Because, or ere It was reveal’d as One Confined in Three, The people fear’d that it might prove Infinity, _The blazon which the devils desired to gain_; And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent; Yet did so far relent, That they might seek relief, and not in vain, _In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain_.”

Was there ever a truer picture painted by man of the curse of lost souls and the hopeless relief they find “in dashing of themselves against the shores of pain”—that relief that the demented seek in beating their weary brains out or letting out the stream of the tired and useless life into the dark ocean of infinity, severing with maddened and sacrilegious hand the little knot that separates Time from Eternity? And what stronger picture of the prevalence of evil and the inherent tendency in the fallen world to rebel than this:

“Nor bides alone in hell The bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel. But for compulsion of strong grace, The pebble in the road Would straight explode, _And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space_. The furious power, To soft growth twice constrain’d in leaf and flower, Protests, and longs to flash its faint self far Beyond the dimmest star. The same Seditious flame, Beat backward with reduplicated might, Struggles alive within its stricter term, And is the worm.”

And here follows the response to the search after the “Unknown Eros”:

And the just Man does on himself affirm God’s limits, and is conscious of delight, Freedom and right, And so His Semblance is, Who, every hour, By day and night, Buildeth new bulwarks ’gainst the Infinite. _For, ah, who can express How full of bonds and simpleness Is God, How narrow is He_, And how the wide waste field of possibility Is only trod Straight to His homestead in the human heart, And all His art Is as the babe’s, that wins his mother to repeat Her little song so sweet!

* * * * *

Man, Darling of God. Whose thoughts but live and move Round him; Who woos his will To wedlock with His own, and does distil To that drop’s span _The attar of all rose-fields of all love_! Therefore the soul select assumes the stress Of bonds unbid, which God’s own style express Better than well, And aye hath borne, To the Clown’s scorn, The fetters of the three-fold golden chain....”

What “the three-fold golden chain” is that binds “the soul select” to God no Catholic needs to be told. Free and loyal self-sacrifice, in a world where self-sacrifice, whether we like it or not, is necessary and must be endured, brings us nearest and makes us likest to Him, the true Eros who “emptied himself for us.” These lines will help us to read the riddle of the “Unknown Eros,” “some note” of whose “renown and high behest” the poet thinks might thus “in enigma be express’d”:

“There lies the crown Which all thy longing cures. Refuse it, Mortal, _that it may be yours_! It is a spirit though it seems red gold; And such may no man, but by shunning, hold. Refuse it, though refusing be despair; And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair.”

This thought again is more fully wrought out in the conclusion of the same ode, “Legem Tuam Dilexi”:

“... For to have naught Is to have all things without care or thought!

* * * * *

And lastly bartering life’s dear bliss for pain; But evermore in vain; For joy (rejoice ye Few that tasted have!) Is Love’s obedience Against the genial laws of natural sense, Whose wide self-dissipating wave, Prison’d in artful dikes, Trembling returns and strikes Thence to its source again, In backward billows fleet, Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet; Thrilling each vein, Exploring every chasm and cove Of the full heart with floods of honeyed love, And every principal street And obscure alley and lane Of the intricate brain With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet Of the primordial heat; Till, unto view of me and thee, Lost the intense life be, Or ludicrously display’d, by force Of distance, as a soaring eagle, or a horse On far-off hillside shown, May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.”

To those who read these lines carefully it will not be necessary to say that the author is a Catholic. His name, though modestly withheld from the present volume, is not unknown. It is many years ago since Coventry Patmore sang his sweet love-songs, _The Betrothal_ and _The Espousals_.

They were received favorably enough by the critics—far more favorably, indeed, than have been many higher and greater poems on their first appearance: Keats’ _Endymion_, for instance. Then a strange silence struck the poet, and he was dumb.

If the present volume is the growth of all these silent years, Mr. Patmore has not suffered by his solitude. Between his earlier work and the present there is no comparison. Indeed, it takes a very careful reading of the first to detect therein the germ of the strong growth and most beautiful flower that compel admiration to-day. Those were nothing more than the story, told with all the fond minuteness of a gentle, ardent, intelligent, and chivalrous young lover, of his first true love; of the flowery paths and pleasant ways that led up to it; of the gracious nothings that make that time so sweet and ever memorable to the lovers; the lone communings, the tremulous doubts, the bitter-sweet emotions, the sun and shade, the laughing April showers that weave Love’s many-colored web and make a brief paradise for the new Adam and Eve, with no serpent lurking in the grass—all this is told delightfully and with delight. The verse is sweet and pleasant and flowing as the subject; but it is a song to while away a drowsy hour, not to cause us to halt and listen in the busy march and fierce strife of life. We glance over them with lazy pleasure as we watch the gambols of children in the sun.

These later poems are of a far different and more solemn nature. The poet has lived much, felt much, suffered much, joyed much, thought and meditated much in this long interval. He has been lifted to the heights of heaven; he has been dashed back to the gates of hell. He has been tossed on the waves of Doubt and felt the brotherhood of Despair. He has lost her who first taught him to sing; whose gentle glances thrilled the tender chords of his nature and moved them to utter sweet music. Here is her picture:

“But there danced she, who from the leaven Of ill preserved my heart and wit All unawares, for she was heaven, Others at best but fit for it. I mark’d her step, with peace elate, Her brow more beautiful than morn, Her sometime air of girlish state Which sweetly waived its right to scorn; The giddy crowd, she grave the while, Although, as ’twere beyond her will, About her mouth the baby smile That she was born with linger’d still. Her ball-dress seemed a breathing mist, From the fair form exhaled and shed, Raised in the dance with arm and wrist All warmth and light, unbraceleted. Her motion, feeling ’twas beloved, The pensive soul of tune express’d, And, oh, what perfume, as she moved, Came from the flowers in her breast!”[118]

Footnote 118:

“The Angel in the House,” _The Espousals_, p. 61.

Here is she ten years later:

“Her sons pursue the butterflies, Her baby daughter mocks the doves With throbbing coo: in his fond eyes She’s Venus with her little Loves; Her step’s an honor to the earth, Her form’s the native-land of grace, And, lo, his coming lights with mirth Beauty’s metropolis, her face! Of such a lady proud’s the lord, And that her happy bosom knows; She takes his arm without a word, In lanes of laurel and of rose.”[119]

Footnote 119:

_The Espousals_, p. 73.

And here at last is her “Departure,” as told in the latest volume:

“It was not like your great and gracious ways! Do you, that have naught other to lament, Never, my Love, repent Of how, that July afternoon, You went, With sudden, unintelligible phrase, And frighten’d eye, Upon your journey of so many days, Without a single kiss or a good-by? I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon; And so we sate, within the sun’s low rays, You whispering to me, for your voice was weak, Your harrowing praise. Well, it was well, my Wife, To hear you such things speak, And see your love

Make of your eyes a growing gloom of life, As a warm south wind sombres a March grove. And it was like your great and gracious ways To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear, Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash To let the laughter flash, Whilst I drew near, Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear. But all at once to leave me at the last, More at the wonder than the loss aghast, With huddled, unintelligible phrase, And frighten’d eye, And go your journey of all days With not one kiss or a good-by, And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d, ’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.”[120]

Footnote 120:

_The Unknown Eros_, pp. 63-65.

It goes without saying that such a loss must tell with incalculable force on a man of intense sensibility. Trials of this kind best prove a man. Some they crush; others they humiliate only to exalt. If we may judge by the silent testimony of the book before us, his great loss made this man greater. He felt, if not for the first time, more keenly than ever before, how uncertain and passing is all merely human happiness. The known Eros that had charmed his life suddenly passed away “with sudden, unintelligible phrase,” and in the darkness that fell upon his soul his humbled eyes were opened to the unknown Eros who was near him all the while.

But, beyond and beside this, between the publication of his earlier poems and the latest his conversion to the Catholic faith took place. So we judge, at least, from internal evidence in the books. Here was a new and most powerful agent introduced to act upon his nature. Moreover, the world had moved in the interval. Many and mighty changes had taken place in the world, and they did not pass unfelt or unobserved by the silent poet. But before we come to these we will give one more response to his questioning of the oracle before whom of all he burns his incense. In the “Deliciæ Sapientiæ de Amore” he sings joyously:

“Love, light for me Thy ruddiest blazing torch, That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch Of the glad Palace of Virginity, May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see....

* * * * *

Bring, Love, anear, And bid be not afraid Young Lover true, and love-foreboding Maid, And wedded Spouse, if virginal of thought; For I will sing of naught Less sweet to hear Than seems A music in their half-remember’d dreams.

* * * * *

... The heavens themselves eternal are with fire Of unapproach’d desire, By the aching heart of Love, which cannot rest, In blissfullest pathos so indeed possess’d. O, spousals high; O, doctrine blest, Unutterable in even the happiest sigh; This know ye all Who can recall With what a welling of indignant tears Love’s simpleness first hears The meaning of his mortal covenant, And from what pride comes down To wear the crown Of which ’twas very heaven to feel the want.

* * * * *

Therefore gaze bold, That so in you be joyful hope increas’d, Thorough the Palace portals, and behold The dainty and unsating Marriage-Feast. O, hear Them singing clear 'Cor meum et caro mea’ round the 'I am,’ The Husband of the Heavens, and the Lamb Whom they for ever follow there that kept, Or, losing, never slept Till they reconquer’d had in mortal fight The standard white.

* * * * *

Gaze and be not afraid, Young Lover true and love-foreboding Maid. The full noon of deific vision bright Abashes nor abates No spark minute of Nature’s keen delight. ’Tis there your Hymen waits! There where in courts afar all unconfused they crowd, As fumes the starlight soft In gulfs of cloud, And each to the other, well-content, Sighs oft, '’Twas this we meant!' Gaze without blame, Ye in whom living Love yet blushes for dead shame. There of pure Virgins none Is fairer seen, Save One, Than Mary Magdalene.

* * * * *

Love makes the life to be A fount perpetual of virginity; For, lo, the Elect Of generous Love, how named soe’er, _affect Nothing but God, Or mediate or direct_, Nothing but God, The Husband of the Heavens: And who Him love, in potence great or small, Are, one and all, Heirs of the Palace glad And only clad With the bridal robes of ardor virginal.”

The Love that our poet has been seeking, has found, and here hymns in strains that at times are truly little short of seraphic, will now be known to the reader; and we leave this high, ethereal Court of Love that is human indeed, yet more than human, to glance at other and more ordinary, though still lofty, subjects which the poet has touched.

In a sense it is really refreshing to find that he is not always in the skies; that he is very human and made of flesh and blood like ourselves. Indeed, so human is he that he openly confesses, in a poem of matchless beauty and delicacy, to having found a substitute for his dead wife. Ordinary men, who are not poets, yet who nevertheless have hearts, will give a rough reading to the exquisite ode, “Tired Memory” (p. 93), wherein the poet, lamenting his wife, and confessing truthfully, albeit sadly, that

“In our mortal air None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,”

and seeking round “for some extreme of unconceived, interior sacrifice, whereof the smoke might rise to God,” cries in agony:

“My Lord, if thy strange will be this, That I should crucify my heart, Because my love has also been my pride, I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss, Wherein She has no part.”

“And I was heard,” he adds, let us hope untruthfully; for the “crucifixion of his heart” took the shape apparently of a second wife, thus:

“My heart was dead, Dead of devotion and tired memory, When a strange grace of thee _In a fair stranger_, as I take it, bred To her some tender heed, Most innocent Of purpose therewith blent, And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such That the pale reflex of an alien love, So vaguely, sadly shown, Did her heart touch Above All that, till then, had woo’d her for its own. And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn, Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine, And made me weak, By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn, And Nature’s long-suspended breath of flame, Persuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name, Awhile to smile and speak With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine...”

But this is not so much the humanity to which we referred. We think that three characteristics will strike the readers of these odes: 1, the high spiritual nature of many; 2, the deep pathos and human love of others; 3, the lofty scorn and fierce sarcasm displayed, mistakenly sometimes, in certain of the odes.

The poet is an Englishman of Englishmen, and, only for his Catholic faith, it seems to us that he would be one among the prophets of despair, whose name is legion and whose day is the present.

“O, season strange for song!”

he cries in the Proem;

“Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue As other kingdoms, nearing their eclipse, Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strong The voice that was their voice in earlier days? Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry, The note which those that seem too weak to sigh Will sometimes utter just before they die?”

To speak frankly, we do not think it is. We do not think England’s soul is parting yet. We think there is much good left in this world for England to do; at the very least there is much atonement to be made for the many and great evils and national crimes—among others that greatest of all, apostasy—for which that soul has to answer. She can do much, she has done something, toward making this atonement; and the time of grace was never nearer to her than at present. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny the intense pathos and exquisite beauty of the following sad lines:

“Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways, There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard, Her ancient beauty marr’d, And, in her cold and aimless roving sight, _Horror of light_....”

In the sixth ode, entitled “Peace,” he returns to this theme:

“O England, how hast thou forgot, In dullard care for undisturbed increase Of gold, which profits not, The gain which once thou knew’st was for thy peace! Honor is peace, the peace which does accord Alone with God’s glad word: 'My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’

* * * * *

Beneath the heroic sun Is there then none Whose sinewy wings by choice do fly In the fine mountain-air of public obloquy, To tell the sleepy mongers of false ease That war’s the ordained way of all alive, And therein with good-will to dare and thrive Is profit and heart’s peace?

* * * * *

Remnant of Honor, brooding in the dark Over your bitter cark, Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied seven days, Upon the corpses of so many sons, Who loved her once, Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways, Who could have dreamt That times should come like these!”

We do not altogether go with Mr. Patmore in this invective, however much we may admire its form. England has certainly acted meanly in many important European questions of late years. She will probably so act in many more in the future, if she finds it advisable or profitable. And it is a poor excuse to ask what other European nation has not acted or would not act, had it the chance, equally meanly with England. We may be very wrathful about the matter; we may have some very hard things to say against England for not drawing the sword in certain cases; yet between the nation that is too ready to fight and the nation that guards severely what are strictly its own primary interests without fighting, we certainly prefer the latter. The bloody road is a sad road to glory, and its end is never seen. While, then, we may for the moment side with the passionate poet who sits down in his studio and hurls his wrath in words of flame against the ministry for not leading the country into war and reviving ancient glories, as they are called, on second thoughts, while still, perhaps, thoroughly disgusted with the ministry and the meanness of their ways, we become gradually reconciled to the situation, and thank Heaven, though of course not the ministers, that we can sleep quietly in our beds. It may be an ignoble sense—doubtless it is; yet if it prevailed a little more generally throughout the world just now, the world would not, in the long run, be the sufferer from it.

