VOL. XXIV., No. 141.—DECEMBER, 1876.
Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1877. THE UNITARIAN CONFERENCE AT SARATOGA.[89] The Unitarians in September last held at Saratoga their biennial conference, and we have looked over the issues of the Liberal Christian, a weekly publication of this city, for a full report of its proceedings, and looked to no purpose. It has, however, printed in its columns some of the speeches delivered in the conference, and given in extenso the opening sermon of the Rev. Edward E. Hale. Before the conference took place the Liberal Christian spoke of Rev. Edward E. Hale “as one of the few thoroughly-furnished and widely-experienced men in their ranks.” This notice prepared us to give special attention to the opening sermon, and to expect from it a statement of Unitarian principles or beliefs which would at least command the assent of a considerable portion of the Unitarian denomination. More than this it would have been unreasonable to anticipate; for so radical and extreme are their divergencies of belief that it may be said Unitarians agree on no one common objective truth; certainly not, if Mr. Frothingham and the section which the latter gentleman represents are to be ranked within the pale of Unitarianism. The Rev. Edward E. Hale has not altogether disappointed our anticipations, for he has given expression to some of the ideas most prevalent among Unitarians; but before entering upon the consideration of these there are certain preliminary statements which he makes deserving some attention. In the closing sentence of the first paragraph of his sermon Mr. Hale gives us a noticeable piece of information. He says: “We were taught long since by Macaulay, in fervent rhetoric, that the republic of Venice is new in comparison with the papacy, and that the Roman Church was in its vigor when Augustine landed in Kent in the sixth century. So it was. But earlier than all this, before there was a bishop in Rome, there were independent Christian churches, liberal in their habit and Unitarian in their creed, in Greece, in Asia, and in Cyprus. Nay, before those churches existed there had gathered a group of peasants around the Saviour of men, and he had said to them: ‘Fear not, little flock; it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’ The Congregational Church order, with the Unitarian theology, is the oldest Christian system known to history.” What authentic history goes back of the account given in the New Testament of the founding of the Catholic Church and her hierarchy by Christ the Rev. Mr. Hale does not deign to inform us. When he does, it will be time enough to pay attention to the assertion, “The Congregational Church order is the oldest Christian system known to history.” The church is in possession; the plaintiffs must make out their case. Until then, “quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur”; for an assertion without proof counts for nothing. But he does attempt to prove his assertion about “Unitarian theology” by what follows: “I make no peculiar partisan claim or boast in this statement. As to the statement of theology, I do but condense in a few words the statement made by the Roman Catholic writer in highest esteem among Englishmen to-day. He says what I say, that he may argue from it that you require the development of doctrine which only the perpetual inspiration of a line of pontiffs gives you, unless you choose to hold by the simple Unitarian creeds of the fathers before Constantine.” From which of the many volumes of the writings of Dr. Newman Mr. Hale has ventured to condense his language we are not told; but we are led to suppose that it was written by Dr. Newman since he became a Catholic, for he speaks of him as “the Roman Catholic writer in the highest esteem among Englishmen to-day.” As a Catholic, Dr. Newman never used language which could be condensed by a “thoroughly-informed” man to what Rev. Mr. Hale has made him say; and we have our doubts whether before he was a Catholic he used it. It would not be amiss if Mr. Hale had something of Dr. Newman’s clearness of thought and accuracy of expression. If he had, of this we are sure: he would never venture to utter in a public speech or put in print that any Catholic writer who has any claim of being a theologian believed or maintained “the perpetual inspiration of a line of pontiffs.” In the next paragraph Rev. Mr. Hale literally quotes a passage from Dr. Newman’s writings to sustain his thesis, but he fails. Here is the quotation: “The creeds of that early day,” says Dr. Newman, “make no mention in their letter of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity at all. They make mention, indeed, of a three, but that there is any mystery in the doctrine, that the three are one, that they are co-equal, co-eternal, all increate, all omnipotent, all incomprehensible, is not stated, and never could be gathered from them.” He fails, because he proceeds on the supposition that the Catholic Church teaches that her creeds contain the whole body of truth of the Christian faith. The Catholic Church at no time or nowhere taught this. Her creeds never did contain explicitly the whole body of the Christian faith, they do not even now; for such was not her intention or purpose. Had it not been for the errors of Arius and his followers, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity might not have been contained in the creeds of the church explicitly, even down to our own day. The supposition, however, that the mystery of the Trinity was not believed in the church “before Constantine” is as absurd as to suppose that the necessity of good works for salvation, or there being a purgatory, was not believed and maintained in the Catholic Church before the time of Charles V., or that Papal Infallibility was not believed and held in the church before the time of William of Prussia, the German kaiser! The discussions and definitions of the councils render Christian truths more explicit and intelligible than they were before; this is a matter of course, but who is so ignorant as to suppose that the councils originated these truths? That the creeds “before Constantine” implied the Trinity and intended it Dr. Newman would have taught the Rev. Edward E. Hale, if he had ingenuously quoted the two sentences which follow his extract. Dr. Newman continues thus: “Of course we believe that they [the early creeds] imply it [the Trinity]. God forbid we should do otherwise!”[90] Rev. Edward E. Hale ought to know that the Catholic Church repudiates with instinctive horror the idea of adding to, or taking away from, or altering in the least, the body of the Christian truth delivered once and for all to her keeping by her divine Founder when upon earth. The mistakes he makes on these points arise from his viewing the church solely as an assembly, overlooking that she is also a corporated body, informed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the constitution given to her by Christ includes the commission to “teach all things whatsoever he commanded.” Following what has gone before, the Rev. Mr. Hale makes another surprising statement. He says: “It was not to be expected—nor, in fact, did anybody expect—that a religion so simple and so radical should sweep the world without contaminating its own simplicity and blunting the edge of its own radicalism in the first and second contact, nay, in the contact of centuries. Least of all did Jesus Christ himself expect this. Nobody so definite as he in the statement of the obscurities and defilements which would surround his simple doctrine of ‘Love God and love men.’” In all deference to Mr. Hale, this is precisely what everybody did expect from the church of Christ—to teach the truth with purity and unswerving fidelity, “without contamination in the contact,” for all “centuries.” For this is what the promises of Christ led them precisely to expect when he founded his church. He promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”[91] He promised also that he would be with his church through all ages: “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.”[92] Does Mr. Hale read the Holy Scriptures and believe what he reads? Listen, again, to St. Paul’s description of the church. After saying that “Christ is the head of the church,” and “the church is subject to Christ,” he adds: “Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life; that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, nor any such thing.”[93] Now, although the Rev. E. E. Hale has thrown overboard the belief in the divinity of Christ and the supernatural inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, nevertheless the words of Christ and his apostle, measured only by the standard of personal holiness and learning, ought to be esteemed, when speaking of God’s church, of equal authority, at least, to his statement, even though he ranks “as one of the few thoroughly-furnished and widely-experienced men” among Unitarians. But how did the church of Christ become “contaminated”? This is an important point, and here is the Rev. E. E. Hale’s reply to it: “And, in truth, so soon as the church met with the world, it borrowed while it lent, it took while it gave. So, in the face of learned Egypt, it Egyptianized its simple Trinity; in the face of powerful Rome it heathenized its nascent ritual; in the face of wordy Greece it Hellenized its dogmatics and theology; and by way of holding well with Israel it took up a rabbin’s reverence even for the jots and tittles of its Bible. What history calls ‘Christianity,’ therefore, is a man-adorned system, of which the methods can be traced to convenience, or even to heathen wisdom, if we except that one majestic method by which every true disciple is himself ordained a king and a priest, and receives the charge that in his daily life he shall proclaim glad tidings to every creature.” The common error of the class of men to whom the Rev. E. E. Hale belongs, who see the church, if at all, only on the outside, is to “put the cart before the horse.” It is not the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, who teach the church of Christ, but the church of Christ which teaches the truth to the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Christ came to teach all nations, not to be taught by them. Hence, in communicating his mission to his church, he said: “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations.”[94] The church, in fulfilling this divine commission of teaching all nations, utilizes their gifts in bringing out the great truths committed to her care by her divine Founder. It is in this cooperation with the work of the church that the different nations and races of men find the inspiration of their genius, the noblest employment of their highest faculties, and the realization of their providential mission upon earth. For the scattered rays of religious truth which were held by the different nations and races of men under paganism were derived from primitive revelation, and it is only when these are brought within the focus of the light of universal truth that their complete significance is appreciated, and they are seen in all their original splendor. The Catholic Church, in this aspect, is the reintegration of natural religion with the truths contained in primitive revelation and their perfect fulfilment. Moreover, there is no truth contained in any of the ancient religions before the coming of Christ, or affirmed by any of the heresies since that event, or that may be hereafter affirmed, which is not contained, in all its integrity, in Catholicity. This is only saying, in other words, The Catholic Church is catholic. But these men do not see the church, and they appear to regard Christianity as still an unorganized mass, and they are possessed with the idea that the task is imposed upon them to organize the Christian Church; and this work occupied and perplexed them not a little in their Unitarian biennial conference held in the town of Saratoga, in the United States of North America, in the month of September, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-six! “Poor wanderers! ye are sore distrest To find the path which Christ has blest, Tracked by his saintly throng; Each claims to trust his own weak will— Blind idol!—so ye languish still, All wranglers, and all wrong.” [95] Were the veil taken from their spiritual eyes, and did they behold the church as she is, they would easily comprehend that her unbroken existence for nineteen centuries alone, saying nothing of what glory is in store for her in the future, is a more evident and conclusive proof to us of the divinity of her Founder than the miracle of his raising Lazarus from the dead was to those who were actual witnesses to it. For, in raising Lazarus from the dead, he had but to deal with passive matter, and that for only an instant; whereas in founding his church he had to exert his power and counteract all the attacks of the gates of hell, combined with the persecutions of the world and the perversities of men, during successive centuries until the end of all time. None but the living God could be the author of so potent, comprehensive, and indestructible a body as the Catholic Church. Of all the unanswerable testimonies of the divinity of Christ, there is none so forcible as that of the perpetual existence of the one, holy, Roman Catholic Church. She is the standing miracle of Christ. The reverse sense of the statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale on this point contains the truth. The Catholic Church welcomes all nations and races to her fold, and reintegrates the scattered truths contained in every religious system, not by way of reunion or composition, but by simplicity and unity in a divine synthesis; and as the ancient Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the Romans, so also the modern Franks and Celts, have served by their characteristic gifts to the development and progress of Christian truth. In like manner the Saxons, with their peculiar genius and instincts, will serve, to their own greater glory, in due season, in the same great cause, perhaps, by giving a greater development and a more scientific expression to the mystic life of the church, and by completing, viewed from intrinsic grounds, the demonstration of the truth of her divine mission. Leaving aside other misstatements and errors contained in the first part of this sermon from want of space, we pass on to what may be termed its pith. Mr. Hale starts with the hazardous question, “What is the Unitarian Church for?” As far as we can make out from repeated reading of the main portion of the sermon—for there reigns a great confusion and incoherence in his ideas—the Unitarian Church has for its mission to certify anew and proclaim the truth that “God is in man.” “God in man,” he says, “is in itself the basis of the whole Gospel.” Undoubtedly “God is in man,” and God is in the brute, and God is in every grain of sand, and God is in all things. God is in all things by his immensity—that is, by his essence, and power, and presence. But this is a truth known by the light of human reason, and taught by all sound philosophers, heathen and Christian. There was no need of the Gospel, nor of that “fearlessness” which, he tells us, “was in the Puritan blood,” nor of the Unitarian Church, to teach this evident and common truth to mankind. The Gospel message means more than that, and the Rev. Mr. Hale has some idea that it does mean more. He adds: “Every man is God’s child, and God’s Spirit is in every life.” Again: “Men are the children of God really and not figuratively”; “The life of God is their life by real inheritance.” After having made these statements, he attempts to give the basis and genesis of this relation of God as father to man as child, as follows: “That the force which moves all nature is one force, and not many, appears to all men, as they study it, more and more. That this force is conscious of its own