There is another peace against which Mr. Patmore declaims in no measured terms in “The Standards.” This was written soon after the launching of Mr. Gladstone’s first pamphlet, not so much against “the English Catholics,” as the author states in a note—he would do well to remember that the world is a little larger than England—but against _Catholics_: against the Catholic Church and its chief.

“... That last, Blown from our Zion of the Seven Hills, Was no uncertain blast! Listen: the warning all the champaign fills, And minatory murmurs, answering, mar The Night, both near and far, Perplexing many a drowsy citadel Beneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell, With armed jar And angry threat, surcease Their long-kept compact of contemptuous peace! Lo, yonder, where our little English band, With peace in heart and wrath in hand, Have dimly ta’en their stand, Sweetly the light Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston, Whence, o’er the dawning Land, Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate ’Gainst the black flag of Hate.”

This call is most spirited and trenchant and bold. We can only find space for the strong end:

“The sanction of the world’s undying hate Means more than flaunted flags in windy air. Be ye of gathering fate Now gladly ware. Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought, The brilliant shall be brought; The white stone mystic set between the eyes Of them that get the prize, Yea, part and parcel of that mighty Stone Which shall be thrown Into the Sea, and Sea shall be no more.”

“1867” is a poem strongly written and of marked character, but with which we cannot agree. It was called out apparently by the passage of the bill extending the suffrage by the conservative ministry under the leadership of Mr. Disraeli. It is—so we read it, and we see no possibility of reading it otherwise—a direct and bitter attack on a rational extension of the popular liberties, which we take to be radically wrong in conception:

“_In the year of the great crime_, When the false English Nobles _and their Jew_, By God demented, slew The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong, One said, Take up thy Song, That breathes the mild and almost mythic time Of England’s prime! But I, Ah, me, The freedom of the few That, in our free Land, were indeed the free, Can song renew?”

* * * * *

Let us here say that if a man cannot attack Mr. Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, on higher and fairer ground than on that of his being “a Jew,” he may as well let that statesman alone. A man who adopts this very small, very cheap, and very common mode of attack is not worthy the hearing of sensible men. Addressing the “outlawed Best”—by the bye, the poet is very arbitrary and perplexing in his use of capitals—England’s nobles, presumably, Mr. Patmore says:

“Know, ’twas the force of function high, In corporate exercise, and public awe Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law, That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign, Which kept you in your sky!”

Does he mean that the “Best” are restricted to the English nobility? If he does mean this, he is quite wrong; if he does not mean it, then the lines immediately following are meaningless:

“But, when the sordid Trader caught The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught, And soon, to the Mechanic vain, Sold the proud toy for naught, Your charm was broke, your task was sped, Your beauty, with your honor, dead.”

And so the ode goes on to hope that

“Prayer perchance may win A term to God’s indignant mood And the orgies of the multitude, Which now begin....”

We cannot help thinking, if God’s name must be introduced in the matter, that he is not especially indignant with Mr. Disraeli and the English nobles and people at the extension of the suffrage, and that for this reason to stigmatize 1867 as “the year of the great Crime” is nonsense. As for “the sordid Trader,” there has always been a considerable admixture of the “Trader” in the composition of the English government, noble or ignoble. The first Napoleon’s estimate of the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” was not an ill-judged one; and never was that government, at least since Reformation times, so pure and its members so honest as to-day, when “the sordid Trader” has a large hand in the administration. We do all honor to the spirit of chivalry; we do not object to class distinctions in countries where such distinctions are historic and hereditary; but we recognize manhood wherever we find it, and set it above all accidents of time or clime or artificial restrictions. At the end of the ode, however, the poet rises above his smaller self to a strain that is noble and true:

'And now, because the dark comes on apace When none can work for fear, And Liberty in every Land lies slain, _And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign_, And heavy prophecies, suspended long At supplication of the righteous few And so discredited, to fulfilment throng, Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear, And the dread baptism of blood seems near That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace, Hush’d be all song, And let Christ’s own look through The darkness, suddenly increased, To the gray secret lingering in the East.”

We could linger with delight over many passages in these odes, and dwell with pleasure on the peculiar depth, conciseness, and expressiveness of the phrases used, the mere words often which the poet chooses. His power of condensation and deep philosophic comprehension and observation constantly strikes one. The concealed art of the whole is marvellous. But this, we have no doubt, will, from the copious extracts we have given, strike the reader as it has struck us. And we hasten on to quote a few more passages and take leave of the book.

We have called attention to the poet’s scorn. It is very bitter, and is at its best when it attacks not so much persons or matters which are at least open to question as when it deals with obvious shams and pretentious littleness. What could be better than this placid treatment of the modern scientific school which can see nothing more than its telescope and its instruments disclose to it?

“Not greatly moved with awe am I To learn that we may spy Five thousand firmaments beyond our own. The best that’s known Of the heavenly bodies _does them credit small_. View’d close, the Moon’s fair ball Is of ill objects worst. _A corpse in Night’s highway_, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst; And now they tell That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst Too horribly for hell. So, judging from these two, As we must do, The Universe, outside our living Earth, Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth, Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep, _To make dirt cheap_. Put by the Telescope! Better without it man may see, _Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight, The ghost of his eternity_. Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye The things which near us lie, Till Science rapturously hails, In the minutest water-drop, _A torment of innumerable tails_. These at least do live. But rather give A mind not much to pry Beyond our royal-fair estate Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great. Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are, Pressing to catch our gaze, And out of obvious ways Ne’er wandering far.”

At other times his strong humanity seems to die in him, the struggle of life seems small and profitless, and the many ends that move us weak and purposeless as children’s plans. “Here, in this little Bay,” he says:

“Full of tumultuous life and great repose, Where, twice a day, The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes, Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town, I sit me down. For want of me the world’s course will not fail; When all its work is done, _the lie shall rot_; The truth is great, and shall prevail, _When none cares whether it prevail or not_.”

Of course we need not remind the poet that it is just the duty of honest men to see that the truth prevails and the lie rots, for his poems are a very pæan of Truth and its high offices; but in this as in others of the odes he gives complete expression to the weariness that at times creeps over all who are struggling for the right. It is like the song of the tired mariners in Tennyson’s _Lotos-Eaters_.

Again he sings:

“Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest Of mankind’s progress; all its spectral race Mere impotence of rest, _The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self_, Crest altering still to gulf And gulf to crest In endless chase That leaves the tossing water anchor’d in its place! Ah, well does he who does but stand aside, Sans hope or fear, And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear, And prophesies ’gainst trust in such a tide: For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught, Whose message is that he sees only naught! Nathless, discern’d may be, _By listeners at the doors of destiny, The fly-wheel swift and still Of God’s incessant will_, Mighty to keep in bound, tho’ powerless to quell, _The amorous and vehement drift of man’s herd to hell_.”

We can quote no further at any length, though we find something to attract us in every ode; and the more we read the odes the more we find in them, the more we admire them, and the clearer they become. Though independent of each other, a secret string of purpose, of aim and aspiration, of a yearning after something that the poet has not yet quite caught or cannot as yet fully express, becomes apparent. To this is due much of the obscurity and dimness that at first offend the eye. Closer study, however, reveals a throbbing passion, a high ideal, gleams of light from heaven, the flashes of a bright intelligence warmed by a pure heart and looking from and through all things earthly heavenwards. We have seen no man of late who can lash the follies and lay bare the falsehoods of the time so thoroughly. A man of intense and rooted convictions, he may make mistakes sometimes, but at least he makes them nobly. He is very human, as we have already said. Indeed, there are touches here and there in some of the odes that are strongly sensuous, and the two last poems, “The Rosy Bosom’d Hours” and “The After-Glow,” were better omitted from the volume. Their littleness offends and breaks with a discordant jar on the high and serene atmosphere through which we have been passing. It is almost like what the introduction of one of Offenbach’s airs would be into a solemn Mass. From the poet whose “Proem” is pitched in so high a key as this:

“Therefore no 'plaint be mine Of listeners none, No hope of render’d use or proud reward, In hasty times and hard; But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throat At latest eve, That does in each calm note Both joy and grieve; Notes few and strong and fine, Gilt with sweet day’s decline, And sad with promise of a different sun,”

we certainly expected no such stuff as the following, addressed to his bride:

“At Dawlish, 'mid the pools of brine, You stept from rock to rock, One hand quick tightening upon mine, One holding up your frock.

* * * * *

I thought, indeed, by magic chance, A third [day] from Heaven to win, But as, at dusk, we reach’d Penzance, _A drizzling rain set in_.”

There is so much that is high and noble and full of great promise in this new writer—for such he really is—and we have been so honest in our admiration of it, that we feel all the more at liberty to point out some of the blemishes that mar a work of rare excellence and strange beauty. Here and there throughout the volume are lines and couplets that linger lovingly in the memory; as, for instance:

“Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe the trodden ground Till passion’s buried floods be found....”

And again:

“Till inmost absolution start _The welling in the grateful eyes, The heaving in the heart_.”

What could be more tenderly and naturally expressive than those two last lines? Or than this:

“_Winnow with sighs_, and wash away With tears the dust and stain of clay.”

Often have we heard aspirations of the following kind, but never sweeter than this:

“Ye Clouds that on your endless journey go, Ye Winds that westward flow, Thou heaving Sea That heav’st ’twixt her and me, Tell her I come....”

The poet yokes all Nature to the wings of his fancy, and makes it the loving slave of his Love.

How simple, yet how subtly told, is this great truth:

“Who does not know That good and ill Are done in secret still, And that which shows is verily but show!”

And this deep reflection contains a volume:

“How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood: _But not all height is holiness, Nor every sweetness good_.”

Here is a proverb, only too often verified:

“One fool, with lusty lungs, Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues, Shall ne’er undo.”

In “Victory in Defeat” he says—how truly!—

“Life is not life at all without delight, Nor has it any might; _And better than the insentient heart and brain Is sharpest pain_; And better for the moment seems it to rebel, If the great Master, from his lifted seat, Ne’er whispers to the wearied servant, 'Well!’”

We hope to hear again and soon from Mr. Patmore. If he can avoid a certain obscurity that will repel many who would be sincere and honest admirers of so noble a writer, it will be better for himself and those whom he addresses. Even as his work now stands we are happy to say of it, in closing our review, what a true poet whose name often adorns these pages has said: “Many parts of the book seem to me both to ascend higher and descend deeper than almost anything we have had for a long time.”

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

PRIESTHOOD IN THE LIGHT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By E. Mellor, D.D. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.

The author in the preface of the book before us says that his lectures were prepared at the request of the Committee of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, and though not considered as exhausting the subject, yet they furnish a contribution toward the settlement of the question of the priesthood and its claims; which settlement in the author’s aim means toward doing away altogether with the priesthood and its claims. After a careful perusal of the volume, we must confess that we think the contribution exceedingly small, and not calculated to settle anything at all in the reverend gentleman’s sense. For the doctor’s lectures are a rehash of all the old objections brought forward against the priesthood, from the time of the Reformation downwards; and which have been time and again triumphantly refuted by our controversialists; but of which refutation the author takes no heed, as if such men as Bellarmine, Petau, Suarez, Thomassin, and a host of others down to our day had never existed. If the author had wished to bring towards the settlement of the subject a _real_ contribution, the proper course for him to pursue would have been to state the objections, to bring forward the answer to each one of them given by our controversialists, to show the futility and untenableness of their answer, and to conclude that the objections yet hold good against the subject. His having, therefore, of a set purpose, or most innocently, ignored those answers leaves the question just where it was, and no one the wiser or better by the author’s lectures.

It is not possible for us in the brief space of a passing notice to attempt a refutation of all the objections he rehashes so carefully. It will suffice to remark that all his objections, even if nothing at all could be said against them, would prove nothing _positive_ against the priesthood. For they may be classified under two heads. The first are those of purely negative character, which, as they prove nothing in favor of the priesthood, neither do they prove anything against it. Under this head we put the old objection, drawn from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews, which exalts the priesthood of Christ above the Jewish priesthood, and which says _at least_ nothing against the Christian priesthood, which is identical with that of Christ.

The other class of objections is when our author examines the positive proofs brought in favor of the Christian priesthood. These proofs, so clear, so satisfactory, so weighty, the author dismisses very summarily by throwing doubt on the meaning of the words, after the fashion of the Protestant method. One example will suffice to prove our assertion. Examining the text, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained,” he disposes of it as follows: “It is not needful to enter into a consideration of the meaning of the words [as if the question was not just about the _meaning_ of the words; or as if our Lord was speaking merely for a joke] which set forth the high powers of the apostles; whether the sins they were to remit or retain were spiritual sins [are there any corporal sins?], or ecclesiastical ones, or both. The question before us is, be the function here referred to what it may, to whom was it accorded and by whom was it meant to be exercised? Almost every word in the passage has been a battle-field.” We would remark on this passage that there is no reason for waiving the question, be the function here referred to what it may, when our Lord says expressly it _is_ to remit or to retain sins; that it is evident from the text, if words or language mean anything any more, that this function was to be exercised by those to whom our Lord spoke, and by those whom they preceded, as the apostles were essentially first and representative men; but it is useless. We only wish to call the attention of our readers to the fact that, if a text clear and palpable in itself, proving a truth or a dogma, can be disposed of in this manner, no Christian truth can stand any longer, and we may as well have done with all Christian revelation. For suppose we want to bring a contribution towards the settlement of the question of the Divinity of Christ, all we have to do is to throw doubts on the meaning of the words of those texts which assert it, and the contribution is made, and so on to the end of the chapter.

We think we have made our statement good, that our author has proved nothing in his book against the Christian priesthood, as all his objections are of a negative character.