existence, that it is conscious of its own work, that it is therefore what men call spirit, that this spirit has inspired and still inspires us, that we are therefore not creatures of dumb power, but children of a Father’s love—this is the certainty which unfolds itself or reveals itself, or is unfolded or is revealed, as higher and higher man ascends in his knowledge of what IS.” That man, by the light of his reason, can, by the study of nature, attain to this idea of God and his principal attributes, as Spirit, as Creator, upholder of the universe, and as Providence, is no doubt true; but that, by the study of “the force which moves all nature,” our own consciousness included, we can learn that we are the “children of a Father’s love,” does not follow, and is quite another thing. It is precisely here that Unitarianism as a consistent, intelligible religious system crumbles into pieces. Nor can Unitarians afford to follow the Rev. Edward E. Hale in his attempt to escape this difficulty by concealing his head, ostrich-like, under the sand of a spurious mysticism, and virtually repudiating the rational element in religion by saying: “The mystic knows that God is here now. He has no chain of posts between child and Father. He relies on no long, logical system of communication,” etc. The genuine mystic, indeed, “knows God is here,” but he knows also that God is not the author of confusion, and to approach God he does not require of man to put out the light of his reason. He will tell us that the relation of God to all things as created being, and the relation of God to man as rational being, and the relation of God to man as father to child, are not one and the same thing, and ought not, therefore, to be confounded. The true mystic will further inform us that the first relation, by way of immanence, is common to all created things, man included; the second, by way of rationality, is common to the human race; the third, by way of filiation, is common to those who are united to God through the grace of Christ. The first and second are communicated to man by the creative act of God, and are therefore ours by right of natural inheritance through Adam. The third relation is communicated to us by way of adoption through the grace of the new Adam, Christ, who is “the only-begotten Son of God.” This relation is not, therefore, ours by inheritance. We “have received from Christ,” says St. Paul to the Romans, “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry: Abba, Father.”[96] “By whom also we have access through faith into this grace, wherein we stand, and glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God.”[97] It is proper to remark here that it is an error very common among radicals, rationalists, and a certain class of Unitarians to suppose that the relation of the soul to God by way of filiation, due to Christ, is intended as a substitute for our natural relations to God by way of immanence and rationality; whereas Christianity presupposes these, reaffirms, continues, completes, and perfects them, by this very gift of filiation with God. For it is a maxim common to all Catholic theologians that gratia supponit et perficit naturam. Our intelligent mystic would not stop here. Proceeding further, he would say that to be really and truly children of God by inheritance implies our being born with the same identical nature as God. For the nature of a child is not a resemblance to, or an image of, that of his father, but consists in his possessing the same identical essence and nature as his father. If the son is equal to his father by nature, then he is also equal to his father in his capacities as such. Now, if every man, by nature, has the right to call God father, as the Rev. Mr. Hale and his co-religionists pretend, then all men by nature are equal to God, both in essence and attributes! Is this what Unitarians mean by “the divinity of human nature”? The Rev. E. E. Hale appears to say so when he tells us: “What we are struggling for, and what, if words did not fail us, we would fain express, is what Dr. James Walker called ‘the identity of essence of all spiritual being and all spiritual life.’” All, then, that the believers in the divinity of Christ claim exclusively for him is claimed by Unitarians equally for every individual of the human race. But the belief in the divinity of Christ is “the latest and least objectionable form of idolatry”—so the Rev. H. W. Bellows informs us in his volume entitled Phases of Faith. The Unitarian cure, then, for the evil of idolatry is by substituting an indefinite multitude of idols for one single object of idolatrous worship. There is one class of Unitarians, to whom the author of this sermon seems to belong, who accept boldly the consequences of their premise, and maintain without disguise that all men are by nature the equals of Christ, and that there is no reason why they should not, by greater fidelity, surpass Christ. Up to this period of time, however, they have not afforded to the world any very notable specimen of the truth of their assertion. Another class attempt to get over the difficulty by a critical exegesis of the Holy Scriptures, denying the authenticity or the meaning of those parts which relate to the miraculous conception of Christ, his miracles, and his divinity. A representative of the extreme wing on the right of Unitarianism replied, when this point was presented to him: “Oh! we Unitarians reject the idea of the Trinity as represented by Calvinists and other Protestants, for they make it a tritheism; but we accept the doctrine as holy mother Church teaches it”; while a leader of the extreme left admitted the difficulty, and in speaking of Dr. Channing, who championed the idea of the filiation of man to God, he said: “No intelligent Unitarian of to-day would attempt to defend the Unitarianism of Dr. Channing.” He was right; for no Unitarian, on the basis of his belief, can say consistently the Lord’s Prayer; for the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation is a rigorous necessity to any one who admits the infinite and the finite, and the necessity of a union of love between them which authorizes the finite to call the Infinite Father! One may bestow sympathy upon the pious feelings of that class of Unitarians of which Dr. Channing is the representative, but the less said about their theological science the better. Our genuine mystic would not stop here. He would continue and show that the denial of the Incarnation involves the denial of the Trinity, and the denial of the Trinity reduces the idea of God to a mere abstraction. For all conception of real life is complex. Intellectual life in its simplest elements, in its last analysis, will be found to consist of three factors: Man as the thinker, one factor; the thing thought, the second factor; and their relation, the third factor—or the lover, the beloved, and their relation; again, the actor, the thing acted upon, and their relation. Man cannot think, love, or act where there is nothing to think, to love, or to act upon. Place man in an absolute vacuum, where there is nothing except himself, and you have man in posse, but not man as being, as existing, as a living man. You have a unit, an abstraction, nothing more. But pure abstractions have no real existence. Our conception of life in accordance with the law which governs our intelligence is comprised in three terms—subject, object, and their relation.[98] There is no possible way of bringing out of a mere unit, as our absolute starting point of thought, an intellectual conception of life. But the Unitarian idea of God is God reduced to a simple, absolute unit. Hence the Unitarian idea of God is not the conception of the real, living God, but an abstraction, a non-existing God. Our genuine mystic would proceed still further; for infused light and love from above do not suspend or stultify the natural action of our faculties, but quicken, elevate, and transform their operations. He would apply, by way of analogy, the same process of thought in confirmation of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. If there had been a time, he would say, when there was no object before God, then there would have been a period when God was not the real, living God, but only God in posse, non-existing. But this is repugnant to the real conception of God; therefore the true idea of God involves a co-eternal object. If, however, this co-eternal object was not equal to God in substance as well as in attributes, then there would have been a period when God did not exist in all his fulness. Now, this object, co-eternal and equal to God the Father, is what the Catholic doctrine teaches concerning Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, “begotten before all ages, consubstantial with the Father.” But the Father and the Son being co-eternal and co-adequate, their relations to each other must have been eternal and equal, outflowing toward each other in love, commensurate with their whole nature. This procession of mutual love between Father and Son is what the Catholic doctrine teaches concerning the Holy Spirit. Thus we see, however imperfectly, that the Catholic doctrine concerning the Trinity presents to our minds nothing that is contrary to our reason, though it contains an infinite abyss beyond the present scope of our reason, but which we shall know when our reason is increased, as it will be, by the gift of the light of glory. But every mystery of Christianity has an intelligible side to our natural reason, and by the light of faith it is the privilege and joy of a Christian while here upon earth to penetrate more deeply into their hidden, divine truth. Again, the Unitarian is mistaken when he supposes that Catholics, in maintaining the Trinity, exclude the divine Unity. They include both in one. Herein again is found in man an analogy. Man is one in triplicity. Man is thought, love, and activity, and at the same time man is one. He thinks, he loves, he acts; there are not three distinct men, one who thinks, another who loves, and still another who acts. There is, therefore, a sense in which man is one in three and three in one. So there is in the Trinity. The Unitarians are right in affirming the divine Unity; their error consists in excluding the divine Trinity. All heresies are right in what they affirm, and wrong in what they exclude or deny; which denial is the result of their breaking away from that divine Unity in whose light alone every truth is seen in its co-relation with all other truths. Our true mystic would not be content to rest here, but, soaring up upon the wings of divine light and love, and taking a more extended view, he would strive to show that where the doctrine of the Trinity is not held either explicitly or implicitly, there not only the theory of our mental operations and the intellectual foundation of religion dissolve into a baseless fabric of a vision; but that also the solid basis of society, the true idea of the family, the right conception of the state and its foundations, and the law of all genuine progress, are wanting, and all human things tend towards dissolution and backward to the reign of old chaos. We give another characteristic statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale’s opening sermon which must have grated harshly on the ears of the more staid and conservative portion of his audience; it is under the head of “The immanent presence of God.” He says: “The Roman Church will acknowledge it, and St. Francis and St. Vincent and FÉnelon will illustrate it. But, at the same time, the Roman Church has much else on her hands. She has to be contending for those seven sacraments, for this temporal power, all this machinery of cardinals and bishops, and bulls and interdicts, canon law and decretals, so that in all this upholstery there is great risk that none of us see the shrine. So of the poor little parodies of the Roman Church, the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, and the rest of them.” Again: “All our brethren in the other confessions plunge into their infinite ocean with this hamper of corks and floats, water-proof dresses lest they be wet, oil-cloth caps for their hair, flannels for decency, a bathing-cart here, a well-screened awning there—so much machinery before the bath that one hardly wonders if some men refuse to swim! For them there is this great apology, if they do not proclaim as we must proclaim, God here and God now; nay, if they do not live as we must live, in the sense of God here and God now. For us, we have no excuse. We have stripped off every rag. We have destroyed all the machinery.” The Rev. Mr. Hale regards the seven sacraments, the hierarchy, the canon law—briefly, the entire visible and practical side of the church—as a “hamper,” “machinery,” “rags,” and thinks there “is great risk that none of us see the shrine.” The difficulty here is not where Mr. Hale places it. “Night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.” The visible is not the prison of the invisible, as Plato dreamed, but its vehicle, as St. Paul teaches. “For the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity.”[99] The author of this sermon is at least consistent in his error; as he believes in an abstract God, so he would reduce “the church of the living God,” “the body of Christ,” to an abstract non-existence. Suppose, for example, that the Rev. Edward E. Hale had reduced “all the machinery” of his curiously-devised body to an abstraction before the Unitarian biennial conference was held at Saratoga; the world would have been deprived of the knowledge of that “simplicity which it is the special duty of the Unitarian Church to proclaim.” Think of the loss! For it was by means of the complex “machinery” of his concrete body that the Rev. E. E. Hale came in contact with the “machinery” of the Unitarian biennial organization at Saratoga, and, thus “upholstered,” he publicly rants against all “machinery.” There may be too complex an organization, and too many applications of it, and too much made of these, owing to the necessities of our times, in the Catholic Church, to suit the personal tastes and the stage of growth of the Rev. Edward E. Hale. But the Catholic Church does not exist solely for the benefit of Mr. Hale, or for any peculiar class of men, or any one race alone. He has and should have, and they all have, their own place and appropriate niche in her all-temple; for the Catholic Church takes up in her scope every individual, and the human race entire. But there are others, with no less integrity of spiritual life and intelligence than he, who esteem those things of which he speaks so unappreciatingly as heavenly gifts and straight pathways to see more clearly the inner shrine and approach more nearly to the divine Presence. Are the idiosyncrasies of one man, though “thoroughly furnished and widely experienced,” to be the norm of all other men, and of every race? Men and races differ greatly in these things, and the church of God is not a sect or conventicle; she is Catholic, universal, and in her bosom, and in her bosom alone, every soul finds its own place and most suitable way, with personal liberty and in accord with all other souls and the whole universe, to perfect union with God. The matter with the Rev. E. E. Hale is, he has missed his vocation. His place evidently was not in the assembled conference at Saratoga; for his calling is unmistakably to a hermit life. Let him hie to the desert, and there, in a forlorn and naked hermitage, amid “frosts and fasts, hard lodgings and thin weeds,” in an austere and unsociable life, “unswathed and unclothed,” in puris naturalibis, “triumphantly cease to be.” The Rev. E. E. Hale is one-sided, and seems to have no idea that the Catholic Church is the organization of that perfect communion of men with God and each other which Christ came to communicate and to establish in its fulness upon earth, and is its practical realization. God grant him, and others like him, this light and knowledge! But we would not have our readers think that all Unitarians agree with the Rev. E. E. Hale in his estimate of the visible or practical side of the church. We quote from a leading article in the Liberal Christian of August last, under the head of “Spirit and Form in Religion,” the following passage: “It seems painfully indicative of the still undeveloped condition of our race that no truce or medium can be approximated in which the two great factors of human nature and society, the authority and supremacy of spirit and the necessity and usefulness of form, are reconciled and made to serve each other or a common end. Must inward spirituality, and outward expression of it in forms and worship, be for ever in a state of unstable equilibrium? Must they ever be hostile and at cross-purposes? Must all progress be by a displacement in turn of each other—now an era of honored forms, and then of only disembodied spirituality? There is probably no entire escape from this necessity. But, surely, he is the wisest man who can hold this balance in the evenest hand; and that sect or school, whether political, social, or religious, that pays the finest justice and the most impartial respect to the two factors in our nature, spirit and form, will hold the steadiest place and do the most good for the longest time. This is the real reason why Quakerism, with all its exalted claims to respect, has such a feeble and diminishing importance. It has oil in the lamp of the purest kind, but almost no wick, and what wick it has is made up of its thee-ing and thou-ing, and its straight coat and stiff bonnet. These are steadily losing authority; and when they are abandoned, visible Quakerism will disappear. On the other hand, Roman Catholicism maintains its place against the spirit of the age, and in spite of a load of discredited doctrines, very largely because of its intense persistency in forms, its highly-illumined visibility, its large-handed legibleness; but not without the unfailing aid and support of a spirit of faith and worship which produces a devoted priesthood and hosts of genuine saints. No form of Christianity can boast of lovelier or more spiritual disciples, or reaches higher up or lower down, including the wisest and the most ignorant, the most delicate and the coarsest adherents. It has the subtlest and the bluntest weapons in its arsenal, and can pierce with a needle, or mow with a scythe, or maul with a mattock.” The same organ, in a later number, in speaking of the Saratoga conference, says: “The main characteristic of the meeting was a conscientious and reverent endeavor to attain to something like a scientific basis for our faith in absolute religion, and in Christianity as a consistent and concrete expression of it,” and adds that the opening sermon of the Rev. Mr. Hale “had the merit of starting us calmly and unexcitedly on our course.” Our readers will form their own judgment about what direction the course leads on which the Rev. Edward E. Hale started the Unitarians assembled at Saratoga in their seeking after a “scientific basis” for “absolute religion, and Christianity as a concrete expression of it”!
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER VII. AN UNEXPECTED PROPOSAL. The next morning coffee was brought to the bed-rooms at the first peep of dawn, and when the little party went out for their walk the sun had only just begun to set the sea-line on fire. They stepped for a moment into the Franciscan church next door, then went down the road leading past it to the Campagna. Fresh and sweet the morning air touched them as they sauntered along—not the morning breeze of New England, simple in associations as the breath of a newly-created being, but like the breath of one, immortally beautiful, about whom Calliope, Clio, and Erato have circled in their stately dance through the unfading centuries. Not only every spot of earth, but every waft of air, was haunted. Mr. Vane stopped them presently with a silent gesture, and pointed to a near height, where a solitary cloud, softly resplendent in all its beautiful undulations, was slowly and loathly detaching itself to float upward and disappear in the sky, as if the door of a sapphire palace had opened to receive it. “Is it Diana?” he whispered. “The Jew has touched nature with a pen of fire,” the Signora said as they walked on again; “but the pagan has dominated, and still in a certain sense possesses that beautiful realm. If, as Milton sings, ‘the parting genius was with sighing rent’ from tree and grove at the birth of Christ, its ghost still haunts the spot, and Milton himself uses pagan language when he sings the beauties of nature. Why does not some Christian Job dislodge these ‘mythic fancies,’ and make nature live with a life that is something more than the rustling of a garment? Job made the lightnings go and return at the command of God, saying, ‘Here we are!’ and he speaks of the ‘store-houses of the snow.’ The Christian poet seems to fear his imagination, to find it tainted, and, instead of purifying it, and setting it flying, like a bird or a butterfly, through the garden of the earth, he puts it in a cage or under a glass along with the pagan images he only glances askance at. Now and then one meets with a saint whose heart overflows in that direction, like St. Francis of Assisi, calling the birds his sisters. Blessed Fra Egidio made the flowers bear witness, as when he proved the miraculous motherhood of the Virgin to the doubting Predicatore. At each of the three strokes of his staff in the road, following his three assertions of Our Lady’s purity, up sprang a beautiful lily. Our Lord set the example in his reference to the lilies of the field: they toiled not, neither did they spin, yet the Creator had arrayed them as Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed. Did he talk to his mother about the flowers, I wonder? When the boat was tossed by a tempest, he spoke to the waves, as to living creatures, saying, ‘Peace, be still!’ Do spirits troublesome and troubled take shape, or, stretching their invisible hands, catch the shapes of nature as weapons, and lash with foam or strike with lightning? We cannot know, and we need not know; and we must not assert. It is not, however, forbidden to fancy. Nature may serve as the playground wherein our imagination and fancy shall exercise themselves and prepare our minds for the wonders of the spiritual life. Fancy and imagination are as really a part of ourselves, and as truly and wisely given by God, as reason and will. They are the sweet little enticements inviting us to fly off ‘From the dark edges of the sensual ground,’ as the bird-mother coaxes her young to try its wings in little flights from twig to twig before it soars into the heavens. No, it is not forbidden to the fancy to play around the mysterious life that makes the bud swell into the flower and the seed grow into the lofty tree, so long as we see all in God, and see in God the Trinity, and, in the aspiring flame of created adoring spirits, behold Maria Santissima as the white point that touches the foot of the throne.” The Signora had been speaking slowly and dreamily, pausing now and then; but at the last, growing earnest, had, as it were, waked herself, and become aware that she was talking aloud and was listened to. Smiling, and blushing too a little, “Scusino!” she said. “I cannot help it. I preach as the sparks fly upward.” “I speak for a seat in your meeting-house for the rest of my life,” Mr. Vane replied promptly. “Apropos of meeting-houses,” she said, “what do you think of those for spires?” pointing to four gigantic cypresses in the villa they were passing. This villa was a strange, deserted-looking place just above the Campagna. Nothing in it flourished but the four cypresses, which rose to a magnificent height, their huge cones sloping at the top to a feather so slender that it was always tipped to one side. Stern, dark, and drawn close together, they looked down on the place as if they had cursed it and were waiting to see the consummation of its ruin. All their shadows were full of a multitudinous grit of cicali voices that sounded like the sharp grating together of teeth. At their feet stood the house, half-alive, half-dead, hidden from the street by the walls it was not high enough to overlook. It was like the upper part of a house that the earth had half swallowed. At each side of the door stood a statue dressed in some antique fashion, hat on head and sword on thigh. They might have been two men who were petrified there long before. At each side of the gate, inside, a stone dog, petrified too, in the act of starting up with open jaws, crumbled in a blind rage, as if a paralyzed life yet dwelt under the lichen-covered fragments, and struggled to pour forth its arrested anger. A little farther on was another decaying villa, where green moss and grasses grew all over the steps, half hid the paving-stones of the court, and choked the fountain dry. The house, once a gay and noble mansion, had now got its shutters decently closed over the sightless windows, and resigned itself to desolation. The long, dim avenues had a damp, unhealthy breath, and not a flower was to be seen. They went in and seated themselves on the steps, where the shadow of the house, covering a verdant square in the midst of the sunshine, looked like a block of verd-antique set in gold. “It reminds me of the funeral we went to in St. Peter’s,” Mr. Vane said, glancing about the sombre place, and over the walls into the outside splendor. “The mournful pageant looked as small in that bright temple as this villa in the landscape.” The two girls gathered grasses and leaves and bits of moss, binding them into tiny bouquets to keep as mementos, and Bianca made a sketch of the two villas. They talked but little, and, in that silent and quiescent mood, perceived far more clearly the character and influence of the scene—the melancholy that was not without terror; the proud beauty that survived neglect and decay, and might at any time burst into a triumphant loveliness, if but some one should care to call forth the power hidden there; the dainty graces that would not thrust themselves forward, but waited to be sought. Yet it needed that summer and sunshine should be all about to keep the sadness from being oppressive. With those cheering influences so near and so dominantly larger, the touch of melancholy became a luxury, like a scattering of snow in wine. Isabel came back to the steps from her ramble about the place, and found her father and the Signora sitting there with no appearance of having uttered a word since she left them. “It is just the time to read something I found and brought with me from Rome,” she said. “I tucked it into my note-book, see, and something at this moment reminded me of it. Bianca was saying that if the place should be sprinkled with holy water, she did not doubt that flowers would immediately begin to grow again, and the track was not long from her notion round to this poem. It had no name when I found it, but I call it ‘At Benediction.’ The Signora told me that it was rude and unfinished; but no matter.” She read: At Benediction. “Like a dam in which the restless tide Has washed, till, grain by grain, It has sapped the solid barrier And swept it down again, The patience I have built and buttressed Like a fortress wall, Fretted and undermined, gives way, And shakes me in its fall. “For I have vainly toiled to shun The meaner ways of life, With all their low and petty cares, Their cold and cruel strife. My brain is wild with tangled thoughts, My heart is like to burst! Baffled and foiled at every turn— My God, I feel accursed! “It was human help I sought for, And human help alone; Too weary I for straining To a height above my own. But thy world, with all its creatures, holds Nor help nor hope for me; I fly to sanctuary, And cast myself on Thee! * * * * * “The priest is at the altar Praying with lifted hands, And, girdled round with living flame, The veilÈd Presence stands. Wouldst thou kindle in our dying hearts Some new and pure desire, That thou com’st, my Lord, so wrapt about In robes of waving fire? “Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, O silent, awful Host? Thou One with the Creator, One with the Holy Ghost! Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, O pitying Son of Man? For if that thou wilt bless me, Who is there that can ban? “Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, Within whose knowledge rest The labyrinthine ways of life, The cares of every breast? My doubting hope would fain outshake Her pinions, if she durst; For if truly thou wilt bless me, I cannot feel accursed! “The Tantum Ergo rises In a chorus glad and strong, And, waking in their airy height, The bells join in the song. And priest, and bells, and people, As one, in loud accord, Are pouring forth their praises Of the Sacramental Lord. “’Tis as though, from out of sorrow stepping, And a darksome way, The singers’ eyes had caught the dawn Of the celestial day. ’Tis as though, behind them casting off Each clogging human load, These happy creatures, singing, walked The open heav’nly road. “The hymn is stilled, and only The bells ring on above. Oh! bless me, God of mercy; Have mercy, God of love! For I have fought a cruel life, And fallen in the fray. Oh! bless me with a blessing That shall sweep it all away! * * * * * “It is finished. From the altar The priest is stepping down; His incense-perfumed silver train Brushes my sombre gown. The mingled crowd of worshippers Are going as they came; And the altar-candles drop to darkness, Tiny flame by flame. “Silence and softly-breathing Peace Float downward, hand in hand, And either side the threshold, As guardian angels stand. I see their holy faces, And fear no face of man; For when my God has blessed me, Who is there that can ban?” The Signora rose rather hastily. “If we are going to Monte Compatri this afternoon, we have no time to linger about reading rhymes,” she said. They went out into the sunshine, already burning hot, and stole along, one by one, in the shadow of the high wall, walking over crowds of little pale, pink morning-glories, that crept humbly on the ground, not knowing themselves to be vines with a power to rise and climb to the height of a man, any more than dear Hans Andersen’s ugly duck knew that he was a swan, though at one point they might have seen, through an opening in the stonework, better-instructed morning-glories climbing hedge and shrub, and blowing out a rhythmic joy through their great white trumpets far up in the air. The greatest pride or aspiration these little creatures seemed capable of was when, now and then, one grew, breath by breath, over some small obstacle in its path, and bloomed with its pretty pink cheek against a gray bit of stone. The whole ground blushed softly with their sweet humility. They entered the shaded avenue that circles the lower part of the town, and saw the beautiful city climbing on the one hand, and the beautiful Campagna spread out on the other; passed the little wooden chalet where Garibaldi was holding his court—a wooden house is such a wonder in Italy!