But we will exceed him in liberality, and grant for a moment that those texts by which we assert the nature and prerogatives of the priesthood prove nothing in its favor, as his negative objections prove nothing against it. What then? Has he gained anything by our concession, or has he made any step forward towards the settlement of the question? Not at all. There will always be the fact of the existence of the priesthood, in the full exercise of all its claims, staring him in the face. How to account for that fact? Our author sees the difficulty, and admits that to account for it by urging an ambitious conspiracy on the part of the presbyters or bishops is absurd, that such a conspiracy could not have succeeded in establishing itself (page 74), and endeavors to account for it by a bias of humanity towards the priesthood identical with a bias towards selfishness and sins. And he goes on developing the thought by saying that the priesthood was called into being by ill-defined terrors of the future, by a fear of God not yet cast out by love, by the irksomeness of the duties of self-discipline, by the intolerable oppressiveness of the sense of personal responsibility seeking relief by its transference to others.

Whether all these reasons can produce a bias towards the priesthood in humanity identical with the bias it has unfortunately towards selfishness and sin, we will leave to the author to assert. We think that all those reasons, when well understood and stated properly, dispose humanity towards the priesthood—in fact, create an instinct for it—and that that instinct is a legitimate, noble, generous craving of the human heart; and to say that they create a bias identical with a bias to sin is to show the most supine ignorance of human nature, of the history of mankind, and the true philosophy of history. But let that pass; do all these reasons account for the existence and claims of the priesthood? According to the author himself _they do not_. For he says himself all this contributed to prepare the way for a transformation of that religion which knows no earthly mediator (page 75).

Well, Dr. Mellor, you have accounted for the preparation of the way, but not for the fact of the existence of the priesthood. When and how did it come into existence? Who were the first who hatched it? Where was it established first? Who were the first Christians they imposed it upon? How did they succeed in persuading them to accept it? Was there any opposition on the part of the Christians who first heard of such a thing? Must not the imposition on any Christian people of a priesthood well organized into a compact body, strong and valiant, and exceedingly sensitive about its rights and claims, have been brought about by a conspiracy of somebody or other? And have you not said—page 74—that to account for the existence of the priesthood by a conspiracy is absurd?

We wish to advert to another theory before closing these remarks. He is not satisfied to have proved _more suo_ that the priesthood has no place in the New Testament; he strives to prove that it was congenial with the whole spirit and nature of it, and the proof, he alleges, is drawn from the words to the Samaritan woman: God is a spirit, and in spirit and truth he must be adored; that is, by having recourse to an invisible church, is the sense he attaches to those words. Of course, if the church is not a visible body, the mountain placed on the top of mountains, we must necessarily do away with the priesthood and sacraments, etc., for they can have no scope in an invisible, abstract thing. But in that case why not abolish Christ the Emmanuel, the God-man?

We could easily enough prove the congeniality of the priesthood with Christianity by showing to the reverend doctor that all the works of God are _permanent_. That the Incarnation is permanent in the church, and that Christ the High-Priest is permanent in the Catholic priesthood, and discharges all the functions necessary to bring all men to salvation in all time and space, in it, and through it, and so forth. But we fear the reverend gentleman has not philosophy enough to understand us, and we forbear. We will not, however, conclude our remarks without thanking the reverend lecturer for the polite courtesy which he uses towards the Catholic priesthood: first, using the _nom de guerre popish_ whenever he has occasion to make mention of it; and, secondly, for associating it with the priesthood of the English Episcopal Church. In the lecturer’s mind, perhaps, it was to do honor to the Catholic priesthood by confounding it with the other. It is a goodly company, no doubt, and we ought to be highly flattered; but we respectfully decline through excess of modesty such unmerited honor, and would rather keep by ourselves, if it is all the same to the reverend doctor.

THIRTY-FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE CITY AND COUNTY OF NEW YORK, FOR THE YEAR ENDING DECEMBER 31, 1876.

Much has been written on the school question within the past few months; not, however, by opponents of the public schools as they exist here, but by those who pay for them—the taxpayers. Four million dollars for the Department of Public Schools alone is a great load. This tax increases yearly, and no doubt will soon reach the fifth million. The strange enthusiasm that led sects to trample on the religious convictions of their neighbors also led them to make light of the burden that came with the victory. But five millions is terrifying. Why not six? Will there be no end to the increase?

Perhaps the originators of the present school system recognized the moral baseness of severing the instruction which may enable the child to act with judgment from the training which teaches him moral responsibility for the judgment as well as for the action springing from it. They certainly desired to accomplish indirectly the chief end of education by placing the school machinery in the hands of philanthropists who serve without pay or emolument.

The result has been a gradual complication of the common-school system, so as to include technical education, and even the higher branches of learning. Years ago a Free College was successfully engrafted. Next came a Normal College for young ladies. In order to render this latter offshoot permanent, it was deemed necessary to provide the graduates with positions in the common schools. The first step was to raise the standard of proficiency for a teacher’s certificate; the next, to declare that the college diploma was sufficient evidence of qualification, without a public examination by the city superintendent. The report tells us that “under the by-law by which the graduates are licensed to teach without a second examination, the city superintendent and the president of the college have performed their duties in perfect harmony.”

When the mode of testing the qualification of applicants who are not Normal College graduates is discussed, the report states, “a system of rigid examinations in the superintendent’s office precludes the possibility of incompetent persons being foisted upon the system through political or social influence.”

Nor is this the only injury to the common schools. The favored graduates are not to be allowed to work for the low salaries received by primary teachers during the past thirty-five years. An _adjustment_ of salaries is demanded. These primary teachers must receive as large a sum as grammar-school teachers. This simply means an increase in the cost of the common-school system.

If that system, as it now exists here, answer to the purposes for which it was intended, it is high time for that fact to appear. Yet the gentlemen who have charge of the board, from the president down, seem strangely to disagree on most important matters. Without committing ourselves to one side or the other in the discussion, we take a few instances. The grammar schools surely form a very important branch of the system. Here is how the president treats of them in the report: “Our primary-school teachers have a lower rate of pay than our grammar-school teachers, and the primary schools have been used as training places for the better-paid positions in the grammar schools. The plan for uniformity in salaries in these two departments has received serious consideration by a committee of the board, and deserves to be carried out. The majority of our pupils receive all the education they have in the primary, _and never enter the grammar schools_. This majority deserves the first consideration. Instruction and discipline are no more difficult in one than in the other, and in neither department is the range of knowledge required to be mastered extensive.”

The president asserts that the common-school system only succeeds in furnishing primary instruction to a majority of pupils, and he would seem to imply that the enormous sum of four million dollars should be spent on the primary schools, reserving, of course, a sufficient sum for the Normal College.

Lest his opinions as to the range of knowledge required in a teacher should dishearten those who are toiling through Normal College, he inserts a few lines for their benefit: “An erroneous idea seems to prevail that a primary teacher can dispense with the higher studies. The truth is that this class of teachers more than any other class needs trained faculties and sound judgment, and these are only obtained by the discipline of hard and close study. Normal study and normal practice, to be effective, must be based on the broad foundation of a liberal education.”

Compulsory education the city superintendent pronounces a complete failure, while those who are paid to enforce it consider it successful. In the discussion some interesting facts are brought to light. The city superintendent states: “Many parents, finding that our schools are unable to govern their wilful and unruly children, send them to the parochial schools. In connection with this, it is proper to call the attention of the board to the fact that, while the average attendance of pupils in the schools immediately under its care has, during the past year, increased less than two and a half per cent., in the corporate schools it has increased more than five per cent. It is also of interest to observe that, at the close of 1875, the number of pupils enrolled in the Catholic parochial schools was 30,732, while in 1867 it was only 16,342, showing an increase, in less than ten years, of nearly 90 per cent.; while the increase in the attendance of the pupils in the public schools has, during the same time, been only about 13 per cent. The increase in attendance at the corporate schools, during the same period, has been more than 57 per cent.... The question, therefore, very properly suggests itself, why should a system for compelling pupils to attend the schools be sustained at great expense to the city while there is no effective means of controlling and educating those children after they have been brought into the schools?”

These are but a few of the spots uncovered in this interesting report. Never was the want of harmony in the system more manifest. The iniquity of taxing a people for what it cannot use, and turning over the amount collected to the keeping of gentlemen who care more for pet schemes than for the real object for which the tax was levied, becomes more and more apparent. Higher education, technical education, and compulsory education are battling vigorously for larger shares of the funds; and the battle seems likely to end when the funds are made large enough to satisfy all demands. In the meantime the common-school system is slowly dying out. The primary schools are becoming departments for the employment of normal school graduates, and the grammar schools feeders for the colleges.

A QUESTION OF HONOR: A NOVEL. By Christian Reid, author of _A Daughter of Bohemia_, _Valerie Aylmer_, _Morton House_, etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

A well-written novel, thoroughly American in its tone, its incidents, and its characters, and yet availing itself of none of the peculiar “isms” which form the chief stock in trade of our native novelists—shunning alike the “woman question” and the shallow metaphysics of “free thought,” depending for no share of its interest upon suggested immorality or social license, and vivacious in its dialogues without any reliance upon the slang which generally does duty in place of wit—was something for which some sad experience in recent fiction had forbidden us to hope. That Christian Reid is already well known to the novel-reading public is evident from the title-page of _A Question of Honor_, but that is the only one of her stories which we have read. We find in it everything to praise and nothing to condemn. It is thoroughly well written, to begin with, its descriptions of scenery being particularly artistic and well done. The author attempts nothing ambitious in the way of character-drawing, but her men and women live and have a true individuality. Their souls are not dissected after the manner with which the New England school of fiction has made us too familiar for our comfort, but their manner of life and speech and thought is indicated with a firm, graceful, and un-provincial touch which is extremely pleasant. Altogether, the book belongs to the best class of light literature. There is nothing in it to shock taste or to jar prejudice, and everything in the way of grace of style and purity of thought to recommend it. So much being said by way of praise, we may add that the author, who is evidently a Catholic, has drawn a picture of social life which is, no doubt, true to a reality of a better kind than the ordinary novel of the day aims at, but which is nevertheless un-Christian. Her characters are neither underbred nor vicious; with two exceptions, they are simply a rather pleasing variety of pagans. We do not quarrel with that, considered as a faithful transcript of reality. But we shall find it a cause for real regret if a writer so graceful and possessing so much genuine ability does not some day give us something better than a mere transcript of lives that might have been lived and ideals that might have been attained had the Creator never stooped to the level of his creatures in order to show them the one way in which he would lift them to himself.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. By the graduating class of St. Joseph’s Academy, Flushing, L. I. (Translated from the French of Mme. Foa.) New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Translation from the French is a literary exercise which cannot be too highly commended to young students. The publication in book-form of such students’ translations can scarcely be too severely condemned. Young ladies and young men “graduate,” as it is called, at an age ranging from seventeen to twenty or twenty-one. They are then popularly supposed to have “finished” their education, whereas not much more has been done than to set them on the right road of learning and appreciating what real education is. Indeed, if so much has been accomplished, both the pupils and their teachers may be congratulated.

To set these young persons straightway at book-making is a grave mistake—how grave may be gathered from the following specimens of translation which half a glance at the volume before us reveals.

The cover informs us that these are “Gems of Biography.” The first gem is entitled “Michael Angelo Buonarotti.” The opening page introduces us to “an old domestic” and “a young _man_ of fifteen or sixteen” “at the _door_ of the Castle of Caprese.” In page 2 the “young man” of fifteen is a “young _interlocutor_.” In the same page “to intercept the passage” is used in the sense of to block up the passage. In page 3, “to cover his curiosity” is used in the sense of to hide or conceal his curiosity. In page 4 we have this elegant sentence: “I don’t think that either of you does anything wrong in the place you go.” In page 5 the young man of fifteen, who was an Italian of four centuries back, indulges in this peculiar bit of slang: “One is not perfect at it _right away_.” A little lower on the same page he says of Michael Angelo: “He is even quicker than I _in piecing_ his man.” “_Mr._ Francis Graciana” and “_Mr._ Michael Angelo Buonarotti” occur quite frequently. “Canosse” is always made to do duty for Canossa, “Politien” for Politian or Poliziano, etc. Such phrases as “You are not _de trop_, Signor Graciana,” constantly occur; but we have no patience to examine further.

Expressions such as these—and they characterize the book, with the exception of “The Mulatto of Murillo,” which runs fairly enough—should not have been allowed to pass in a written composition; but to embalm them in a printed volume is simply an act of cruelty. The sketches in themselves are good for nothing and were not worth the trouble of translating, inasmuch as they have been far better given in English over and over again. “Flushing Series” is the threatening legend on the cover. If this volume be a specimen of what is to come, we trust sincerely that we have seen the last of the “Series.” Catholic education is too serious a subject for trifling.

THE WONDERS OF PRAYER: A remarkable record of well authenticated answers to prayer. By Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T. Williams, Publisher.

It is not often that an author is his own publisher. In the present case this may have been a matter of necessity; but it should not have been so, for the volume is interesting enough. It is a collection of anecdotes, the authenticity of which Mr. Williams personally vouches for, showing that God answers in an immediate and direct manner the requests of those who in faith ask him for temporal blessings. “They demonstrate,” says the author, “to a wonderful degree the immediate practical ways of the Lord with his children in this world; that he is far nearer and more intimate with their plans and pursuits than it is possible for them to realize.” We have no disposition to scoff at the stories related by Mr. Williams, although the style in which they are told often provokes one to mirth. There is but one true faith in the world, but there are many people who hold more or less of this faith without knowing it. “_Souffrons toutes les religions, puisque Dieu les souffre_,” said Fénelon; and our Holy Father, the Pope, has not unfrequently expressed his affection as well as his pity for good Protestants. No doubt many of the people who are spoken of in this book were very good Protestants. And we are glad to observe in it this passage: “The present is the age of miracles as well as the past. Fully as wonderful things have been and are constantly being done this day by our unseen Lord as in the days of old when he walked in the sight of his disciples.”