—and the public garden, sweet with the infantine breath and bright with the infantine hues of countless petunias, and at length found refuge in Villa Torlonia. Thick and dark, the lofty trees knit their branches over the seats where the travellers sat and looked at the grand fountain-front, with its stone eagle and rows of huge stone vases along the top, and its beautiful cascade and basin in the centre. At either side this cascade, in the ten or twelve niches, tall stone vases overflowed with wild-flowers that had once overflowed with water, the masks above still holding between their dry lips the pipes from which the sunny streams had sprung. Far above could be seen, in the rich green gloom of overarching trees, cascade after cascade dancing down the steep slope, and, farther yet, the top of a great column of water that marked the uppermost fountain. “It is too late to go up now,” the Signora said; “but you can see the way. It goes round in a circling avenue, or up the steps that are at each side of the ten cascades. I think there are ten. But the steps at the right are constantly wet with the spray, and covered with ferns and moss. You go up at the left, which the sun sometimes touches, and which is always dry. Below here, too, there are two ways of going up, either by the parting avenues or by the little dark door you see beside the cascade. That door leads through a dim passage, where the walls are all a green tremble with maidenhair fern growing as thick as feathers on a bird, and up a little dim winding stair that brings you out beside the stone eagle there. I gathered one of those ferns once that was half a yard long. You see they build palaces here for waters as well as for princes.” The day went by like a dream, steeped in dazzling light, embalmed with the odors of flowers growing in a luxuriance and beauty new to their northern eyes, sprinkled over with a ceaseless fountain-spray, sung through by countless larks, and made magnificent by palace after palace, and by constantly-recurring and incomparable views. For many a year to come they would remember the honey-snow of the orange-trees and the clustered flames of the pomegranates; they would compare their rose-bushes with the tree which, in one of these gardens, held its tea-roses nodding over their heads, nor love their own shyer gardens the less, indeed; and in their trim walks, and loath and delicate blooming, they would sometimes think with longing of the careless profusion of the land where the best of nature and the best of art dwelt together in the familiar and graceful intercourse of daily life. An hour before sunset they were again in their carriage, and, after a short drive, found themselves following the long loops of the road that lead leisurely up the side of Monte Compatri, through the rich woods, through the pure and exquisitely invigorating air, with all the world unrolling itself again before their eyes in a view almost equal to that of Tusculum. They were obliged to alight in the piazza of the fountain; for the steep and narrow streets did not admit of carriages. From this piazza the streets straggled, climbing and twisting, breaking constantly into little flights of stairs, and sometimes ending in a court or at a door. “Prepare to be stared at,” the Signora said, as they took their way up the Via Lunga. “We are the only ladies in the town whose headgear is not a handkerchief; and as for Mr. Vane, they are very likely to take him for Prince Borghese. And, come to think of it,” she said, looking at him attentively, “you are very much like the prince, Mr. Vane.” The gentleman smiled quietly, without answering. He recollected what the Signora had forgotten—that she had once expressed the greatest admiration for Prince Borghese. He took the lady’s parasol and travelling-bag from her hand, and offered his arm, which the steep way and her fatigue made acceptable, and the two girls followed, searching on every side with bright and curious eyes, and murmuring little exclamations to each other. The irregular stone houses, so near each other, face to face, that one could easily toss a ball from window to window across the street, were quite vacant, except for pigeons that flew in at the windows, or a cat that might be seen sleeping on a chair or window-ledge, or, perhaps, for a few hens searching for crumbs. The families were all out of doors. In one little corner portico sat a handsome woman, with her dark hair beautifully plaited, and a bright handkerchief laid over her massive shoulders. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she sat smiling, chatting with a neighbor now and then, and enjoying a conscious queenship of the place. At either side of her was a young girl, slim, dark, and bright, a mere slip of the mother. These girls kept their eyes cast down, and appeared to think only of their knitting. On the next step was Carlin’s group. Further on, a young mother steadied her year-old child between her knees and a chair, while she darned a stocking. One perceived that the whole and snowy-white stockings worn even by the poorest were not kept in order without constant care and labor. Near by, an old woman with a distaff spun flax, and entertained a company of men with her lively talk. This antique goddess was, perhaps, the wit of the place. She was, however, in no manner allied to the graces; for the thin gray hair gathered tightly with a comb to the top of her head, and entirely uncovered, and the white kerchief knotted round her neck, instead of being draped in the becoming Italian fashion, showed that she had long since ceased to hold by even the shadow of a personal charm. Outside the door of a little cafÉ, the only one in the place, half a dozen men sat at tables, drinking coffee and smoking, while on the door-step a man with a furnace and rotary stove, and a basket of charcoal beside him, roasted coffee to keep up the supply, lazily turning the crank while he listened to the gossip going on at the tables. On a neighboring step were gathered several women in a little sewing-circle. To these came a woman up the street, bearing on her head a tub covered over with nodding fern-leaves, which she set down on the wide top of the balustrade. The circle suspended their work while the woman displayed a sample of her wares—twelve frogs run on to a stick. She was met with shrugs and exclamations of disapproval. “Poor frogs!” said Isabel. “They look like little white babies.” They were very poor little babies indeed, thin and small as spiders. The frog-merchant, nothing disconcerted, laid aside her first sample and displayed another. “Oh! those are better,” the women cried, and immediately began to chaffer about the price. Children swarmed everywhere. The close little town was as full of them as the shoe where the old woman we all know so well dwelt with her tribe of young ones. It did not need a powerful imagination to picture the place boiling over like a pot some day, with a many-colored froth of bambini down the mountain-side. It was out of the question that there should be room for the rising generation to stay in the town when they should have become a risen generation; for they were six or seven in a family, and already the houses were full. “Perhaps one of them will go to America, and set up on some sidewalk a furnace for roasting chestnuts,” Bianca said. “And perhaps, some day, ten or fifteen years hence, we may stop and ask such a person what part of Italy he came from, and he will answer, ‘From Monte Compatri’; and we will say, ‘Ah! we have been there, at such a time; and perhaps it was you we saw playing in Via Lunga or in the piazza?’ and he will brighten an instant, and then, all at once, begin to cry. And Isabel will almost cry for him, and will give him her best handkerchief to wipe his tears away, perhaps wiping them for him; and I will buy all his chestnuts, which will be cold by the time we get home, and papa will slip some money into his hand, and ask him if he wants work to do, and we will all tell him where we live, and to come to us if he should get into trouble. And then we will go home and talk for all the rest of the day about nothing but Italy, and that day we went up Monte Compatri. And Isabel will insist that she recognizes the fellow perfectly, and try to coax papa to take him for a gardener or something.” “And then,” resumed Mr. Vane, continuing the story, “we shall have the lazy vagabond coming to us every day begging, and we shall miss things out of the room where he is left alone a few minutes, and Isabel will give him my clothes, till I shall have nothing left to wear.” “Meantime, what will the Signora be doing?” that lady demanded, finding herself left out. “Is she to have no part?” She did not see the pleasant glance that fell on her from the eyes of the gentleman at her side. She was looking down, a little hurt, she hardly knew why. For was it not a matter understood that her home was in Italy, and theirs in America? “Why, you,” said Isabel—“you will be in Casa Ottant’Otto, thousands of miles away, and we shall be writing you all about it.” “Not so!” Mr. Vane said. “She will be with us at the time, I think, and will correct all our mistakes, and reward all our well-doing with her approbation.” “There, that sounds comfortable,” the lady said, smiling. “I was really feeling neglected and left out in the cold.” They had come to the street that encircles the town, and on the outside of which a row of houses hangs on the mountain-edge. In one of these they were to spend the night, and, as she spoke, the Signora looked up brightly, and beckoned some one in a window above to come down and open the door for them. Mr. Vane spoke rather hastily in answer to her remark, and apparently for her ear alone. “If you should be outside, the cold will then be inside the circle,” he said. “It is you who are to choose.” “Oh! thank you,” she replied lightly. “And now mind the steps. They are rather dark.” The street from which they entered this house was so narrow, and the houses so joined, that they seemed to be still in the heart of the town; but when they had passed the dusky stairs, and entered the long, low sala at the head of them, they found the place like a nest in a tree-top. The mountain-side dropped sheer from under the very windows, and the view swept round from Rome and the sea to Palestrina and the mountains. In this sala the whole family of the padrone had assembled to welcome and stare at the strangers before giving the room up to their use. A dozen or so smiling faces, full of good-will and curiosity, clustered about without the slightest sign of any thought that they might be intruding, or that there was to be any limit to the free use of their eyes. An old woman leaning on a cane muttered unintelligible blessings and made innumerable little bows right and left, a hale young matron talked and welcomed, a servant smiled unceasingly, a young girl with a baby in her arms asked abrupt questions in a loud voice, and children of all ages filled up the gaps. The young ladies resigned their clothes to examination, and began shyly petting the little ones, and the Signora gave orders for their entertainment. While she was talking the servant and two of the boys ran skurrying out of the room and presently returned with an air of great pride, bearing in their hands beautiful white pigeons, which they caressed while displaying. The young ladies admired them and smoothed their snowy plumage, without being in the least aware why they had been brought. “They are for our dinner to-morrow,” the Signora remarked with great composure. There was a little duet of dismayed exclamations. “I thought they were family pets!” Bianca said, recoiling. “And so they are, my dear,” was the reply. “They pet them up to the moment of killing them, and praise while they are eating them. Their fondness never ceases. And now let us take off our bonnets and have supper.” The room was long, low, and paved with coarse red bricks. The ceiling, crossed by several large beams, was papered in compartments representing squares of blue sky with light clouds floating over, and a bird or two here and there in the space, and the flowery walls were nearly hidden by great presses holding linen, by sideboards laden with dishes, and by the high backs of patriarchal old chairs, very picturesque to look at and very penitential to sit in. All the centre of this room was taken up by a long table, at one end of which their supper was speedily prepared. There was bread, as good as could be had in Rome, and such a salad as could scarcely be had in any city, the oil as sweet as cream, and the lettuce so crisp and delicate that it could be almost powdered between the hands. Just as they sat down a large decanter of gold-colored wine, ice-cold from the grotto, was placed before them. For in these little Italian towns, however they may lack the necessities of life, they are never without the luxuries. They sat down merrily, only one of the family remaining to wait on them, the others hovering about the door, and watching the faces of their guests as they ate, to see how the food pleased them. “Papa,” said Isabel, pointing to a plate before her, on which a small onion shone like silver, “do you recognize that vegetable?” “I recognose it,” replied Mr. Vane, who would sometimes play upon words. “Well, I propose that we agree to divide it in four parts, each a little larger than the last, the largest for you, the smallest for Bianca, and that we all eat our portions, and so find no fault with each other.” Bianca instantly declined the invitation, and blushed deeply when they rallied her on her daintiness. “These onions are very delicate and sweet,” the Signora said. “I used to avoid them, till one day I received a call from a personage of the most dignified position and unexceptionable manners, from whose breath I perceived, in the course of the conversation, that he had been eating these little onions. But the faint odor that reached me as he spoke was as though a rose and an onion had been grafted together. Since then I have eaten without scruple.” But Bianca still declined, still blushing. Why? Was it that her affection for the friend ever tenderly remembered had so consecrated her to him that nothing but what was sweetest and purest must touch where his image was enshrined, whether he were present or absent? She was quite extreme enough in her sensitive delicacy for such a thought. Supper over, they went out into a loggia attached to their sala and overhanging the steep mountainside, and watched the sun go down over the sea. The globe of fire had already touched the water-line, that by day showed only like a line of purple cloud, and kindled it to an intense lustre; and, as they looked, there was half a sun above the horizon, and another half visible as though seen through the transparent edge of the world over which it disappeared; then, without diminishing, it dropped out of sight, leaving an ineffable, silent glory over the scene. The fire of the sea faded to a faint gold, the rosy violet of the Campagna changed to a deep purple, and Earth, raising her shadowy hands, put aside the curtaining light of day, and looked out at the stars. The sisters withdrew presently, and left the two elders to admire the beauties of nature at their leisure. Isabel, screened off in one corner of the sala, made voluminous notes of her experiences, and planned a wonderful story, into which they should all be woven. Seated on a footstool, with a brass lamp hanging to the back of a chair near her, and her writing on her knees, she saw one character after another emerge from the shades and take form and individuality before her eyes, as if they grew there independent of her will. They spoke and moved of themselves, and she only looked and listened. Now and then some trait, some feature, some word, was such as she had seen in real life, but these people were not portraits, though they might have such resemblances, and even might have been suggested by persons she had known. The shades grew more and more alive, gathering into substance. Stone walls built themselves up silently and with a more than Aladdin-like celerity, and gardens burst into instantaneous bloom. If she willed the sea present, its waves rolled up to her feet in foam, or caught and tossed her in their strong arms; if she called for forests, swiftly their darkening branches shut her in, and her light feet trod their dry, crackling twigs and rich, disordered flowers. The very accidents of a great pine-cone to stumble over, or an unexpected lizard running across the path, were there. The dull walls of the room she sat in, the rough bricks under her feet, the crowded town about her, were as though they were not. She was free of the world. O precious gift of the magical lamp! which, at a touch, calls about its possessor all that men wish, and