THE LITTLE PEARLS; OR, GEMS OF VIRTUE. Translated by Mrs. Kate E. Hughes. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Will be found very entertaining and instructive reading for our young folks, and we recommend it as suitable for a present at the distribution of school prizes. We think, however, that the name of the writer whose work is translated should have appeared on the title-page.

BESIDE THE WESTERN SEA: A Collection of Poems. By Harriet M. Skidmore (“Marie”). New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

This gifted lady has done well to collect her scattered poems into a volume. They are chiefly of a devotional character, and, though unequal, none of them are without merit, some of a very marked kind. She has the gift of song, and she sings easily and gracefully on almost any subject. The following, though one of the shortest and least ambitious of the collection, strikes us as a very sweet poem, and affords a fair idea of the author’s powers. Its title is “The Mist”:

“I watched the folding of a soft white wing Above the city’s heart; I saw the mist its silent shadows fling O’er thronged and busy mart. Softly it glided through the Golden Gate And up the shining bay, Calmly it lingered on the hills, to wait The dying of the day. Like the white ashes of the sunset fire, It lay within the West, Then onward crept above the lofty spire, In nimbus-wreaths to rest. It spread anon—its fleecy clouds unrolled, And floated gently down; And thus I saw that silent wing enfold The Babel-throated town. A spell was laid on restless life and din, That bade its tumult cease; A veil was flung o’er squalor, woe, and sin, Of purity and peace. And dreaming hearts, so hallowed by the mist, So freed from grosser leaven, In the soft chime of vesper bells could list Sweet, echoed tones of heaven; Could see, enraptured, when the starlight came, With lustre soft and pale, A sacred city crowned with 'ring of flame,’ Beneath her misty veil.”

ROMAN LEGENDS: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome. By R. H. Busk, author of _Sagas from the Far East_, etc. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1877.

These are very graceful and interesting legends. They furnish glimpses that could not otherwise be well obtained of the peculiar constitution, habits of mind and thought, of the common people in and about Rome. For the most part they are such as have not hitherto found their way into literature, being taken as they fell from the lips of narrators to whom they had been household words, handed down from one generation to another. The task of eliciting them seems to have been no easy one, but its results are pleasant enough to earn honest gratitude for the years of labor which have been spent in gaining them. The tales themselves range under four categories, concerning which the author notes that the Romans are rigidly exact in adhering to, never by any chance giving a fairy-tale if asked for a legend, or a fairy-tale if inquired of concerning ghosts. They comprise legends; ghost-stories and local and family traditions; fairy tales and _ciarpe_, or gossip. The book is

## particularly rich in stories of St. Philip Neri.

PHILIP NOLAN’S FRIENDS: A story of the change of Western Empire. By Edward E. Hale. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.

This volume traces the course of a journey into the heart of the great South-west at the beginning of the present century. This tract was still the border-land of the Aztec kings. Throughout its vast extent Spanish heroes had wasted their lives in _ignis-fatuus_ searches. Rich discoveries of gold did not reward their diligence, and they resigned so inhospitable a region to a new order of pioneers. Even to this day the names of places bear token that the zeal of the Spanish missionaries was in no way inferior to that of the sons of Loyola along the St. Lawrence. Such was their indomitable perseverance that twenty-seven missions had been established in this region previous to 1626, and a century later the missionary spirit carried the Gospel among the Apaches, Moquis, and Navajoes.

The heroine’s escort through this _terra incognita_ to Americans is ample, the weather delightful, and we do not care to question the adequacy of the motive for the expedition. Nor does it matter that we are led to believe that Philip Nolan possesses a sterling character, though what he says or does, or what apparent influence he has over the course of events, would hardly justify this conclusion.

The novel is readable, but not by any means artistic. The author lacks the power to create a character that can think and act like a human being. He wishes us to believe his heroine possesses beauty, sensibility, and vivacity; but he lacks the subtle power to invent

## actions and conversations which impress individuality, and we gather our

notions of the lady more from his suggestions than from the movement of the story. This seems to be the author’s weakness: his figures act and he suggests the motives and impulses.

His male characters miss no opportunity to abuse the missionaries. They regard the “black-gowns” as the cause of Indian rascality and Spanish treachery. Ill-luck is always traced to them, and the torrents of abuse poured on the servants of God lend the only touches of nature that may be found in the author’s passive figures. Of course these outbursts of hatred reveal the true character of the adventurers. They are border ruffians.

The book is partly historical. It treats of a transition period. The allegiance of the inhabitants had suffered a violent dissolution. A border element existed, mainly recruited from the United States. This element was of service in manufacturing public opinion, and, in this way, might have hastened the transfer of the Louisiana tract to its natural owner, the United States. We are inclined to the opinion that Southern interests would have brought about the transfer without the assistance of European complications or scenes of border treachery.

REPLY TO THE HON. R. W. THOMPSON, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, ADDRESSED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., of the Society of Jesus. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

In this pamphlet of eighty-six pages Father Weninger has undertaken the almost unnecessary task of replying to Mr. Thompson’s book, _The Papacy and the Civil Power_. If there is anything in that book to refute, it refutes itself. Mr. Thompson, however, over and above the rashness of attempting such a book at all, was rash enough to quote Father Weninger. The natural result is the present pamphlet. The pamphlet is addressed to “the American people.” If the American people take it up, they will be rewarded by some lively reading. The reverend author says at the conclusion: “We have handled our adversary throughout the whole discourse without gloves.” No reader of the pamphlet will be inclined to dispute that statement.

THE PEARL AMONG THE VIRTUES; OR, WORDS OF ADVICE TO CHRISTIAN YOUTH. By P. A. De Doss, S.J. Translated from the original German by a Catholic priest. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

This work, written by one of the Jesuit Fathers banished from Germany, is an excellent treatise on the angelic virtue, which he considers from almost every point of view in a solid, instructive, and highly interesting manner. No more useful book could be placed in the hands of the youth of either sex.

GOD THE TEACHER OF MANKIND: A PLAIN, COMPREHENSIVE EXPLANATION OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis: Benziger Brothers. 1877.

We have received advance sheets of this new and most interesting work by the indefatigable Redemptorist father to whom Catholics in this country are so much indebted for works that are really useful as well as popular. The book is too important in itself and on too important a subject to be dismissed with a hasty notice. We shall return to it later.

EDMONDO: A Sketch of Roman Manners and Customs. By Rev. Fr. Antonio Bresciani, S.J., author of _The Jew of Verona_, etc., etc. Translated from the Italian. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1877.

This is a powerfully-written story that cannot but excite the liveliest interest on account of its faithful and beautiful description of Roman scenery and vivid delineation of Roman life and customs.

The translation is well rendered, but we do not approve of the omission of two chapters from the writings of such an author as the learned Bresciani. Such men do not write anything that can be cast aside without loss to their readers and admirers.

DORA. By Julia Kavanagh.

BESSIE:

SILVIA. By the same author. D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

We have not read any one of these three stories, and can only acknowledge their receipt. From others that we have read by the same author we think it safe to recommend these to persons who are fond of novels. Julia Kavanagh is, to our thinking, one of the purest, most graceful, and most interesting story-writers of the day.

THE CATHOLIC KEEPSAKE. A gift-book for all seasons. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

The best encomium we can bestow on this collection is to say that it is worthy of its name. The numerous sketches and stories are short, entertaining, and very agreeably written, even though a little ancient.

BESSY; OR, THE FATAL CONSEQUENCE OF TELLING LIES. By the author of _The Rat-Pond; or, The Effects of Disobedience_. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

A plain, simple story for children, and, as the title designates, with a moral attached.

THE STORY OF FELICE. By Esmeralda Boyle. London: Trübner & Co. 1873.

SONGS OF THE LAND AND SEA. By Esmeralda Boyle. New York: E. J. Hale & Son. 1875.

In these poems Miss Boyle displays much true poetic feeling and a gift of melodious utterance.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 150.—SEPTEMBER, 1877.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS. VIRGIL AND HORACE.

The number of versified translations of Greek and Latin poets which the English presses continually put forth must be a never-ending surprise to the practical American mind—if, that is to say, the practical mind ever thinks of so manifestly useless and absurd a thing at all. Authors are supposed to write and publishers to print for the purpose of making money; that either should work to any other end is a proposition which to the practical mind is simply bewildering. Yet one would think there can be but little money in laboriously turning into English a quantity of school-books which no one reads except at school, and whose only value is in their being in a foreign tongue. Original poetry is bad enough; the verdict of the practical mind on that point is pretty apt to be one with the view taken by Heine’s rich uncle, to whom the poet, at the height of his fame, was but a _Dummkopf_ (may not the uncle, alas! have been right?); but poetry at second hand, the “old clo’” of the Muses, Apollo’s second table, the cold victual of Parnassus, a disaerated Helicon—the practical mind can only gasp at the notion (which, by the way, strikes it in quite another shape than the poetical one we have chosen to give it, but just as effectively) and seek to renew its faith in human nature over the credit column of its ledger.

Another class of minds, too, not quite so practical—a class that has been at college, we will say, that knows Virgil and Horace by name, or even by certain quotations (_arma virumque_, _pallida mors pulsat_, _atra cura_, etc.), and can read Greek letters at sight, but on the whole thinks Huxley a greater force in the world to-day than Homer—the cultured class, in short, about which some of our newspapers make so much to-do—can understand why the great classic poets should be turned into English verse (for the benefit of those who have not been at college), but not at all why such versions should be multiplied. If you want Virgil in an English dress, there’s your Dryden; or Homer, there’s Pope—say our person of culture is from an extreme northern latitude, geographically or mentally, he will perhaps put Chapman here, and pooh-pooh Pope with a reference to Bentley. Do you desire Horace in the vulgar, there’s good old Francis—pray, what better do you ask? What better, indeed, can you expect to get? Just look at your _Cyclopædia Septentrionalis_ and see what it tells you! So what is the use or the meaning, what is the reason of being, of your Theodore Martins and your Coningtons, your Morrises and Cranches? What is there to be had of them all but vanity and vexation of spirit, and time and money mislaid?

Somewhat in that way, we take it, a good many folks, even of the book-buying, nay, of the book-reading, sort, must feel over every fresh announcement of a translation of one or other of the favorite classic poets. And as the supply of such things is in the long run, by a beneficent law of nature, tempered to the demand, and the mind of the book-buying many reacts upon, and often rules, the ardor of the book-making few—“book” in Lamb’s sense, be it understood—it is not surprising that the list of American translators should be of the scantiest. Mr. Cranch’s bold venture of last year—a blank-verse rendering of the _Æneid_—had few precursors or precedents. There is Mumford’s blank-verse Homer, which Professor Felton praised, and Professor Arnold, strange to say, seems not to have seen; and Mr. Bryant’s blank-verse Homer, which everybody praised and a smaller number read. Then, some years since, a Philadelphian gentleman put forth still another version of the _Iliad_ in what he said was English verse, although the precise metre of such lines as

“For Agamemnon insulted Chryses”; “But Agamemnon was much displeased”; “Wounded is Diomed, Tydeus’ son, Ulysses, also, and Agamemnon.”

unless it be hexameter—everything you cannot scan in English verse is hexameter, just as everything you cannot parse in Greek is second aorist—we have been unable to determine. We have heard, also, of a version of Horace by a professor in some Southern university, but this we have not seen. Are there any others? Mr. E. C. Stedman ten years ago printed specimens of a projected translation of Theocritus, in English hexameters, of considerable merit; but his reception does not seem to have encouraged him to go on. And that is all, a little Spartan band of four or five to oppose to the great host of British translators from Phaer to Morris. The practical mind may feel reassured of its country.

It is true that these English versions are often reprinted here; but it is only the chiefs of the army—those who shine pre-eminent among their fellows,

“sicut inter ignes Luna minores,”

or who are already known to fame for triumphs in other fields. Prof. Conington made something of a critical furor by the bold breaking away from rule and precedent in his choice of a metre, though Dr. Maginn, in his Homeric ballads, had given him the hint. In like manner our booksellers have reprinted and our book-buyers bought Mr. Morris’ _Æneid_ (we beg his pardon—_Æneids_), not because it was a new translation of Virgil, but because it was a new work of the latest popular poet; just as they printed and bought Mr. Bryant’s Homer because it was the latest work of our oldest living poet, as they printed and bought Lord Derby’s _Iliad_ because it was the work of a nobleman, and not only that, but of a leading European statesman, and therefore, in both aspects, a very surprising and desirable thing for our people, who have never been used to connect that sort of accomplishment with the idea they had formed of a nobleman, still less with their notion of a statesman. But we did not reprint or buy Mr. Worsley’s, or Prof. Newman’s, or Prof. Blackie’s, or Mr. Wright’s Homer; and even if we printed, it is to be feared we did not extensively buy, Mr. Cranch’s _Æneid_, although in the way of buying English _Æneids_ we might have done worse. Why? Not, certainly, because any of the versions named lacked merit, but because they appealed to us on their merits simply, without any outside helps to popularity, and we would none of them. The fact is, we do not care in the least for Homer or Virgil, and we care a great deal for Morris and Bryant—that is to say, while they are topics of talk; and it is one of the social duties, which persons of culture would die almost sooner than fail in, to have something, or even nothing, to say about the ordained subjects of fashionable gossip.

But in England it is otherwise. There is in that country a large class always to be counted on to buy any translation of a favorite classic which has successfully run the gauntlet of the reviews. This class is made up of diverse elements. First, the translators themselves, who in England form no inconsiderable percentage of the literary public; for every other graduate of either university who has not been a stroke-oar—that is honor enough to win or give—seems to feel within him a sacred void unfilled, a mysterious yearning unsatisfied, a clamorous duty unperformed, until he has translated some classic author in whole or in part. Every translator, of course, buys the publications of every other translator to chuckle over his failures or—let us do them justice—to applaud heartily and generously the happy dexterity which conquers a difficult passage. Then, too, even scholars who have Homer and Horace at their fingers’ ends, who think in Latin and dream in Greek, who dare to take liberties with the digamma and speak disrespectfully of the second aorist—even they to whom the best translation of a classic is as corked claret? or skim-milk—may still buy Prof. Conington’s _Æneid_ or Lord Lytton’s Horace for a better reason than the pleasure of finding fault with it. They know, none better, that, as the former puts it, a translation by a competent hand is itself an “embodied criticism” and commentary; and even scholars, after twenty centuries or so of criticism and commentary, and even of mutual vituperation, have not yet quite made up their minds as to the meaning, or at least the shades of meaning, straight through of any poet of antiquity. This is not to say that we have not here, too, scholars who might buy a translation for the same reason; but in neither country, perhaps, are there so many as to be much of a stand-by in themselves.

But the mainstay of the English translator is that sort of fashionable sentiment in favor of classical learning necessarily fostered in a country where the university is a working element and influence in political, social, and literary life. This sentiment is not so powerful or wide-spread as it once was; as it was, let us say, when a couplet made Mr. Addison a secretary of state, or a burlesque made Mr. Montague a minister and Mr. Prior an ambassador—an improvement still on the age when Sir Christopher Hatton danced himself into the chancellorship. But it is still powerful; and the university is still such a force in English life as it never has been, as it probably never will be, here. The Oxford and Cambridge debating clubs used to be regularly looked to, and are still, perhaps, now and again beaten up, by experienced huntsmen for embryo statesmen, much as the metropolitan manager will scour the provincial stage for an undiscovered star. University men edit the leading organs of public opinion; university men fill the desks in Downing Street and the Parliamentary benches in Westminster Hall; university men yawn day after day in the club-windows of Pall Mall, and night after night in the dancing and supper rooms of Belgravia—no, not the supper-rooms; that is, perhaps, the one spot of the fashionable world where young England forgets to yawn. Like enough, the learning of many of these sages is no deeper than the lore of our own pundits from Yale and Harvard; and not a few of them, no doubt, would be far more at home criticising the boat-race in the Fifth Æneid (the contestants in which they would probably characterize, in their delightful idiom, as “duffers”) than construing the Latin it is told in. Such is the proud result of modern university education in a free and enlightened Anglo-Saxon community. Nevertheless, though the university may not actually give learning, it creates a sentiment in favor of learning; it develops almost unconsciously a taste for it. One may say that it is next to impossible for any man to go through college without taking in some sense of classical culture—through the pores, as it were—which shall ever after give him a feeling of companionship, a kind of Freemasonry, with authors he could never read. To have lived among books, in an atmosphere of books, is itself in some sort an education.

Now, with this feeling for learning diffused throughout a great nation, showing itself in its chief organs of public opinion, in its selection of public officers, and even to some extent in its popular elections, and centring above all in a great city, the headquarters of all the social, political, and literary activity of the nation—its book-making, book-branding, book-buying centre—we come to see why translations from the classics should have more vogue across the water than with us. If a cabinet minister choose to beguile his leisure by turning Aristophanes into English, it is but fit that society, before having him in to dinner, should know something about it, if only to avoid such a slip as is told of Catalani. The _prima donna_ was seated, as a great compliment, next to Goethe at a state dinner, but not knowing the divine Wolfgang—or, indeed, much of anything but some operatic scores—gave her mind to the potage rather than to the poet. A friend nudged her: “Why do you not talk to M. Goethe?” “I don’t know him, and he’s stupid.” “What! not know M. Goethe, the celebrated author of the _Sorrows of Werther_?” “The _Sorrows of Werther_! Ah! M. Goethe,” cried the _diva_ with _empressement_, turning to the great man, “how can I ever thank you enough for your charming _Sorrows of Werther_! I never laughed so much at anything in my life.” She had seen a parody of that immortal work in a farce at Paris. Here, when our cabinet minister lets loose his intellectual surplus on exposures of Popery, society runs no great risk. Everybody can talk a little Popery—an easier subject, on the whole, to talk or write about than Aristophanes; and one knows pretty well what our cabinet minister’s book is about without the fatigue of failing to read it.

Of the feeling we have mentioned the taste for quotation in Parliamentary debate is a good test. An apt illustration from Horace or Virgil had at one time almost the force of an argument. “Pitt,” says the late Lord Lytton, in the excellent preface to his unrhymed version of Horace’s _Odes_, “is said never to have more carried away the applause of the House of Commons than when, likening England—then engaged in a war tasking all her resources—to that image of Rome which Horace has placed in the mouth of Hannibal, he exclaimed:

“'Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido, Per damna, per cœdes, ab ipso Ducit opes animumque ferro.’”[121]

Footnote 121:

“Even as the ilex, lopped by axes rude Where, rich with dusky boughs, soars Algidus, Through loss, through wounds receives New gain, new life—yea, from the very steel.”

—Horat. _Carm._ iv. 4, Lord Lytton’s Trans.

Pitt, indeed, is famous for such felicities. In his speech on resigning the chancellorship in 1782, after claiming “to have used his best endeavors to fulfil with integrity every official engagement,” he continued: “And with this consolation, the loss of power, sir, and the loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise, I trust I shall soon be able to forget.”

“Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit Pennas, resigno quæ dedit ... ... probamque Pauperiem sine dote quæro.”[122]

Footnote 122:

“Constant I praise her, but resign With equal mind her gifts. When, swift deserting me and mine, Her ready wing she lifts, And, _wrapped up in my virtue_, wait Fair Poverty’s undower’d estate.”

—Horat. _Carm._ iii. 29.

The original of the line italicized Pitt modestly omitted.

Sir Robert Walpole had worse luck in attempting a like feat on his retirement, made not so gracefully in the shadow of a threatened impeachment.

“Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ,”[123]

Footnote 123:

“Conscious of no wrong done, no crime to pale at remembered.”

—Horat. _Ep._ 1. i.

he quoted, and was at once taken up by his rival, Pulteney, who offered to bet him a guinea that the line read _Nulla pallescere culpa_. Walpole lost, and, tossing the coin to Pulteney, the latter, before pocketing it, held it up to the House with the grim remark: “It is the first money I have received from the treasury for many years, and it shall be the last.”

It may well be that there is less of this sort of thing nowadays, when Parliamentary illustrations, among the younger members at least, seem to be drawn more extensively from natural history than from ancient poetry. Yet it is but a few years since Mr. Gladstone, on going out of office, created a sensation in his turn by his application of Virgil’s fine line,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.”[124]

Footnote 124:

“Rise from our ashes thou unknown, the predestined avenger.”

We cannot very well imagine a leading Congressman summoning Horace to enforce his argument, say, on the vital necessity to the nation of repealing the Seventh Commandment until such time as his constituents at Podunk can get enough of their neighbors’ currency to make resumption and patriotism convertible terms. Not only would he be doubtful of being understood, but he would be awed by that practical-minded public opinion at home which severely discourages in its chosen representatives such frivolities as unknown tongues. He would see behind the Speaker’s desk the grim phantom of the honest Granger transfixing him with a spectral finger, and asking him in hollow tones if he was sent to Congress to talk gibberish or to get that little appropriation; he would see the still more appalling phantom of the local editor grimly sharpening his quill and squaring himself for another of those savagely sarcastic articles about our erudite Congressman, who spends his time—the time we pay for, etc.—muddling his brains—the few brains, etc.—over obsolete rubbish in the Congressional Library, while he neglects his constituents’ interests and allows that little bill, etc., etc. He sees all this, and, instead of Horace, he quotes Josh Billings, and everybody is satisfied.

Now, this is not meant to the dispraise of either the Congressman or his constituents, but only to show that here political is divided from literary life in a way quite unknown in England. The scholar in politics is a fond illusion of youthful enthusiasm. Our politicians do not write; our literary folks do not go to Congress. A stray editor, to be sure, now and then gets in, tumbling over, as it were, from the Reporters’ Gallery, or a flourish is made of sending Mr. Motley or Prof. Lowell minister to some foreign court; but these are spasmodic exceptions, and usually result in a way to confirm the rule. We have no counterparts to Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mr. Lowe, or Sir George Cornewall Lewis, or the Duke of Argyle. Perhaps, however, a new era is dawning with the present Secretary of the Navy, who spells his literature with a “P.”

We have said enough—the reader may think more than enough—to show why translations from the classics should flourish better in England than here, and also, by implication at least, why of all classic authors, with the one exception of Homer, Horace and Virgil should most have taken the translators’ attention. From one or other of these are all the Parliamentary quotations we have given; and it is indeed, we believe, considered what our English friends call “bad form” to quote in debate any other Latin or Greek. The cause of this popularity it is easy to see. Horace and Virgil, in the usual college curriculum, are put into the student’s hands just as he has got over his initial struggles with the language, and his mind is a little freed to feel some of the beauties as well as the difficulties of the author—to know that the rose has fragrance as well as thorns. Homer, on the contrary, from his comparative ease, comes much earlier in the Greek course, and becomes so much the more distasteful to the learner as Greek is harder than Latin; its very letters are aliens to his eyes, its alphabet is a place of briers and brambles. It is hard to get over these early dislikes. St. Augustine confesses a hatred for Homer thus implanted in his school-days which he could never overcome, while he declares Virgil to be the greatest and most glorious of poets—a censure echoed by Voltaire, who pronounced the _Æneid, le plus beau monument qui nous reste de toute l’antiquité_, and asserts that if Homer produced Virgil, it was his finest work.

Both in Virgil and Horace there is much to captivate a youthful mind and everything to keep the affections won. The story of the _Æneid_ is not only full of life and color and motion, with plenty of fighting, which all boys love of course, but, despite its later-discovered want of a reasonable hero or heroine, its episodes—the Trojan horse and the sharp street-fight in fallen Ilium, the mysterious journey through the shades under a spectral moon, the races in the Fifth Book, the midnight scout of Nisus and Euryalus, the plucky young Iulus fleshing his maiden shafts at the siege in Book Ninth, the gallant onset and tragic fate of the young champions Lausus and Pallas—all are apt to take the boyish imagination; and in older years the haunting melody of the verse, the pensive grace that suffuses the telling of the story, renew and rivet the early charm.

Horace, too, is full of matter that even boyhood can taste and manhood never tires of. The lovely bits of rural landscape scattered like so many cabinet pictures through the odes—the sweltering cattle standing knee-deep under the oak-boughs in the pool of Bandusia, the bickering, pine-arched rivulet by whose side Dellius takes his nooning; the sunny slopes of Lucretilis dotted with sheep; the romantic beauty of the Happy Isles—do we not all recall the delight we felt when these enchanting little sketches first smiled on us from the weary drudgery of Tacitus and Thucydides like vistas of fresh meadow and woodland and cascade caught by the wayfarer from the hot and dusty highway? We did not so well relish then, in that out-door time of life, the warm little interiors that contrast and set off these: the glowing fire-side piled high with logs, made merry with old Falernian, and laugh and joke and friendly talk, while the rain beats upon the roof and the snow whirls about Soracte, and, drawing closer to the cheery blaze, we hug ourselves in the “tumultuous privacy of storm”; the jolly dinner-parties, where we help to quiz Quinctius for his gravity or chaff that harebrain Telephus out of his affectation of wisdom; the more sober feasts with Mæcenas or Virgil at the little Sabine Farm—but these, too, we soon get to know, and linger over them with fond familiarity. Then, too, we win to the secret of that genial though pagan philosophy which comes home to the “business and bosoms” of all of us, and whose precepts are so pithily expressed we cannot forget them if we would: that there is a time when folly is the truest wisdom; that he alone is happy who is content with little; that a wise man takes care of the present and lets the future take care of itself, because, as Cowley puts it,

“When to future years thou extend’st thy cares, Thou dealest in other men’s affairs”;

that we must pluck the blossom of to-day, or we may never have a chance at the morrow’s.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying,”

says Herrick, a later Horace. As we grow older and graver his sympathetic companionship keeps pace with us still, and in his deeper tones there are hints which even Christian civilization need not disdain to add to its scheme of a lofty and noble life.

So it is that England for three centuries back—indeed, ever since she began to have a literature to house them in—has been trying to naturalize and domesticate these Roman poets. In this, however, Virgil had nearly a century the start of Horace, owing, no doubt, to the nature of his great work, which appealed to the romantic impulses of that early time. Indeed, long before either the _Æneid_ or the _Iliad_ was generally known in Europe, the stories of both had been made over into the form of romances: the former by Guillaume de Roy in French, the latter by Guido de Colonna in Spanish. De Roy’s _Livre d’Eneidos_, translated into English and printed by Caxton, “no more resembles Virgil,” cries the good Bishop of Dunkeld wrathfully, “than the devil does St. Austin.” It was probably to clear the fair fame of his beloved poet that the bishop brought out his own quaint and spirited Scotch version in 1513. The first complete English translation came out in 1558; but in the previous year appeared the Second and Fourth Books, done into blank verse by the Earl of Surrey, notable as the first-known blank verse in the language, unless we are to take as such the unrhymed, alliterative metre used by Longland in _The Vision of Piers Ploughman_. It is thought to have been Surrey’s design, had he lived, to translate the remaining books. Had he done so, he would have added an ornament to our literature.

As it is, the distinction of giving the first full translation of the _Æneid_ to the language rests with a Welshman—Dr. Thomas Phaer. He himself, however, did only the first nine books and part of the Tenth; when dying, the work was taken in hand and finished, with the Thirteenth or supplementary book of Maffeo Veggio, by another physician, Dr. Thomas Twynne. English doctors then and afterwards seem to have had a propension towards the Muse. Dr. Borde, Dr. Thomas Campion (“Sweet Master Campion”), and Dr. Thomas Lodge—they seem to have had a propensity to be named Thomas also—were only the first of a long line of tuneful leeches, ending with our own Drs. Holmes and Joyce. Is there any occult connection between physic and Parnassus, between rhyme and rhubarb, between poetry and pills? and is Castaly a medicinal spring? Phaer’s version, which is printed in black-letter, is in rhymed fourteen-syllable verse, or “long Alexandrines”—a metre which Chapman afterwards took for his Homer, and to which Mr. Morris, the latest translator of the _Æneid_, has reverted.