work, and strive for of earthly good, without the pain or responsibilities of earthly possession; which gives the rose without its thorn, the wine without its lees, the friend without the doubt, the triumph without disappointment! Happy they who, when what we call real life presses too hard or becomes too dull, can put it aside for the time, and enter a world of their own, for ever beautiful and satisfying, who, walking the common street, see things unseen of common eyes, and for whom many a beauty smiles under an ugly mask. Bianca was in no such exalted mood of fancy, but, withdrawn to the chamber she was to occupy with the Signora, was lifting the holier eyes of faith, and, with childlike simplicity and confidence, laying all her heart open to God, sending up her petitions for earthly happiness on a cloud of the Acts, said after her own manner: “O my God! I believe in thee, I hope in thee, I love thee, I thank thee, and I am sorry for having offended thee”; and then, as a thought or wish more earthly thrust itself forward, presenting it, unafraid and undoubting. Living and dead, friends and strangers, the poor, and those who had no one to pray for them—all were remembered by this tender heart; but ever, like the refrain of a song, came back the petition, “Bless, and guard from all ill of soul or body, him who is so much more to me than all other men, and, if it be thy will, give him to me for a friend and companion as long as I shall live.” The two in the balcony, left to themselves, were talking quietly, having no mind to separate. The Signora found in the society of Mr. Vane a pleasure altogether new to her—the pleasure of being able to depend on some one. It was only now, when she was surrounded with a constant, friendly care, that she became aware how unprotected and unhelped her former life had been, and how sweet was that repose which the protected enjoy. Besides, Mr. Vane’s care was of a particularly agreeable kind. It did not, by watching and seizing on opportunities of serving, suggest the existence of an emotional care which might change to neglect, but was simply a calm readiness, which assumed, as a matter of course, that it should help when help was needed. “I shall never be sufficiently thankful for having been led to make this European journey,” Mr. Vane said after a little silence. “It has done me good in many ways, and promises more even than it has performed as yet.” “I am glad you say thankful instead of glad,” the Signora said, smiling. “Perhaps, too, I should say, I am thankful you say so.” He thought a moment before speaking, and recollected that only a few months before he would not have used the word. The change had come so gradually that he had scarcely been aware of it. “Yet I believe that I always recognize the Source from which all good flows,” he resumed seriously. “At least, I never denied it. Here religion is such a household affair, one falls after awhile into the habit of expressing what before was only felt, and felt, perhaps, unconsciously.” “It is better so,” was the reply. “We strengthen a true feeling when we give it utterance. Besides, we may thus communicate it to others.” “One of my causes of thankfulness,” he resumed, “is that my daughters should be associated with you. I wish you could make them more like yourself, and I am sure that their admiration and affection for you will lead them naturally to imitate you and to receive your instructions willingly. They have been to me a source of great anxiety, and I feel myself utterly incapable of directing them; for, while I wish them to be modest and womanly, on the one hand, I as certainly wish them to be capable of finding in life an object and a happiness which shall not depend on any other person. It would please me to see them well married; but God forbid that an unmarried life should be for them a disappointed life! What I could do for them I have done, but with an immense self-distrust; and I have felt safer when leaving them to themselves than when interfering or seeking to guide them.” “I should think you had done well both in guiding and in leaving them free,” the lady replied. “Many parents do too much either one way or the other. Does not the result satisfy you so far?” She was surprised at the emotion with which he spoke, not knowing anything of his married life. “The result is not yet. Everything depends on their marriage, or their reason for not marrying.” He hesitated, then went on, as if incapable of keeping silence longer on a subject of which he had never spoken: “The fate of their mother is to me a constant warning and a constant pain. In one respect I can save them from that; for I shall never urge them to marry, and shall never oppose any choice of theirs, unless it should be a manifestly bad one. But I cannot guard them from the tyranny of some mistaken sense of duty, or mistaken pride or delicacy which they might conceal from all the world.” Startled by this half-revelation, his companion kept silence, waiting for him to speak. It was impossible he should not speak after such a beginning. “I do not know which was the more deeply wronged, I or my poor Bianca,” he said presently. “It all came from the blundering coarseness of parents who overstepped, not their authority—for they never commanded her—but their power to influence, which, with one like her, was quite as strong. Their mistake has taught me to interfere and control less the gentle, silent one than the one who speaks her mind out clearly and loudly. I have always thought that the mother of my daughters had some preference which she never acknowledged. Often, more often than not, these preferences come to nothing and are soon forgotten; but not always. She did not wish to marry me, but she consented without hesitation, and I believed that the slight reserve would vanish with time. Perhaps she believed it too. Her conscience was as pure as snow. She did perfectly, with all her power, what she believed to be her duty. But that preoccupation, whether for another person or for a single life, was never vanquished. You have, perhaps, chased a butterfly when you were a child, beaten it with your hat from flower to flower, and at last imprisoned it under a glass; or you have caught a hummingbird that has strayed into your room, and flown from you as long as it had strength. Neither resisted when it was caught; but the down was brushed off the butterfly’s wings, and the bird was dead in your hand. My wife omitted nothing that a good will could accomplish. She was grateful for my efforts to make her happy; she was calm, and even cheerful; and I am sure that she never said to herself, even, that she was sorry for having married me. But the only beaming smile I ever saw on her face was when she knew that she was going to die.” His voice trembled a little, and he stopped a moment, as if to steady it before going on. “Was not I wronged too? Was not the unwilling jailer as unfortunate as the unwilling prisoner? I say nothing of my own personal disappointment, though that was great. The mutual confidence, the delightful companionship, the perfect union, to which I had looked forward, and which were my ideal of marriage—where were they? In place of them I never lost the feeling that I had a victim for ever at my side. I felt as if I had been unmanly and cruel; yet the fault was not mine. She gave herself to me in all that she could, yet she was never mine.” He paused again; yet this time his voice trembled more in resuming than in leaving off his story. “I rejoiced in her release; and I look forward to no future meeting with her that shall be different from that meeting which we are permitted to look forward to with all the good in heaven. If other husbands and wives expect some closer partnership in heaven, I neither expect nor wish it. I have resigned her absolutely and for ever. I do not think that I am morbid. You should know her peculiar character to understand well how I could be made to feel that crystal wall that always stood between us. I felt it so that I really believe, if the children were not demonstrative in their affection for me, I should not have the courage to show any fondness for them. I used, when they were little ones, to look at them sometimes with a kind of terror when I came home, to see if they would smile brightly, and run to me as if they were glad from the heart to see me. I always waited for them, and, thank God! they never failed me. Duty and submission are there, but a perfect affection makes them almost unnecessary.” Finishing, he glanced for the first time at his companion, and saw that she was in tears. “My dear friend!” he exclaimed, “how selfish I have been! Forgive me!” “No,” she replied gently, wiping her eyes, “you are not selfish. It seems to me that you are one of the least selfish of men. I am glad you have confidence enough in me to tell me such a story, which, I can well believe, you seldom or never speak of. It is quite natural that you should confide it to some one, and you could not expect any one to hear it unmoved.” What an exquisite moonlight covered the world, and made a fairy-like, silvery day in the little balcony where the two sat! The air sparkled with it, and one tear still hanging to the Signora’s eyelashes shone like a diamond in its beams. “You are the first person to whom I have ever spoken on this subject, and the only person to whom I could confide it,” Mr. Vane said. “Can you guess why, Signora?” She looked at him with a startled glance and read his meaning, and, in the first astonishment and confusion, was utterly incapable of replying. “Shall I tell you why?” he asked. She rose hastily, blushing and distressed. “Do not say any more!” she exclaimed, and was on the point of leaving him abruptly, but checked herself, and, turning in the open low window, held out her hand to him. “You have called me friend. Let us remain friends,” she said. He touched the hand, and released it without a word, and they separated. Half an hour afterward Bianca’s face peeped out into the moonlight. “Are you still here, papa?” she said, and went to him. “Good-night, dear.” He embraced her gently, and echoed her good-night, but did not detain her a moment. “What! papa romancing here all alone?” exclaimed Isabel in her turn. “It isn’t good for your complexion nor for your disposition. Late hours and too much thinking make one sad.” “Therefore you should go to bed directly,” was his reply. She kissed him merrily and left him alone. TO BE CONTINUED.
If in our contemporary evolution a great genius should appear, worthy to continue the work of St. Thomas, it would be requisite that he should combine in himself the gifts and acquirements of a metaphysician, a theologian, and a master of natural science. We accentuate strongly the last of these requisites, because we are not so much in need of pure metaphysics and theology, possessing both already in a state of high perfection and completeness, as we are of the mixed science in which the relations of the higher and the lower orders of being, truth and good, are developed and manifested. There have been some men already, since the modern period began, who have combined metaphysical and natural science in a remarkable degree. Such a man was Leibnitz. The famous Jesuit Boscovich was perhaps superior intellectually, as he certainly was morally, even to this prodigy of talent and learning. He was a great mathematician and physicist, a great metaphysician, and a great statesman, besides being eminent in Christian perfection and apostolic zeal. Balmes was a man of a similar stamp, though especially eminent in social science. Among living men a high place belongs to Father Bayma as a metaphysician, mathematician, and physicist, although he has published little under his own name, except his remarkable work on Molecular Mechanics. Such men are invaluable at the present time. And for all those who are aiming at a thorough education for important positions in the service of the church and humanity, the conjoined cultivation of these various branches of science, in the due proportion for acquiring what we have called the mixed science, is of the highest importance. We are happy to know that it is not neglected, and is likely to be advanced to a higher and more extensive state of excellence in the near future. One who has the chance of looking over the theses in physics which are prepared for the examinations at Woodstock will be convinced that there is one Catholic seminary, at least, in this country where such matters receive due attention. The articles published from time to time in the Catholic reviews of Europe, as well as an occasional volume from the pen of a Catholic professor, are another evidence of what we have stated. The English hierarchy, aided by the band of gifted and learned priests and laymen who adorn the Catholic Church of England, is distinguishing itself in the promotion of this scientific culture. Dr. Mivart is one of this band. We have, in former numbers, taken occasion to notice several of his works, and express our high estimation of the courage and ability with which he is constantly laboring for the advancement of true, Catholic science. Dr. Mivart’s specialty is natural science; but he is not a mere physicist or scientist. He has the genuine philosophical spirit, and shows in his writings that he has studied to some purpose metaphysics, theology and ethics, history, politics, and belles-lettres. The essays contained in the volume we are at present reviewing were first published in the Contemporary Review, with the exception of the last one, which appeared in the Dublin Review. We propose, at present, to do little more than give an analysis of their contents and of the author’s argument. The title informs us that his topic of discussion is, “Some great Social Changes.” These social changes, in his idea, are very deep and universal alterations in the social fabric which have been going on during the entire post-mediÆval period, are still in progress, and are likely to proceed much further as time goes on. It is in view of their bearing on the perpetuity and action of the Catholic Church that they are considered. In the introductory chapter a general view is taken of their nature, origin, causes and probable development, and the plan to be followed in pursuing the particular scope of the essay is laid down. The second chapter is on Political Evolution. The third presents the three ideals of social organization, which are proposed by as many different classes of political philosophers: 1. The pagan, or monistic. 2. The civic, or that which is based on some maxims of natural right and expediency. 3. The theocratic or mediÆval. The fourth chapter treats of Scientific Evolution, the fifth of Philosophical and the sixth of Æsthetic Evolution. We may as well premise a statement of Dr. Mivart’s idea of evolution before we proceed to analyze his argument. It is a procession from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, whose origin is God as first cause, whose ultimatum is God as final cause or end, whose principle of continuity is the intelligent volition of God as ruler, embracing all the phenomena of the universe, physical, biological, political, moral, and religious, in one enchainment of activities, which rise in a graduated series from the lowest to the highest toward their Ideal in God.[101] A similar idea is laid by Leo at the foundation of his Universal History: “The Christian view of the history of the world takes all facts, not as something new superadded by the power of man to the creative act of God, but only as a further evolution of the facts of creation.”