The long Alexandrine has perhaps as much right as any to be called the English national metre in the sense in which we call the Saturnian verse the national metre of the Latins. Chaucer took his heroic couplet from the Italian or French, and Surrey, no doubt, had from the same source, or perhaps the Spanish, the hint for his blank verse. A curious parallel might be drawn between Surrey and Ennius, who, like him, introduced a new or “strange metre—the Greek hexameter—and, like him, by doing so revolutionized the versification of his country. Another point in common is that each has been reproached for his action. Ascham impliedly finds fault with Surrey because he did not choose hexameters or unrhymed Alexandrines instead of his unrhymed verse of ten or eleven syllables; and certain of those dreadful German scholars, who know everything and a few things besides, assure us that Ennius dealt a fatal blow to Latin poetry when he foisted on it a metre unsuited to its genius. One can hardly help speculating on the result had Virgil had to content himself with the _horridus numerus Saturnius_ as the vehicle of his tenderness and elegance, or if Hamlet had had to soliloquize in the metre of Sternhold and Hopkins. Would the rude instrument have cramped the player, or would the genius of the player have elevated the instrument? As Macaulay points out, the old nursery line,

“The queen is in her parlor eating bread and honey,”

is a perfect Saturnian verse on Terence’s model:

“Dăbūnt mălūm Mĕtēllī Nævĭō pŏētæ.”

How would Mr. Gladstone’s menace,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,”

have sounded in that shape? Should we recognize, do you think, those

“Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty,”

done up in long Alexandrines or in such hexameters as those of Master Abraham Fraunce, which moved Ben Jonson to dub him a fool:

“Now had fiery Phlegon his dayes revolution ended, And his snoring snout with salt waves all to be-washed,”

or even in Sidney’s or Spenser’s, which were, in truth, little better? No doubt Virgil and Shakspere, being great poets, would have subdued what they worked in to their own artistic uses. Yet all the same let us be thankful to the humbler artisans who furnished to their hands pipes fit for them to play on, and to make such music as the world shall never tire of hearing. It should be added that the likeness between the English and the Latin reformer does not extend to the degree of refinement attained by each. In this respect Surrey is much the more advanced. Ennius never got over the barbarism of excessive alliteration which seems to mark the early metrical efforts of all peoples.

“Sicut si quando vincleis venatica velox”; “Sicut fortis equus spatio qui forte supremo”; “Quai neque Dardaneis campeis potuere perire Nec cum capta capei, nec cum combusta cremari.”

The last passage Virgil copied, as he did many others, and it is instructive to see how his more polished taste tones down his predecessor’s jingle:

¸ “Num Sigæis occumbere campis, Num capti potuere capi? num incensa cremavit Troja viros?”[125]

Footnote 125:

“Was there no dead man’s place for you on that Sigeian plain? Had ye no might to wend as slaves? Gave Troy so poor a flame To burn her men...?”

—_Æneid_, vii. 294 seq., Morris’ Trans. p. 175.

Surrey’s blank verse has the quaintness of his age, but not its defects of taste. Martial, writing about two centuries after Ennius, sneers at him, much as Ennius had sneered at his predecessor, Nævius—he who lamented that Latin poetry was to die with him!

“Ennius est lectus, salvo tibi Roma Marone.”[126]

Footnote 126:

“And Rome reads Ennius while Virgil lives!”

Pope, writing nearly the same length of time after Surrey, has only praise for him: “Surrey, the Grenville of a former age“—at least, Pope meant it for praise.”

To return to Phaer. It may be of interest to the reader to contrast the manner of the earliest and latest English translators of the _Æneid_. Venus’ admonition to Æneas (ii. 607) is thus given by the Welsh doctor:

“Then to thy parent’s hest take heede, dread not, my mind obey: In yonder place where stones from stones and bildings huge to sway Thou seest, and mixt with dust and smoke thicke stremes of reekings rise, Himselfe the god Neptune that side doth furne in wonders wise: With forke three tinde the wall vproots, foundations allto shakes; And qvite from vnder soile the towne, with ground-works all uprakes. On yonder side with Furies most, dame Juno fiercely stands, The gates she keeps, and from the ships the Greekes, her friendly bands, In armour girt she calles. Lo! there againe where Pallas sits, on fortes and castle-towres, With Gorgon’s eyes, in lightning cloudes enclosed, grim she lowres, The father-god himself to Greekes their mightes and courage steres, Himselfe against the Troyan blood both gods and armour reres. Betake thee to thy flight, my sonne, thy labours’ ende procure, I will thee never faile, but thee to resting-place assure. She said, and through the darke night shade herselfe she drew from sight; Appeare the grisly faces then, Troyes en’mies vgly dight.”

Mr. Morris gives it thus:

“And look to it no more afeard to be Of what I bid, nor evermore thy mother’s word disown. There where thou seest the great walls cleft and stone turn off from stone, And seest the waves of smoke go by with mingled dust-cloud rolled, There Neptune shakes the walls and stirs the foundings from their hold With mighty trident, tumbling down the city from its base. There by the Scæan gates again hath bitter Juno place The first of all, and wild and mad, herself begirt with steel, Calls up her fellows from the ships. Look back! Tritonian Pallas broods o’er topmost burg on high, All flashing bright with Gorgon grim from out her stormy sky; The very Father hearteneth on, and stays with happy might The Danaans, crying on the gods against the Dardan fight. Snatch flight, O son, whiles yet thou mayst, and let thy toil be o’er; I by thy side will bring thee safe unto thy father’s door.

“She spake, and hid herself away where thickest darkness poured. Then dreadful images show forth, great godheads are abroad, The very haters of our Troy.”

The half-lines respond to the imperfect verses in Virgil, which, in the fashion of the Chinese tailor, both Mr. Morris and his forerunner conscientiously copy. Phaer has other oddities, such as “Sybly” for Sibylla, “lymbo” for Hades, “Dei Phobus” for Deiphobus, and “Duke Æneas”; while every book is wound up with a _Deo Gratias_ by way of colophon. Let us hope it was not too fervently echoed by his readers. Indeed, Phaer’s version is better than its fame.

“After the associated labors of Phaer and Twynne,” says Warton in his _History of English Poetry_, “it is hard to say what could induce Richard Stanihurst, a native of Dublin, to translate the first four books of the _Æneid_ into English hexameters.” The remark shows less than the wonted perspicuity of the historian of English poetry. What induces any translation, except the belief (the fond belief!) that the work it aims to do has not yet been done? Master Stanihurst, like many other learned men then and since, was firmly persuaded that the hexameter was your only measure for a translation of Virgil. But there are hexameters and hexameters, and Master Stanihurst’s were unluckily of the other sort. A poet who proclaims his intention to “chaunt manhood and Garboiles,” and gives us

“With tentive list’ning each wight was settled in hark’ning”

for

“Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant,”

or

“You bid me, ô princesse, to scarifie a festered old sore”

as an equivalent for

“Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”

must be content with “audience fit though few.” Sir Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and a few other choice spirits, all bitten with the same flea, patted poor Stanihurst on the back and told him that what Nash called “his [and their] foul, lumbring, boisterous, wallowing measures” had “enriched and polished their native tongue.” But the rest of the world laughed with Nash, and may still for that matter; for Stanihurst’s version is full of conceits even droller than Phaer’s. “Bedlamite” for _furiatâ mente_, “Dandiprat hop-thumb” for _parvulus_, Jupiter “bussing his pretty, prating parrot”—_i.e._, Venus—and Priam girding on his sword Morglay, are some of them. The last shows how the glamour of the Gothic romances, in which Virgil figured sometimes as a magician—the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ long outlived their origin—still hung about even the learned, of whom Stanihurst was indisputably one— “eruditissimus ille nobilis” Camden calls him. It may be interesting to add that he was a Catholic, a friend of Campion the martyr, and died in exile because of it.

Stanihurst seems to have played the part of horrible example to all after-translators; for although Surrey’s metre has been repeatedly used, and Phaer’s of late by Mr. Morris, and we might add by Prof. Conington (for his octosyllabic verse is but a variation of the Alexandrine, which skipped capriciously from twelve syllables to sixteen[127]), the hexameter has never again, so far as we know, been applied to rendering the _Æneid_. Yet the measure which in English goes by that name seems far better adapted, _pace_ Mr. Arnold, to the pensive grace of Virgil than to the grave majesty of Homer. It may be true, as scholars contend, that it by no means reproduces the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter, and it may be equally true, as other scholars tell us, that we have no conception of what was the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter on the Greek or Roman ear—though the second objection might, in malicious hands, prove an embarrassment for the first. Yet as we read Homer and Virgil there is no doubt that hexameters can be—indeed, that such have been—constructed which do go far to reproduce the effect of Homer and Virgil, according to the modern reading, upon the modern ear. Grant that this is an entirely wrong effect; that either Homer or Virgil, hearing his verses read in modern fashion, would be sure to clap hands to ear, and cry out in an agony with Martial:

Footnote 127:

See Warton, _Hist. E. P._ sec. 1.

“Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus; Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus”;[128]

Footnote 128:

“My piece you’ve been spouting! I ne’er should have known: Next time, if you love me, do say it’s your own.”

—Mart. _Epigr._ i. 39.

it is yet the only effect we are ever likely to get until the day of judgment; and what are you going to do about it? Of course it is hopeless to try to imitate Homer’s sonorous harmonies—the καλὰ τὰ Ὁμήρον ἔπη, as Maximus Tyrius calls them, the lovely Homeric words—the πολυφλοίς βοιο θαλάσσης and ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. It is not in ours or any other tongue but Homer’s own to do it. But Mr. Arnold has shown that we can imitate afar off his rhythm and metrical effect, and why should we not do that? If anybody can give us hexameters that please the English ear and make it fancy, without being conscious of too much elongation, that it is listening to the faintest echo of Homer’s mighty lyre or Virgil’s silver string, why, let us have them, prithee, and a _fico_ for the grammarians.

In this desultory review of Virgilian translators we mean to confine ourselves to the _Æneid_; but we may say in passing that the _Eclogues_ were, about 1587, put into unrhymed Alexandrines by Abraham Fleming, who thus nearly anticipated the metre Prof. Newman, after much experimenting, hit on as the proper one to render Homer, and which, as Prof. Marsh says, has the disadvantage (or the merit?) to American ears of suggesting our own epic strain of _Yankee Doodle_. Fleming, however, as will be seen from the following quotation, taken from the beginning of his Fourth Eclogue, only dropped into our national music occasionally:

“O Muses of Sicilian ile, let’s greater matters singe! Shrubs, groves, and bushes lowe delight and please not every man. If we do singe of woods, the woods be worthy of a consul.”

While Virgil was thus engrossing the attention of Elizabethan scholars Horace lay comparatively neglected, although it was an era of translation, as transitional periods in the literature of a country are apt to be. Nearly all the Latin poets then extant were done into English before the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Greek series began sonorously with Chapman’s Homer soon after. Even that most perfect of all actual or possible poets, as her courtiers called her—Queen Elizabeth—tried her hand at it in a translation of part of the _Hercules Œteus_ of Seneca. But no complete version of Horace seems to have appeared prior to Creech’s towards the end of the seventeenth century. In 1567, however, Thomas Drant published _Horace, his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyres Englished_. In his preface is one quaint remark, to the truth of which all Horatians will bear witness: “Neyther any man which can judge can judge it one and the like laboure to translate Horace and to make and translate a love booke, a shril tragedie, or a smooth and platleuyled poesye. Thys I can truly say, of myne owne experyence, that I can sooner translate twelve verses out of the Greeke Homer than sixe out of Horace.”

The first version of the _Odes_ was that of Sir Thomas Hawkins, about 1630. This, though it seems to have been popular enough to go through several editions, was far from complete, the lighter odes being omitted as being “too wanton and loose.” Our own edition, which is the fourth, dated 1638, contains about two-thirds of the odes and epodes. Here and there we find a tolerably good verse:

“What man, what hero [Clio] wilt thou raise With shrillest pipe or Lyra’s softer lays? What god whose name in sportive straine Echo will chaunt thee back againe?”[129]

Footnote 129:

_Carm._ i. 12.

This will compare not too disadvantageously with the latest version—Lord Lytton’s—which, indeed, is not especially good:

“What man, what hero, or what god select’st thou, Theme for sweet lyre or fife sonorous, Clio, Whose honored name shall that gay sprite-voice, Echo, Hymn back rebounding?”

As a rule, however, Sir Thomas is stiff—a fault common to almost all translations of the easiest of lyrists up to a much later period. Yet in this century there were many versions of single odes, epistles, and satires, some of which have scarcely ever been surpassed. Such, for instance, were Ben Jonson’s rendering of Ode IV. 1, _Ad Venerem_, and Milton’s of I. 5, _Ad Pyrrhum_, severally included by Mr. Theodore Martin and Lord Lytton in their respective versions as beyond their skill to better; Dryden’s fine paraphrase of III. 29, _To Mæcenas_, which Mr. Martin, non sordidus auctor, pronounces finer than the original; and, on a lower plane, however, Roscommon’s version of the _Art of Poetry_. Of these, Milton’s has been said to touch the high-water mark of translation, and is indeed very elegant and close.

Ben Jonson’s set translations are often injured by a rigid strictness which Horace might have warned him against:

“Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres,”[130]

Footnote 130:

“Nor word for word translate with painful care.” —Horat. _De Arte Poet._, Francis’ Trans.

and which evoked Dryden’s protest against “the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson.” Yet even in fetters he danced better than most; and some of his translations, notably the one mentioned above and one of Martial, _Liber, amicorum dulcissima cura tuorum_, it would be hard to pick flaws in.

In Jonson’s day, however, there was no mean between word-for-word rendering and the loosest paraphrase, until Denham laid down something like the true rule in his verses to Fanshawe on the latter’s translation of Guarini:

“That servile path thou nobly dost decline Of tracing word for word and line for line.... A new and nobler way thou dost pursue To make translations, and translators too. They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame.”

Cowley, who translated largely from Horace, runs to the opposite extreme from Jonson: his versions are as much too free as Jonson’s are too close. Yet some of his single lines are unmatched for felicity and force:

“Hence ye profane, I hate ye all, Both the great vulgar and the small”

(a phrase which has passed into a proverb) for _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_; “The poor rich man’s emphatically poor” for _Magnas inter opes inops_; “From his toucht mouth the wanton torment slips” for _Fugientia captat Flumina_; and, best of all, perhaps, “He loves of homely littleness the ease” for Martial’s _Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amet_—which shows how a deft translator can, without leaving his original, breathe into it, so to speak, a beauty it scarcely had—such lines as these make us regret either that Cowley did not translate more or that he was unable to transfer to his own poetry more of the same simple elegance of thought and word.