[102] In the introductory chapter Dr. Mivart begins by noting the fact that there are crises or great epochs in this historical evolution, and expressing his conviction that the present is one of these, and particularly marked by being a period of conscious development. As the outcome of the changes occurring in the past, he traces its logical connection with the periods of the French Revolution, the revolt of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance, and the conflict of Philip the Fair with the Holy See. The process of this evolution is designated as a struggle of reviving paganism to reject the domination of mediÆval theocracy, which, gradually obtaining success, is likely to be carried to a much further point than it has yet reached. Two questions are proposed for consideration: 1. “The effect on Christianity of the further development of the great movement.” 2. “The probable result of the renewed conflict between such a modified Christianity and a revived paganism.” In order clearly and fully to understand the author’s method of treating these questions, it is necessary to place and keep distinctly in view with whom he is arguing and on what principles. It is not with professed Christians or Catholics that he primarily intends to discuss these topics, on their principles, but with those who are mere naturalists, and who admit nothing but what is evident or provable by purely scientific and rational arguments. The truth of revelation and the Catholic faith is therefore left on one side, and nothing is taken into consideration except “obvious or admitted tendencies of known natural forces and laws.” It is the author’s purpose to extort from the enemies of revelation and the Catholic Church, by using their own principles and ideas, evidence for the ability of the church to cope with, overcome, and bend to her own superior force of intelligence and will the new and hostile environments, political, scientific, and philosophical, by which she is surrounded. In respect to the political aspect of the question, he argues that, supposing the changes in this order to proceed in their evolution until a complete disintegration of the mediÆval, theocratic system is effected, an interior, latent capacity will be evolved in the church, by which she will be integrated and strengthened for a more complete and extensive triumph than was ever before achieved. Briefly, his argument amounts to this: Violent, red-republican, or despotic subversions of the liberty of the masses and social order cannot be lasting. Some kind of basis for liberty with order must be found in natural law and right, consisting of maxims of ethical truth and expediency. The political maxims of England and the United States are referred to for illustration, and the author anticipates for the English-speaking nations, their maxims of policy and their language, an universal, predominating influence in the future. Now, the church, he argues, can avail herself of this liberty. The laboring classes, once liberated from and raised above that misery and oppression which are the active cause of their hostility against both the hierarchy and the aristocracy, can be won over to the cause of the church. Religious orders, founded on poverty and labor, whose members are drawn from these classes and associated with them, can gain new life, power, and extension. Opposition and persecution will only purify and invigorate the intellectual and moral constitution of the church, and intensify its unity of organic life and action. That part of society which is corrupted by pagan immorality will be weakened and diminished by its errors and vices, while the Catholic portion will become always stronger and more numerous by the effect of its ethical maxims carried out in practice. The past history of the church enables us to augur for her future history that there are no circumstances, however difficult and apparently destructive to her life, which she cannot surmount, and over which she cannot achieve a complete triumph, in virtue of the organic strength which she possesses. At the end of his long and minute process of argument, in which he says he has “endeavored dispassionately to estimate what, at the very utmost, must be the destructive effects on Christianity of the greatest amount of anti-theocratic change which can possibly be anticipated,” the author considers that a Catholic may be fairly entitled to express the following conviction: “By the continuance, then, of this evolutionary process, there is plainly to be discerned in the distant future a triumph of the church compared with which that of mediÆval Christendom was but a transient adumbration—a triumph brought about by moral means alone, by the slow process of exhortation, example, and individual conviction, after every error has been freely propagated, every denial freely made, and every rival system provided with a free field for its display—a triumph infinitely more glorious than any brought about by the sword, and fulfilling at last the old pre-Christian prophecies of the kingdom of God upon earth.”[103] One-half of the volume is taken up with the consideration of political evolution and the three political ideals. Nevertheless, the author considers that the questions respecting science and philosophy are much the most important. For, although he concludes from his course of reasoning that political changes will be harmless to the church, and even give her increased strength, coherence, and efficiency, so that a Catholic may reasonably expect for her all that triumph which he thinks her Author has foretold, in spite of such changes; yet, in arguing with an unbeliever, such a ground of confidence cannot be assumed. If the claims of the church to authority, and the dogmatic truth of her doctrine, can be successfully assailed by science and philosophy, then scientific and philosophical evolution must be fatal to Christianity, and political changes will facilitate and hasten the catastrophe, though they are powerless to produce it by their own solitary, unaided force. Here we arrive at that part of the subject which is to us the most interesting, and which the author has treated in the most satisfactory manner. On this field Dr. Mivart is at home; for it is his own peculiar ground, where he has already labored with eminent success, and where we confidently hope he will hereafter gather a still greater and richer harvest. We anticipate a great revolution in the attitude of what is in common parlance rather incorrectly called “science”—i.e., the complex of various branches of physics—toward the Catholic Church. A hostile attitude is wholly unnatural. Second-class scientists, sciolists in knowledge, men of an imperfect and one-sided culture, are intellectually swamped in the morass of facts, theories, and hypotheses in which they pass their lives. The imperfect beginnings of natural sciences present phases of apparent contradiction to revealed truths. Imperfect theological systems, and opinions which rest on merely human authority, but are erroneously supposed to be revealed doctrines, frequently clash with science, or with scientific hypotheses which are more or less probable or plausible. But there is in genuine natural science, in the methods by which it proceeds, in the spirit which actuates its great masters, something eminently favorable to genuine sacred science and akin to it. The wild, anti-Christian hypotheses which are put forth under the name of science are not unfrequently crushed by the masters in science, even though they are not themselves Christians. Inductive science is modest, calm, impartial, slow, and just, in its procedure. It is like the law in its accepting and examining evidence on all sides of every question. The masters in science who are unbelievers are so in spite of, and not because of, their scientific spirit and method. If they are actively hostile to Christianity, it is because of some false philosophy which is accidentally connected with their science, or by reason of their ignorance of real Christianity. No false system can stand the application of the genuine principles and method of scientific inquiry. It is precisely by that method and those principles that the truth of the Catholic Church is established, corroborated, and confirmed. An amiable friend, a Unitarian minister, once remarked to us that men’s minds were going back, by a circuitous route, to the Catholic Church. This is what Dr. Mivart endeavors to show. Having tried all false routes and traced up all errors to their ending in No-Land, men work back across lots and through thickets to the old travelled road which they abandoned through caprice. In respect to physical science, Dr. Mivart’s principal line of argument goes to show that it has nothing to do directly with theology, because it is conversant exclusively with “phenomenal conceptions.” Facts as to the coexistences and sequences of phenomena do not furnish the philosophy by which they are to be explained. This philosophy, and the theology which rests on it as its natural basis, have their own distinct sphere. It is only where theology affirms something as a revealed truth respecting facts of this kind—e.g., that the sun revolves around the earth, that creation began four thousand years before Christ, and was completed in six literal days—that it comes upon the common ground where it can clash with physical science. In regard to Catholic doctrine, he shows that such affirmations are but few, and that none have ever been made into dogmas by the authority of the church which have been afterwards proved by scientific evidence to be false. The complete revolution in cosmology effected by the demonstration of the Copernican system is referred to as an instance of apparent conflict between science and dogma which turned out to be no conflict at all. So, also, the apparent conflict between evolutionary biology and Christian dogma, which the author has more fully discussed in other works, is succinctly treated. The antagonism between physics and theology, though of long standing, is accidental, and “physical science should be considered, alike by the philosophic Christian and anti-Christian, as neutral and indifferent.” The only influence, therefore, which physical science can have on Christianity is through the philosophy which is connected with it. It is philosophy which affords the real battle-ground for the final and decisive conflict between the Christian and anti-Christian forces. Notwithstanding the narrow-minded, ignorant, and absurd contempt for philosophy which many modern scientists express, and which has been quite common for some time past, the author thinks that the scientists themselves, even by their destructive efforts, are aiding powerfully in bringing about a great philosophic reaction. The author most justly observes that fundamental questions of philosophy underlie all physical science, and that, for this reason, the great development and wide popularity of physical science must drive many minds into philosophy. Reviving paganism, which is only a return to the old Aryan predilection for pantheistic naturalism, and is theoretically based on ancient philosophical ideas revived in new dresses by modern sophists, can only come into that internecine conflict with Christianity, after which it pants, on the ground of philosophy. Both sides must therefore give themselves to philosophical study and discussion, and they have already begun to do so. The supreme question, therefore, in respect to the movement of contemporary evolution, is the philosophical direction it is likely to take. We arrive, then, at the last topic but one considered by Dr. Mivart—viz., Philosophic Evolution, and the process by which he endeavors to “form a final judgment as to the result of the great conflict between reviving paganism and the Christian church.” In Dr. Mivart’s opinion—one in which we need not say we most heartily concur—what is needed is a return, “not to a philosophy, but to the philosophy. For if metaphysics are possible, there is not, and never was or will be, more than one philosophy which, properly understood, unites all speculative truths and eliminates all errors: the philosophy of the philosopher—Aristotle.”[104] Moreover, he declares his conviction that evolution will infallibly bring about this return. In his view, scholastic philosophy simply went out of fashion in the same way that mediÆval architecture came to be despised as barbarous, and will again resume its sway just as the architectural glories of northern Europe have come to be universally appreciated. One or two testimonies to the grandeur of the mediÆval philosophy from distinguished opponents are given. The widespread and earnest revival of the same among Catholics all over the world is a fact too patent to need any proof. Dr. Mivart’s almost chivalric enthusiasm for scholastic philosophy is of itself a signal instance of a movement in this direction from a new quarter—i.e., from the ranks of the devotees of physical science. It would seem that he himself has been led through science to philosophy, and therefore his views and reasonings on the matter have a peculiar interest. He presents two distinct phases of the question. One represents the inability of the anti-Christian scientists to construct a philosophy which may successfully oppose Christianity. The other presents positive tendencies in scientific evolution toward the peripatetic philosophy of the Christian schools. In respect to the first, his line of argument shows that these anti-Christian scientists are at war with each other and can never agree upon any one system; furthermore, that their reasonings end in absolute scepticism, and thus undermine their own foundations. Human nature and common sense invariably cause a reaction against idiotic and suicidal systems of this sort. Even the cultivation of natural science, therefore, must produce a tendency to seek for a satisfactory system of psychology and ontology. And as the philosophy which Des Cartes brought into vogue, ending with the transcendentalism of Kant and his successors, is no better than a philosophy of scepticism, it seems that a return to the mediÆval and Grecian school, to Aristotle and St. Thomas, is unavoidable. There is but one other system which holds out the promise of a refuge from materialism and scepticism—that of the Ontologists. This system, however, is too contrary to the spirit and method of the natural sciences to offer any attractions to minds seeking for a synthesis of the spiritual and the material. The exposition of positive tendencies toward Catholic philosophy in the evolutionary processes of modern thought is on too abstruse and extensive a range to admit of being more compendiously treated than it actually is in the author’s text. We will, therefore, content ourselves with quoting his own words, in which he summarily expresses the result of his arguments in his conclusion: “Glancing backward over the course we have traversed, it seems borne in upon us that the logical development of that process which Philip the Fair began is probably advancing, however slowly, to a result very generally unforeseen. But if such result as that here indicated be the probable outcome of philosophical evolution, Christianity has once more evidently nothing whatever to fear from it. A philosophy which as a complement unites in one all other systems will harmonize with a religion which as a complement synthesizes all other religions, and not only religions properly so called, but atheism also. Atheism, pantheism, and pure deism, running their logical course and mutually refuting each other, find an ultimate synthesis in Christianity, as we have before found them to do in nature. Christianity affirms the truth latent in atheism—namely, that God, as He is, is unimaginable and inscrutable by us; in other words, no such God as we can imagine exists. It also affirms the truth in pantheism, that God acts in every action of every created thing, and that in him we live and move and are. Finally, it also asserts the truths of deism, but by its other assertions escapes the objections to which deism is liable from opposing systems. Similarly, Christianity also effects a synthesis between theism and the worship of humanity, and that by the path, not of destruction, but through the nobler conception of ‘taking the manhood into God.’ “Our investigations have led us to what we might have À priori anticipated—the conclusion that the highest and most intellectual power is that which must ultimately dominate the inferior forces. Neither political nor scientific developments can avail against the necessary consequences of philosophical evolution. No mistake can be greater than that of supposing that philosophy is but a mental luxury for the few. An implicit, unconscious philosophy possesses the mind and influences the conduct of every peasant. Metaphysical doctrines, sooner or later, filter down from the cultured few to the lowest social strata, and become, for good or ill, the very marrow of the bones, first of a school, then of a society, ultimately of a nation. The course of general philosophy, it is here contended, is now returning to its legitimate channel after a divergence of some three centuries’ duration. This return cannot affect prejudicially the Christian church, but must strengthen and aid it; and thus that beneficial action upon it of political and scientific evolution, before represented as probable, will be greatly intensified, and the great movement of the Renaissance hereafter take its place as the manifestly efficient promoter of a new development of the Christian organism such as the first twenty centuries of its life afforded it no opportunity to manifest.”[105] The author’s last chapter, on Æsthetic Evolution, is a kind of appendix to the essay—which is really concluded with the passage just now quoted—but it is nevertheless an ingenious and elaborate essay in itself. The author begins by remarking that the question of evolution in religion is one which would furnish an interesting subject of inquiry. He then pays a very high but just tribute to the genius of Dr. Newman, whose influence over Dr. Mivart’s mind may be traced in all his writings, as the one who, in his great essay on Development, has elucidated with a master-hand the evolutionary process within the church, and anticipated the doctrines of Spencer, of Darwin, and of Haeckel. With a passing allusion to the great Vatican decree as the culmination of this process and the keystone of the great arch of civil and religious liberty; and to the two distinct though intermixed processes of evolution outside the church, one simply pagan, the other sectarian; and to the process of disruption and dissolution which is tending to carry the adherents of the sects either toward anti-theism or toward the church—the author turns aside to consider a subject closely connected with religious evolution: the probable effect of the great modern movement of contemporary evolution upon Christian art. Most of his remarks are upon architecture, although he touches lightly upon music, painting, and sculpture. In music he appears to give his vote for St. Gregory and Palestrina. In respect to painting and sculpture, he anticipates progress in these arts by the blending of the best elements of the Preraphaelite period and those of the Renaissance. In handling the topic of architecture he analyzes the arguments for and against both the Gothic and Italian styles, and ends by declining to advocate the side of the exclusive champions of either of the two styles. After discussing some of the general principles of the art, he proposes a return to the style which prevailed before the introduction of the pointed arch, as a starting point for an improved style combining some features of the Gothic with some others of the Romanesque style of architecture. One consideration which he presents respecting the use of stained-glass windows strikes us as especially worthy of attention. As ornaments and as objects of devotion, the paintings upon glass in church-windows are far inferior to statues and pictures, and they nevertheless exclude them and occupy their place by reason of the quality of the light which is reflected through stained glass. It is desirable, therefore, to find some way of making the windows beautiful and ornamental as well as useful, and at the same time admitting light of that quality and in that direction which is requisite in a church decorated with paintings and statuary. Dr. Mivart says: “In the first place, the absence of any rigid rule of symmetry will allow the admission of light just wherever it may be required. Secondly, the windows may be of any shape found the most convenient—square, elongated, and narrow windows, rose-windows or semi-circular windows, as in the nave of Bonn cathedral. They may also be made ornamental by mullions, while tracery need not by any means be confined to the upper part of each window, since each window may be all tracery, the stone-work being of such thickness as may combine strength and security with a copious admission of light. The absence of that beautiful but self-contradictory feature, brilliant stained glass, will allow an ample supply of light without too great a sacrifice of wall-space, and without any impairment of stability. Not that the glazing should not be ornamental and artistic; the pieces of glass might be so designed that their lead frame-work may form elegant patterns, while the glass itself, of delicate grays and half-tints, will afford a wide scope for the skilful designer.”[106] Finally, the author winds up by expressing his belief in a future development of Christian art in language which we condense a little from his concluding pages: “Nullum tempus occurrit ecclesiÆ! The ever-fruitful mother of beauty and of truth, of holy aspirations and of good works, has not come to the end of her evolution even in the world of art, and it may be affirmed that there appear to be grounds for thinking that in the whole field of art, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, our successors may witness a vast, new, complex, and stable artistic integration of a special and distinctly Christian character—a self-consciousness, as it were, in Christian art such as never was before, and which will appropriately serve to externally clothe and embody that vast and magnificent Christian development for which all phases of evolution are preparing the way, and to which Christians may look forward with joy and hope as the one supreme end of the whole evolutionary process, so far as the Author of nature has revealed to us his purposes either by the lessons which the universe of mind and matter displays before our eyes, or by supernatural revelation.”[107] The essay of which we have given an analysis, and all the other works of Dr. Mivart, are well worthy of attentive perusal. Their great merit lies in the fact that they break up new ground and lead the way to investigations in new fields of thought. Of course it could not be expected that subjects so wide-spreading and far-reaching as those which the author has discussed in this volume should be thoroughly and completely handled within so small a compass. Each chapter would require an elaborate volume even for the full elucidation of the author’s own ideas. Whatever difference of opinion may exist in regard to particular views and theories, there is one grand, predominant idea pervading them all, in which Dr. Mivart expresses in his own peculiar way what is a very common belief and expectation of great numbers of the most illustrious champions of the Catholic Church in the present eventful period. That this is really a great and critical era in the church’s history, and that present changes and events, however painful and unpromising they may be, are preparing the way for one of her grand and decisive triumphs, is a general conviction in the minds of her devoted adherents, the truth of which her most embittered enemies seem to forebode with a dread anticipation. All things created by God have a potentiality in them which is infinite. Much more, the greatest of his works on this earth, the church. The mere observation of what she has done, and of the capabilities which are contained within her, looked at from a purely rational viewing-point, is sufficient for prognosticating a future evolution to which no limits are assignable. A Catholic must, however, look upon her origin, her past action, and her future destiny as belonging to the supernatural order. She has been created to fulfil God’s purpose. That his purpose is the final triumph of good over evil is certain. But, in particulars, we only know how far, how long, and in what way this triumph is decreed to take place on this earthly arena where the church is militant; in so far as the purposes of God are made manifest to us by actual history or by prophecy. The general sense of the most approved interpreters of prophecy in the sacred Scriptures justifies the expectation of some signal triumph of the church on the earth yet to come. There seems to be a presentiment in the hearts of the faithful that it is now drawing near. We have a strong warrant for attributing this presentiment to a secret movement of the Holy Spirit, in the repeated and emphatic utterances of the august and holy Vicar of Christ upon earth, our gloriously reigning Sovereign Pontiff Pius IX. As to the time, the means, the nature, and the duration of this triumph of the church upon earth, and the exact, precise sense of the unfulfilled prophecies respecting the temporal kingdom of Jesus Christ, there is room for much diversity of opinion. The great social changes and evolutionary movements of which Dr. Mivart writes present a problem to a thoughtful Christian mind very difficult of solution. “OÙ allons nous!” is the anxious exclamation of Bishop Dupanloup in respect to France, and a similar questioning of the future agitates the minds of men throughout the world. Whoever has any sagacious and well-reasoned answer to this interrogation is, therefore, likely to find eager and interested listeners, and deserves a respectful hearing. Dr. Mivart thinks that he sees the way out of present complications, and discovers signs which herald the advent of a new and long period of human history under the influence of Christianity which will be the culmination of God’s work on the earth. Whatever may be thought by different persons of this horoscope and of the signs in our present sky, all must admit the ingenuity and force of reasoning which the author has displayed, admire his chivalrous and generous spirit, and recognize the great amount of valuable knowledge and genuine truth, both in physics and metaphysics, contained in the volume now reviewed and in Dr. Mivart’s other productions.
Let fastidious and fashionable people say what they will about shanties, there was something in Mike Roony’s humble dwelling that was really attractive. Perched on the top of a broad and lofty rock near the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, it commanded a magnificent view of the Hudson River and the Sound; and as the only way to reach it was by a flight of steps which Mike had cut in the rock, ’twas known among the neighbors by the name of Gibraltar. Some said Roony was a squatter; that he paid neither tax nor rent for the small piece of Manhattan Island which he occupied. Well, be this as it may, one thing is certain—he always declared his readiness to move when they blasted him out. Nothing grew upon this homestead—not a bush, not a weed, not a blade of grass; it was a little desert, roamed over by a goat, and swept clean by the winds, which made it their romping-ground from every quarter of the compass. But Mike had a wife who loved flowers, and in the window fronting south stood a flower-pot wherein there bloomed a sweet red rose. Helen—for this was her name—had the true instincts of a lady, albeit her garment was not of silk and she sometimes went barefoot. She kept herself scrupulously neat—for water does not cost anything—and was fairer to behold than the flower she cherished. Born in America, of Irish parents, hers was one of those ideal faces which we not seldom meet with among American women. A freckle or two only helped to set off the perfect whiteness of her skin; her eyes had taken their hue from the blue sky of her native land, and like the raven’s wing was the color of her hair. But although Helen knew that she was beautiful, and there was a small mirror in the shanty, she did not waste any time before it, unless, perhaps, of a Sunday morning ere going to High Mass. A true helpmate was this wife in every sense of the word. She arose betimes, no matter how cold the weather might be, to prepare her husband’s breakfast, and, if a button was missing off his coat, always found time to sew it on before he went to his work. The floor of the shanty was daily sprinkled with fresh sand; the pictures on the wall—one of the Blessed Virgin at the foot of the cross, the other of St. Joseph—were never hung awry; you saw no broken panes in the windows; and the faces of her two little children, Michael and Helen, were kept as bright and clean as her own. She never quitted home during her husband’s absence to gossip and talk scandal with other women; and, monotonous as her life may seem, ’twas a happy one. Mike, too, was happy, and no mariner homeward bound ever watched for the beacon-light on his native coast more impatiently than he watched for the light which Helen used to place in the window, whence he might see it from afar as he trudged back from his day’s work. And no matter how hard it might be raining, or snowing, or freezing, at the first glimpse of its welcome rays Mike always burst out into a merry song. In the evening she would read him to sleep with some story from the Catholic Review; then, when his head began to nod, she gently drew the pipe out of his mouth and whispered: “Love, ’tis bed-time.” Oh! happy were those days—so happy that Helen would sometimes tremble; for surely they could not last for ever—otherwise it would be heaven on earth. But, sober and inoffensive as Roony was, he was not without enemies; indeed, for very reason of his sobriety and inoffensiveness some hated him. And one evening—Christmas eve—he and his young wife were seated by the stove, talking about the Black-eye Club, whose head-quarters were in a liquor-store close by, and whose members had sworn vengeance on Mike for refusing to join them. “They have threatened to beat me,” he said; “but if they only give me fair play, I’ll be a match for the biggest of ’em.” “Ay, fair play!” said Helen, shuddering. “Savages like them always take a man unawares, and, like wolves, they hunt in packs.” “They carry pistols, too,” added Mike, “while I carry nothing but my fists.” “Well, bad as I feel about it, husband dear, I’d a thousand times rather have you brave the whole villanous gang than see you join them; for now we are so happy.” Here Helen twined her arm round his neck, then, gazing on him with loving eye, she continued: “You have never touched liquor, you do not get into fights, you are so good; and this rock is dearer to me than the greenest farm in the land.” “With you any spot would be a paradise,” rejoined Mike; “and I hope to-morrow will be the last Christmas that we’ll go without a turkey and some toys for the children.” “Oh! I’m sure it will,” said Helen. “But you are right to pay all our debts first; and already the boards which the shanty cost are paid for, and so is the stove, and there is nothing owing except the coal”; then, with a smile: “And I’ve promised a pailful of coal to Mrs. McGowan, who lives on the next rock. You see, poor as we are, we can afford to give something away. Oh! isn’t that sweet?” “It is indeed,” answered Roony; then, after a pause: “But now tell me, wife, who do you think is going to preach to-morrow?” “Father H——.” “Really! Oh! I’m so glad; he always knows when to stop.” “A good sermon can’t be too long,” said Helen. “Well, I own it isn’t easy to leave off when once you get a-going. I was a brakeman five years, and know what it is to stop a train of cars. But if I was in the pulpit I’d know how to do it.” “How?” “Well, I’d just fix my eye on the sleepiest-looking fellow in the congregation, and the very moment his head began to nod I’d lift up my hand and say, ‘A blessing