All of Cowley’s contemporaries were not so happy, however, as he in their attempts to better Horace, though many tried it. One of them, Sir Edward Sherburne, claps a periwig on Mt. Soracte:[131]

Footnote 131:

Horat. _Carm._ i. 9. One of the best versions of this ode is that of Allan Ramsay, in the Scotch dialect.

“Seest thou not how Soracte’s head (For all his height) stands covered With a white periwig of snow, While the laboring woods below Are hardly able to sustain The weight of winter’s feathered rain?”

He had evidently been reading and, with Dryden, admiring Sylvester’s _Du Bartas_:

“And when the winter’s keener breath began To crystallize the Baltic Ocean, To glaze the lake, to bridle up the floods, And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.”

The conceited style then in vogue was not well fitted to do justice to Horace’s _simplex munditiis_, although he was now universally read and esteemed—“The next best poet in the world to Virgil,” Cowley calls him—and has left the mark of his genial influence on all the writers of the time. One finds the Horatian sentiment running like a golden thread through the minor poetry of James and Charles I., at times informing whole poems with a pithiness of phrase and a dignity which Horace might call his own. Such are Marvell’s ode on _The Return of Cromwell_, such Shirley’s “The glories of our blood and state” and “Victorious men of earth, no more”—all three among the finest productions of their kind in the language.

After the Restoration the business of translation was resumed with vigor. Dryden in his Virgil, and, somewhat later, Pope in his Homer, set a fresh model which was followed by all their successors until Cowper’s Miltonic _Iliad_ came to break the spell and pave the way to the modern style, which aims to combine freedom with fidelity, ease of manner with correctness of meaning, and so far as possible to reproduce the author himself, form as well as matter. Creech’s Horace was hardly a success, being stiff and ungainly without being particularly close, and, while showing in its metre some sense of the poet’s rhythmical grace, scarcely attempted to render the characteristic delicacy of his wording—that _curiosa felicitas_ we all have heard of. In this—and indeed in every—respect the version of Dr. Francis, which came out about half a century later, was greatly superior as a whole to any previous one, and took with Horatians a position the best of its successors has found it hard to shake. Indeed, with such of the poet’s lovers as date from the golden age of Consul Plancus, Francis is still the paramount favorite, and you will talk to them in vain of the merits of Robinson or Lytton, of Conington’s fluent ease or Martin’s sprightly grace. Francis is in the main faithful, generally pleasing, and always respectable at least, but, like most of his rivals, he lacks a certain lightness of touch, an airy gayety of treatment in the minor odes which no one, we think, has hit off so well as Mr. Theodore Martin. They are, as that accomplished writer says, in many instances what would be called now _vers de société_, and their chief value rests in the poet’s inimitable charm of manner. Unless some notion of this can be given, the translator’s labor is lost, and he offers his readers but a withered posy from which color and perfume alike are fled.

ALBA’S DREAM. BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC.

## PART III.

Gondriac had seen many strange things come to pass of late years: stupendous things, as when M. le Marquis climbed up the cliff like a common man to condole with old Caboff; wonderful things, as when M. le Marquis was rescued by old Caboff in the storm; tragic things, as when he went forth and died in the place of young Caboff; but nothing so untoward as this had ever happened at Gondriac before: M. le Marquis was going to marry Alba. The wonder was both lessened and heightened by the romantic story concerning Alba’s birth, which was spread through the village simultaneously with the announcement. The fatherless girl, who had owned no name but Alba, was the daughter of a nobleman, who had been affianced by his family to a great heiress, but who fell in love with a penniless orphan and married her secretly; a few months after his marriage he was ordered off to Egypt with Bonaparte and was killed in his first engagement. The young wife lived to give birth to her child, and then died, leaving it to the care of an old friend of her mother, a childless widow, whom the Revolution had ruined, and who now gained her bread by needlework. Virginie accepted the charge, and adopted as her own the little one, whose sole provision was a pittance which the father had been able to secure to his wife as a dower. Her heart, hungering for some one on whom to lavish its great capacity for loving, bestowed upon the baby more than a mother’s tenderness; she loved it with a love that seemed to gather up into one passion all the loves that a woman’s heart can hold. She left the shelter of her native place, where all had known her from her childhood, and where, in spite of her poverty, she held her head high, and went to live at Gondriac, where no old familiar face would smile upon her, but where her secret would be secure, and none would know that she was not Alba’s mother. This was the story she told Hermann when he asked her for Alba’s hand.

“I thought to let the secret die with me,” she said, “and that the child might have loved me to the end as her own mother; but now she must hear the truth. To me she will always be my child, my very own—as truly mine as if I had given her birth.”

“Let her know nothing until she is my wife, and then I will break it to her,” replied the young lord; “and I doubt but she will love you more dearly still when she learns the truth.”

Alba was very happy—so happy at times that it was more than she could bear; she would often heave great sighs for very bliss as she sat upon the rocks, her hand clasped in Hermann’s.

“Why do you sigh, my Alba?” he asked her once reproachfully. “Are you afraid I shall not make you happy?”

“I am afraid of being too happy; I am so happy now that I could die of it. And by and by, when I am your wife, and you will never leave me, and that all I used to long for when I believed in fairies shall be mine—I feel as if the joy of it must kill me. Hermann, we will try to be very good together, will we not? We will do our best to make everybody good and happy. There shall be no poor people here, and when they are sick we will have a good doctor to come and take care of them, and I will go and nurse them myself. I hope they will all love me. Do you think they will? Sometimes I am frightened lest they shouldn’t care for me any more when I am a great lady, living in a castle.”

“You foolish child! They will care ten times more for you then,” said Hermann, “because you will be able to do so much for them.” Then, looking at her with a smile at once tender and suspicious, “What a greedy little thing it is for love!” he said. “You can’t care for me as I do for you, Alba, or else my love would be enough for you; I don’t long for anybody’s love but yours.”

“It is not so much that as that I long to make them happy,” explained Alba; “and how can I do that until I can make them love me?”

They quarrelled over this philosophy of hers, and then made plans for the future.

“You will take me to see all the beautiful places you have told me of, will you not?” said Alba.

“I will take you round the world, if you like it—that is, if you don’t get tired of it before we are half way.”

“Tired! with you? I should never be tired—never, never, never.” She repeated the word in a low voice, as if speaking to herself, while looking dreamily out over the sea, where a ship, with her white sails set, was drifting away into the sunset.

“Where shall we go to first?” said Hermann.

“To Egypt, I think; or perhaps to Italy—I am dying to see the city with the streets of water, and Spain, where the palaces grow, and Moorish temples; but let us go first of all to Germany and see the countries where you won the battles. I should like that best. O Hermann, Hermann! how happy we shall be.” And then, as if her heart were overfull of joy, she began to sing. Hermann liked this better. Those silent, rapturous moods sometimes frightened him, as if they were a demand for something that he could not give. M. de Gondriac was as much in love as a man could be, and so far he would have no difficulty in making his wife’s happiness his chief concern; but he was quite aware that this was not to be achieved by the usual commonplace means. Something more than ordinary love, let it be ever so tender and chivalrous, was needed to satisfy the cravings of a heart like Alba’s. She worshipped him as the noblest of men; and it was no easy thing to realize this ideal. Would he be able to achieve it, to live up to her exalted standard through the coming years, when the glamour of young love’s idealizing mists should have cleared away, and his wife would be at leisure to observe him with her clear, intelligent eyes?

But a cloud was gathering over these sunny days of courtship. M. de Gondriac was summoned to Paris by the chief of the War Office. The call, of course, brooked no delay. His arm, though nearly healed, still incapacitated him from joining his regiment; but he must go in person and certify to this. Though they might admit him unfit for active service, he might be retained in attendance on the emperor; Bonaparte liked to have high-sounding names upon his personal staff. But Hermann would not alarm Alba by suggesting this possibility. They parted in sweet sorrow, looking forward to meeting soon again.

Alas! is it a decree of fate that the course of true love never shall run smooth? Are poets prophets, or do the loves of all humanity conspire to make their voice an oracle? The days went by, and Alba waited; but Hermann neither came nor wrote, and they could get no tidings of him. Had he been ordered to the frontier, in spite of his disabled arm, and killed or taken prisoner? Doubts crowded upon Alba’s heart until they almost stopped its pulses. But Virginie feared even worse than this, and, if her fears were true, there was no comfort in store. M. de Gondriac had felt strong enough to brave the emperor’s displeasure at a distance; but how when he stood face to face with it, with the power of that magnetic will, with the ridicule of his equals, with the blandishments of refined court ladies? Was his love of the metal to challenge these antagonistic forces and prevail?

Spring passed, and summer, and now it was harvest-time; the reapers waded through the yellow fields, the sickle was singing in the corn, the grapes hung heavy on the vine. But no news came from Hermann. Alba pined and drooped, and at last fell ill. The doctor came from X—— and saw her, and said that it would be nothing; it was weakness and oppression on the heart; she wanted care and nourishment. But no care revived her. She grew weaker and weaker, and the low fever came, and there was no strength left to battle with it. But Virginie would not see the danger; when the neighbors came for news, she would answer, with a smile on her wan face: “Thank God! no worse. The child is very weak; but last night she slept a little.” Thus twenty days went by, and then there came a change, and on the twenty-first day, as the Vesper bell was tolling, the _curé_ came, and Alba was anointed as a bride for heaven. The old man wept like a child as he blessed her and departed. “God comfort you, Mère Virginie!” he said, laying his hand heavily on the mother’s head. But Virginie was like one in whom the faculty of pain or of despair was paralyzed. “She will not die, M. le Curé. God is merciful; his heart is kind,” she said. When the sun was going down, Alba spoke: “Mother, bring me his picture and the pearls he gave me; I should like to wear them once before I go....” They brought the pearls and decked her in them; they smoothed back the moist, dark hair and crowned her with the queenly coronet; they clasped the necklace round her throat and the bracelets on her arms, while she lay quite passive, as if unconscious of what they were doing. Never had she looked so beautiful as at this hour in the deepening twilight, with the shadow of death stealing on her and touching her features with a celestial pathos. Virginie could not but see it now. Alba was going from her. But, no! it should not be. No, there was a God in heaven, a merciful, all-powerful God; it should not be. He would save her child even at this extremity. She had not cried to him loud enough before, but now she would cry and he should hear her, now that she knew how dire was her need of him. She knelt down at a little distance from the bed and began to pray. It was terrible to see her; to see how despair and faith wrestled within her. The agony of the strife was visible in her face; it was pale as death, and the big drops stood upon her brow, that was contracted as by breathless pain; her eyes were open, fixed in a rigid stare as on some unseen presence; her white lips, drawn in, were slightly parted, as if to let the words escape that she could not articulate; her hands were locked together, bloodless from the fierce grip of the fingers. Old Jeanne cowered in the corner as she watched her.

An hour went by. The tide was coming in; the waves were washing on the shore with the old familiar sound. The moon rose and stirred the shadows on the plain; its light stole through the latticed window and overflowed in a silver stream upon the bed, illuminating it like a shrine in the darkened chamber.

“Mother!” murmured Alba faintly.

“My child!”

“Kiss me, mother.... I am going....”

“Alba! my child!... O God! O God! have pity on me....”

But Alba had passed beyond the mother’s voice.

* * * * *

There are cries, we sometimes say, that might wake the dead—cries that sound like a disembodied spirit, as if a human soul had broken loose with all its terrors and hopes and concentrated life of love and agony, and, escaping in a voice, traversed the void of space and pierced into the life beyond. Those who have heard that cry will remember the silence that followed it—a silence like no other, infinite, death-like, as if the pulse of time stood still, hearkening for the echo on the other side.

The neighbors came and grieved. “How beautiful she is!” they whispered to one another, as they stood by the couch where Alba lay smiling in her death-sleep and decked in her bridal pearls. “No wonder our young lord loved her. How strange that he should have left her! Has she died of love, I wonder?” Many thought more of Virginie than of Alba. “She will die of grief,” they said. For Virginie had not shed a tear, not uttered one wail of lamentation, since that great cry that followed Alba into the dark beyond. She and Jeanne had arrayed her in her bridal dress—those splendid robes of silk and lace which her lover in his pride had prepared for her; it was a foolish fancy, but the mother, remembering how her lost one had loved these splendors, seemed filled with a vague idea that they might even now give her some pleasure. When this was done she sat with her hands lying loosely locked together on her knees, gazing on the dead face, as mute and motionless as if she were dead herself. Yet some said they noticed a strange look like a gleam of disbelief in her eyes now and then, as if she thought death but mocked her with some kind intent.

The night and the day passed, and the night again, and to-day at noon the dead bride was to be borne away. Friends crowded in for a last look; then, as the hour drew near, there was a movement without, a sound of voices chanting in the distance, the tramp of feet approaching, and they knew it was time for them to go. But Virginie still sat there, pallid, immovable, like a statue set up to stir pity and reverence in the hearts of the beholders. Mme. Caboff laid a hand upon her arm and pressed her gently to come away. “The child is not dead, but sleepeth,” she said; “take comfort in that thought.”

Then Virginie rose like one waking from a trance, and that strange gleam of disbelief which some had noticed in her eyes was now visible to all. “Go ye away, my friends,” she said, “and leave me here awhile with my child and God.” There was no murmur of dissuasion, though many thought that grief had made her mad; the majesty of grief subdued them to obedience, and one by one they passed out of the room in silence.

Then Virginie knelt down and lifted up her voice in a last supreme appeal to God.

“She is not dead, but sleepeth! Was that a message from thee, Lord? Thou hast whispered it to my heart before. And what if she were dead—are not death and sleep alike to thee? Canst thou not wake from one as easily as from the other? She is not dead, but sleepeth! When the Jews laughed thee to scorn, thou didst glorify thy Father and raise the dead girl to life again, and all the people blessed thee. Thou didst pity the widow and restore her son, though she knew not of thy presence nor believed in thee. Wilt thou be less pitiful to me, who believe and cry to thee? Son of David, look down upon me, have pity upon me, and awake my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Canst thou not wake her from this sleep as readily as thou didst raise Lazarus from the grave where he had lain four days? Christ crucified! Redeemer! Saviour! Father! hearken to my prayer and have mercy on me! By thy pity for the widow, and for Lazarus’ sisters, and for thy own Mother at the foot of the cross, and for John and Magdalen, and for thy murderers, have pity on me and call back my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Father! by the birth of thy dear Son, by his thirty-three years’ toil and poverty, by his bloody sweat, by his scourging, by the nails that were hammered into his hands and feet, by the lance that cut into his heart, by his death and sleep in the sepulchre, by his victory over the grave, by his resurrection and his reign of glory at thy right hand, hear me and give me back my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Lord! I believe in thy name, I believe in thy love, I believe in thy mercy and omnipotence. I believe; O God! help thou my unbelief. The child is not dead, but sleepeth.”

She rose from her knees, and, pressing the crucifix with one hand on the breast of the dead, she held the other uplifted with priest-like solemnity. There was a pause of intense and awful silence; the chanting without had ceased; every ear was strained, every heart stood still, listening to the prayer they dared not say _amen_ to. Then Virginie’s voice arose again, sounding not like hers, but rather like a voice that came from some depth of life within, beyond her, and making the mute void vibrate to its solemn tones: “_Alba! in the name of the living God, awake!_...”

Then silence closed upon her speech, and every pulse was stilled to a deeper hush.... The white lids quivered, the sleeper’s breast heaved beneath the pressure of the cross, sending forth a soft, long sigh, and Alba was awake.

“Mother!”

And now a cry arose from without the cottage which must surely have been heard in heaven; for the rocks took it up and bore it out to sea, and the waves rolled it back to the reverberating shore, and deep called unto deep, and louder and louder it rose and rang, until it thrilled the welkin, and heaven sent back to earth the shout of jubilee and praise.

But there was one who did not join in it. When the first ecstasy of her thanksgiving was past, and Virginie had clasped the loved one in her arms, and felt the warm blood returning to the cold lips under her kisses, she saw that Alba was like one whose spirit was not there; her eyes were open in a wide, intense gaze, as if straining to see beyond their ken, her ears were deaf to the sounds around her, hearkening for a voice that others could not hear.

“My child, my darling, let us give thanks together!” Virginie said when they were once more alone. But Alba turned her eyes upon her mother with that far-off gaze that seemed to reach beyond the veil. “Mother,” she said, speaking in low, fearful tones—“mother, why did you call me back? Did you not know I was with God? I was with God,” she continued in the same hushed tones; “I was in heaven with the angels and all the blessed ones, so full of happiness that I have no words to speak of it.”

“Tell me what you saw, my child. It was a dream; but God sometimes gives us visions in a dream.”

“It was no dream, mother. I was dead. My soul had left my body and taken flight into eternity. I stood before the throne and saw the vision of God. But of this I cannot speak.”

Alba paused like one whom reverence made dumb, and then continued: “I sang. O the joy of victory that thrilled through me as I lifted up my voice, and heard it amongst all the voices of the blessed! That was the wonder. Voice upon voice uprose, till all the hosts of heaven were singing, and yet you heard each singer distinct from all the rest; each voice was different, as star differeth from star when all are shining. And there was room in the vast space for silence. I heard the silence, deep, palpitating, as when we hold our breath to listen, and I heard the songs as they rolled out in full organic numbers from the countless choir. I heard my own voice, clear and sweet and loud like the clarion of an archangel; thousands of nightingales singing as one bird in the stillness of the summer night were nothing to it! And then the joy of recognition and of love—the very air was warm with love. Every spirit in the angelic host—the saints, the prophets of the old law, the martyrs and confessors and virgins—all loved me and knew me with an individual knowledge, and I knew them. And—I know not how it was—though all were resting in a halcyon peace, none were idle; they were busy at some task in which the faculties of mind and soul, new-born and glorified and quickened a thousand-fold, were eagerly engaged. I seemed to see that they were governing the world and caring for the souls of men—of those chiefly whom they loved on earth. For this I know: that no true bond is broken by death; the loves of time live on into eternity; the sorrows of earth are felt and pitied up in heaven, and the blessed clasp us in their cherishing sympathies closer than they did on earth. For the life in heaven is manifold, and, while the blessed citizens toiled, and sang as if their very being were dissolving into music, their souls were dwelling in the light of the vision of God, feeding on its beauty in unbroken contemplation. All was activity, and a fulness of life compared to which our life is death, yet all was steeped in peace, in rest unutterable. O mother! why did you call me back from it?”

“It was a dream, my child; your soul was in a trance; perhaps it was at my prayer God woke you from it in time. But, Alba, are you not glad to be with me again? It seems to me that even in heaven I should have missed you!”

“I did not feel that I was parted from you; you seemed nearer to me there than when I was on earth. But, mother, I saw standing near the martyrs, yet not of them, a soul arrayed in crimson—that flaming light that I call crimson, not knowing its real name—and she stretched forth her arms to greet me with a greater joy than all the rest, and she called herself my mother?”

Virginie’s heart stood still. Had heaven betrayed her secret? If so, it were vain to try to hide it any longer. She told the truth to Alba. “And now,” she said, “you will love that mother in heaven better than you love me!” There was a look of humble, beseeching misery in her face as she said this that was most pitiful. But Alba did not answer; that far-off gaze was in her eyes again. At last, slowly turning them upon Virginie, she said: “Now I can understand why you called me back. If you had been my real mother you would have let me go; your love would have been brave enough to part with me, to suffer when you knew that I was happy.”

There was no anger in her voice, no reproach in her look; but the words held the bitterness of death to Virginie, and pierced her heart like blades of poisoned steel.

* * * * *

The mystery of the young lord’s silence ceased to occupy the first place in local gossip, now that a more exciting theme had been provided, but it held its place in Virginie’s mind and was seldom out of her thoughts.

“Would it not be a great joy to you to see him again?” she said to Alba.

“I should be glad of it, mother; but the time is so short it matters little whether I see him here or not.”

“You never loved him, Alba.”

“I loved him with my whole soul; I loved him too well. I would have died for love of him.”

She had died for love of him, the mother thought.

“And yet you do not care to see him again?”

“I am satisfied to wait until we meet in heaven.”

The spark was dead; it was useless trying to blow the cold ashes into a flame. Virginie devoured her heart in uncomplaining silence. If Alba’s reproach was merited, if her love had been at fault, tainted in its origin with egotism and cowardice, then it was meet that she should suffer and expiate the sin.

But Hermann, meantime, was on his way to Gondriac. He had not been killed or wounded or faithless; he had been confined at Vincennes by order of the emperor, in hopes that solitude might help him to see the folly of this intended marriage, and bend his stubborn fancy to the reasonable will of his imperial master. The experiment had failed. The emperor was dethroned, a captive now himself, and M. de Gondriac was free and speeding on the wings of love to claim the reward of his fidelity.

Before he reached the cottage on the cliff he had learned the story of Alba’s—resurrection, was it?—of her having passed in spirit through the gates of death, and come back to life so changed men hardly knew her for the same. “It was a trance,” the _curé_ said, when Hermann stopped on the road to take his greeting.

“It was death, monseigneur,” said the fishermen who gathered round his saddle-bow. “She died of love, and the mother’s prayer called her back to life; but the child left her heart in heaven and pines to be gone again.”

Hermann sent his horse on to the castle and made his way up the cliff, pondering this strange story. She had died of love of him, they said in their simple superstition, and was pining to die again. Sweet Alba! He would make her life such a paradise of love that she should have no reason to regret her glimpse of heaven. As he drew near the low, thatched cottage the purr of Virginie’s spinning-wheel came to him with the old familiar welcome. He opened the door and entered unannounced.

“Monseigneur!” She dropped her yarn with a cry.

The glad surprise subsided, Hermann in a few words explained all, and then heard the details of the wonderful tale Virginie had to tell.

“You will find her somewhere on the rocks,” she said. “It may be that the sudden sight of you will startle her dead heart into life and bring back a thrill of the old happiness; if not, I pray God to take her to himself, for the sight of the child’s patient misery is killing me.”

But M. de Gondriac had no such dismal apprehensions as he went out to seek his beautiful one. How would she meet him? Would it be with the old shy glance of pleasure, giving him her hand to kiss, and forbidding any tenderer caress by that air of virgin pride that sat on her so queenly? Or would joy break down the barriers and send her bounding into his arms? He trod the sandy grass with a quick, strong step, but the sound of his footfalls fell upon her ear unheeded; she sat motionless, with her face set towards the sea till he was at her side.

“Alba!”

Then she looked up, and a pale blush, faint as the heart of a white rose, clouded her face.

“Hermann!”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, and she took his caress as she might have done a brother’s. The placid tenderness of her manner chilled him.

“Alba! my wife! You are glad to see me back again!” he said, still holding her close to him and looking into her eyes for some answering sigh, some flash of the old coy, shrinking fondness; but they looked back into his limpid, calm, passionless as a dove’s. She smiled and lifted up her face to kiss him. He bent down to receive it, but that proffered kiss was like the iron entering into his soul. The Alba whom he had left was not here; she had gone, he knew not whither, and in her place another being had come—a shadow of the woman who had loved him with all a woman’s tenderness. He sat down beside her and related the history of his life since they had parted, all he had suffered for her sake, and how light he held the suffering now that the reward was his; and she listened calmly, and spoke her gratitude with a gentle humility that was very touching. Then they were silent for a while, Alba apparently not caring to speak, Hermann longing to do so, but not daring to say what his mind was full of. At last Alba broke the spell.

“You know that I was dead,” she said; “I should be in heaven now, if mother had not called me back.”

“My darling! I will make a heaven for you on earth.”

“I once thought that was possible. I thought that heaven could give me nothing better than your love; but now I know that all the love of earth is but a shadow, a mockery compared to the love of heaven. It is nothing, nothing beside it! O Hermann! when we talk of happiness we are like blind fools. We don’t know what happiness means.”

“Alba! you have ceased to love me, or you would not speak so!”

“I love you as well as ever—nay, better than I did before; but, O Hermann! I should have loved you so infinitely better up in heaven. If you knew what the life of love is there!”

She clasped her hands, and her dark eyes shone with a supernatural light, as if the brightness of glory, invisible to him, were reflected there.

“You will tell me about it, darling, but not now,” he said, a terrible dread seizing him. “I want you to think of me a little now, and not so much of heaven. We must fix our wedding-day; it shall be soon, shall it not? There is no need for any delay.”

“No, there is no need,” she repeated. Then, after a pause, she said, looking calmly into his face: “Hermann, why should we not wait to wed one another in heaven?”

“There is no marrying or giving in marriage there,” he replied: but he had grown ashy pale, and the chill of a horrible fear was in his heart, deepening with every word that Alba spoke.

“You are angry with me,” she said, misunderstanding his pallor and the changed expression of his face. “O Hermann! don’t think that I have ceased to love you. I love you with all my heart. I have never loved any one, never could love any one, but you. Say you are not angry with me!”

“No, darling, I am not angry; but I thought we were to be so happy together, and I see that you are changed. But, Alba, I will not hold you to your promise; you shall not marry me unless you wish it.”

“I do wish it. I wish to make you happy. I have no other wish on earth now.”

He kissed her without answering, and they went home.

The terrible fear which for a moment possessed him was soon dispelled. Alba was not mad. Whatever was the mysterious change that had come over her, her reason was unimpaired. But all else was changed: the conditions of life had become reversed, the spiritual relations between the seen and the unseen were in some way disturbed, and things thrown out of their natural proportion. But the nature of the experience by which this change had been wrought eluded Hermann’s grasp, baffling reason while it compelled belief. Belief in what? Had Alba’s spirit, infringing the laws that rule our mortal state, broken loose from its prison, and been permitted to stand before the gates of pearl and taste of those joys which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, and then been sent back to earth, home-sick as an exiled angel? Was this thing possible? Is anything not possible to Him who bids the lilies blow and the stars shine, and who holds the sea in the hollow of his hand? Hermann de Gondriac did not stop to investigate the mystery. His was one of those human souls whose deepest convictions lie dormant in their depths, not only unanalyzed but unrecognized, for want of a voice to question them. He loved Alba, and he would trust to his love to mend the broken spring and reconcile to the happiness of earth this heart enamored by the bliss of heaven.

* * * * *

The wedding-day rose bright and fair; a golden glow was on the flood; the sun shone on the breakers, turning the green to sapphire blue, while the tide flowed in, swelling the anthem of the dawn; the yellow woods round Alba’s home glistened like a golden zone, fit symbol of the enchanted life awaiting her within their magic ring. No sad Vesper bell was tolling; merrily the silver-footed chimes, like messengers of joy, tripped on to meet her on the morning air, as she came forth, once more arrayed in bridal pearls. A train of little children, clad in white and piping canticles, went on before, strewing flowers upon her path.

Pale as a lily in her snow-white robes was Alba, her dark eyes glowing with a light that was most beautiful; and when the bridegroom turned to greet her at the altar, her smile, they said, was like the smile of an angel.

The wedding rite began; the ring was passed, the solemn words were spoken: “_Until death do part ye...._” Then Alba, with a cry of joy, as when we greet some vision of delight, fell forward and was caught in Hermann’s arms.

“Farewell, beloved!... Mother, farewell!...”

“Alba! my wife! O God! can it be possible?...”

But loud above the lover’s wail and that of all the people Virginie’s voice was heard in tones more of jubilee than lamentation: “Thy will be done, O Lord! Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

* * * * *

That night the moon rose late; the sea-gulls, poised above the purple flood, heard the waves wash softly on the noiseless shore; the stars came out and looked into the shining sea below; the rocks gleamed white as snow-peaks in the moonlight, and all the land lay listening to the silver silence. From out its depths a voice was calling, though only those who hearkened heard it, and the voice said: “Thou shalt see His face, ... and night shall be no more, and they shall not need the light of the lamp, nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall enlighten them, and they shall reign for ever and ever.”

THE END.

ITALY. WRITTEN AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.