I wish you all.’” Here Helen laughed, and while she was laughing Mike added: “And I’ve sometimes thought Father H—— kept his eye on me.” While they were thus chatting by the little stove the northwest wind went howling round the house, and Jack Frost tried his best, his very best, to get in, but did not succeed, not even through the keyhole; for Roony was not sparing of fuel, and the stove-pipe was red hot. Indeed, ’twas rather pleasant to hear the voice of the blast and the rattling of the window-panes; while at times the whole building seemed to rise up off the rock, and then Helen would throw an uneasy glance at her husband, who would grin and say: “It’s well anchored, darling; never fear.” At length the clock struck midnight, and the children, who had been sleeping on their parents’ laps, were taken gently up and put to bed—so gently that their slumber was scarcely broken. Then husband and wife retired too; but, ere placing their heads on the pillow, they knelt and gave thanks to God for the many blessings they had enjoyed since last Christmas. Oh! sweet was the sleep which followed the prayer, and happy were their dreams; and when Christmas morning came, the sun did not rise on a happier home than this one. Scarcely had its rays flashed through the east window when Mike sprang up, and, clapping his hands, shouted: “O Helen, Helen! open your eyes and see what Santa Claus has brought you.” Obedient to his call, Helen awoke; and sure enough, to her great surprise, discovered one of her stockings dangling from the latch of the door, and there was something in it, but what it might be she had not the least notion, nor her husband either. “Oh! go quick and see what it is,” she said. “I’m so curious to know.” Accordingly, Mike went to the stocking; then, plunging his hand into it, drew forth—a bottle, and on it was marked, “Whiskey.” “Well, I declare,” he said, grinning, as he held it up, “here is something, Nell, to drink your health with this Christmas day.” But the wife’s bright look had vanished in a moment when she heard what the bottle contained; and now, in a grave tone, she answered: “No, dear, do not drink my health with that. Thank God! you have never yet touched liquor, so do not begin the bad habit on this sacred day, nor on any other day. Throw the bottle out of doors—do!” “Well, now, can’t a fellow take just a sip in honor of Santa Claus, who brought it?” “No, no; the devil brought it. Don’t take even one drop; throw the poison away—quick!” “Oh! but it’s a bitter cold morning, Nell, and the fire isn’t lit, and a sip of whiskey’ll keep me warm while I make it—only just one sip.” “Husband, I beg you”—here the wife clasped her hands—“I implore you to get rid of the devil’s gift as quick as possible. I see that you are already tempted. O husband! listen to my voice.” To calm her—for she seemed much excited—Roony opened the door, and, stepping out into the frosty air, struck the neck of the bottle against the rock, so as to make her believe that it was broken in pieces; but only the neck came off. “Really,” he said within himself, after moistening his lips with a drop, “this doesn’t taste bad; surely a little won’t hurt me.” Then, concealing the bottle in the goat-house, he went back and told his wife what he had never told her before—a lie. “You broke it! Oh! I’m so glad,” she exclained, “so very glad!” But there was a tear in her eye as she spoke; then, while Mike busied himself kindling the fire, Helen knelt down and remained a good while on her knees. “Why, Nell, what ails you?” he asked, drawing near her after she had finished the prayer. “This is Christmas morning; let’s be merry.” “Oh! yes, I must be merry,” she replied, trying to assume a cheerful air. But there was something in her tone which struck Mike as peculiar, and for a moment he blushed. Did she suspect the untruth which he had told? No; her faith in him was unbroken, and she could not account to herself for the heavy weight upon her heart, which even the prayer had not taken away; and now, despite the glorious sunbeams flooding the room and the sweet voices of her children, Helen felt sad. Who had entered their happy home in the stillness of night, and placed that ill-omened gift in her stocking? Might it really be the Evil One? And while she wondered over this mysterious occurrence, she thought of the many families, once happy and well-to-do, who had come to grief and misery through intemperance. Was her own day of trial approaching? What did this Christmas gift portend? “But no, no; I will not be sad; I’ll be cheerful. For Michael’s sake I will,” she said to herself. Then, as the bright look spread over her face, Mike clapped his hands and shouted: “That’s right, my darling. Hurrah!” And so the early hours went by; and when ten o’clock struck, they set out for St. Paul’s Church, which was about nine blocks off, the mother holding her little boy by the hand, the father carrying little Nell, who was not yet old enough to walk so far. But when they were within a few paces of the church door, Roony stopped and declared that he had forgotten to feed the goat. “Well, dear, it’s too late now,” said Helen. “Nanny can wait; you’ll miss Mass if you go back.” “O wife! how would you like to miss your breakfast?” rejoined Mike. “Nanny is hungry. I must return.” “And lose Mass?” she said, with a look of tender reproach. Roony did not answer, but turned on his heel and went away, leaving her too overcome with surprise to utter another word. The priest was already at the altar when Helen arrived, and the church very full; yet more people continued to push their way in, and ever and anon she would look round to see if her husband were among the late-comers. She tried to keep her thoughts from wandering, but did not succeed. Never had Helen felt so distracted before, and the foreboding of evil which had oppressed her in the early morning now returned and shrouded her in such gloom that she could hardly pray. But, troubled as the poor woman was, no suspicion of the truth had yet entered her mind. She was very innocent, and did not doubt but Mike, having come late, was hidden among the crowd by the door. At length the service ended; and now she felt quite certain that he would join her. But five minutes elapsed, and then ten—a whole quarter of an hour passed away. The congregation was fast dispersing; still, her husband did not appear. “Oh! where can he be?” she asked herself. “Where can he be?” At every voice that greeted her Helen started; for many knew her and wished her a merry Christmas, and Mrs. McGowan, who had a keen eye, exclaimed: “Why, what ails you, Mrs. Roony?” How lonesome the wife felt as she plodded homeward! Yet her children were prattling merrily, and the street was full of happy people. She was blind to them all, she was deaf to every word that was spoken, and kept murmuring again and again: “Where can Michael be?” Finally Helen reached home, and was about to cross the threshold, when suddenly she paused and uttered a cry which might have been heard afar, ’twas so loud and piercing; while little Mike and Nell exclaimed at one breath: “Mamma, look at papa sleeping.” Yes, there lay their father stretched upon the floor, breathing heavily. But ’twas not the pleasant slumber into which Helen loved to see him fall when he returned weary from a hard day’s work; and after gazing on him a moment with an expression impossible to describe, she buried her face in her hands. Poor thing! well might she weep; and if a feeling of disgust mingled with her grief, may we not forgive her? He was breathing heavily; by his right hand lay an empty bottle with the neck broken off, and the air of the room was tainted with the fumes of liquor. “Stop! let your father sleep,” she said to her son, who had knelt down and was playfully brushing the hair off his parent’s face. But this precaution was needless; the latter was too deep in his cups to be roused by the touch of the child’s hand, and presently, with a heavy heart, Helen turned away and set to work to prepare the dinner. There was no turkey to cook; still, she had intended to provide a somewhat better repast than ordinary, it being Christmas day. But, alas! she hardly knew what she was doing as she bustled about the stove; and when, by and by, dinner was ready, she tasted not a mouthful herself—all appetite had fled. The children, however, ate heartily, pausing now and again to say: “Mamma, why don’t you call papa?” It was evening when Roony awoke, and the moment Helen perceived that his eyes were open she began to tremble; for, though she did not doubt but he was sober by this time, she felt as if another man were near her, and not the one whom she had once so honored and trusted. And as he stared at her from the floor, he did indeed appear changed; there was a silly, vacant look on his face, his eyes were bloodshot, and it was almost five minutes before he attempted to rise. Then, without opening his lips, he got up and went out of the house, closing the door behind him with a slam. “Well, I declare,” he said, tossing away the broken bottle—“I declare I’ve been drunk; and, what’s more, I told a lie and missed Mass. Will she ever forgive me?” Then stamping his foot: “Oh! what a fool I’ve been—what a wicked fool!” Presently, while he was thus lamenting his sins, the door opened and a voice said: “Come to me, dear; come to me.” “O Helen!” he cried, turning toward her, “can you forgive me, will you?” “Come to me,” she repeated, opening wide her arms, but at the same time drawing back a step from the threshold; for curious eyes were watching them from a neighboring rock. Quick Roony flew into the shanty, then, dropping down on his knees, burst into tears. The wife wept too, while little Mike and Nell looked on in childish wonder at the scene. “But, darling, why do you cry?” he exclaimed presently, rising to his feet. “You’ve done nothing wrong.” Helen made no response, but brushing the tears away, twined her arms around his neck. “Well, speak, darling. What have you done to cry?” repeated Roony. “O Michael!” she answered in faltering accents, “you have been such a good, kind husband to me. We have been so happy together—so very, very happy. God has blest us with two darling children. We might live, perhaps, years and years in this sweet spot; and when at length death parted us, ’twould not be for long—we should meet again in heaven. O Michael! I weep because all this may be changed—because death might part us for ever and ever!” “No, no, darling, it shall not! It shall not!” “Well, I will pray with heart and soul, husband dear, that you may not fall a second time. Alas! if the habit of drink once fasten upon you, it may be impossible to shake it off; and intemperance not only ruins many a family, but damns many a soul.” At her own words the wife shuddered and began to weep anew. “Well, I say never fear. Not another drop of liquor will I touch,” said Mike—“no, not another drop as long as I live.” “Oh! thank God!” exclaimed Helen, “thank God!” “Yes, yes, I solemnly promise it. And now, darling, try and forget all about my wickedness to-day, won’t you?” “Yes, I’ll forget all about it,” she answered. With this Helen began to sing a merry song, in which her husband joined, while the children went romping around the room, and the cricket came out of his tiny hole beneath the stove and chirped merrily too. But although Helen had forgiven him, yet Mike’s conduct had wrought a deep impression on her; and when bedtime arrived and they retired, he slept soundly enough, but she lay awake for hours. And whenever the wind shook the house, she would tremble; and once the door seemed to open. But no, this was merely fancy. The noise, however, which startled her at midnight was real and not imagination. It proceeded from the den where the Black-eye Club was celebrating Christmas, and mingled with their yells were horrible oaths. Helen did not doubt but a fight was going on; perhaps some one was being beaten to death. Then she turned toward her husband, and even touched him, to make quite sure that he was lying beside her. The following day Roony went off to work as usual, and came back in the evening, cheered as usual, too, by the light in the window; and immediately its welcome rays flashed upon him, he exclaimed: “Oh! what a good wife I have. God bless her!” Ay, Helen is good! Her heart is with you, Mike, wherever you go; and at this very moment she is kneeling by the little beacon, praying that it may guide you safely to her side, and that you may not be tempted to stray into the bar-room on the corner. But not the next day only, the whole week, Roony was his old, good-natured, hard-working, sober self; and what had marred the joy of Christmas was fast fading from Helen’s memory. But one Saturday evening, as he was trudging homeward with his pocket full of wages, there came over him a sudden craving for spirits; the broken bottle out of which he had taken his maiden drink seemed to rise up before his eyes; the delicious taste of the whiskey was on his lips afresh. In fact, the craving was so very strong, so wholly unexpected, that it startled him, and his heart beat violently. “Oh! I never thought I should be seized in this way,” he groaned. “How very strange! I can’t resist; yet I must. O Helen! would to God I had not taken that first drink.” The words were scarcely breathed when the beams of the home-light flashed upon him. ’Twas still a good distance off, and the air was muggy and thick, yet it shone brighter than Mike had ever seen it shine before. For about a minute he watched it yearningly; he even quickened his steps and twice groaned, “O Helen!” Then, muttering a curse upon himself, he turned his eyes away from the light, and at the same time, swerving out of the dear home-path, he hurried on to the liquor-saloon. “Three cheers for Mike Roony!” was the salutation which greeted him from a dozen voices as he entered. “I knew you’d join us afore long,” said the President of the Black-eye Club, advancing and shaking him warmly by the hand; then, motioning to the others, their empty glasses were refilled and the new-comer’s health toasted. Presently Roony wanted to treat; but “No, no,” they all shouted; “’tis our privilege to treat you this evening.” Whereupon the bottle was passed round again; while poor Mike, flattered beyond measure by this unlooked-for reception, thought to himself: “What a fool I was not to join the club long ago!” And so on they went carousing, and Helen’s husband growing more and more intoxicated, until at length, when he was barely able to stand, a voice exclaimed: “Now, boys, let’s christen him.” Quick as lightning a violent blow on the eye followed these words; then down dropped Roony unconscious to the floor. “Where can he be?” said the anxious wife, seeing that he did not return at the usual hour. “I pray God nothing has happened. The dear fellow came near being killed by a blast last year. O my God! I hope nothing has happened.” After waiting for him awhile, Helen and her young ones took their places at the supper-table; but not a morsel did she eat. A vague fear possessed her. The children spoke, but the mother answered them not; the cricket chirped—she was deaf to its merry song; and every few minutes she would open the door, and look out and listen. But no husband appeared. And now, without him, how everything seemed to change! The rock, the shanty, the pretty rosebush she cherished, even the children whom she loved ten thousand times more than the rose—all appeared different to her eyes; nothing was the same when he who was the corner-stone of home was missing; and Helen realized as never before what a link of adamant bound her heart to his. “Oh! if anything has happened. If he is killed, ’twill kill me too,” she sighed. Then, when little Mike asked, “Where is papa?” she answered, “Coming soon.” And even to speak these words brought her a moment’s peace of mind, and she would try to think of some good cause which might detain him. But the clock went on ticking, and the hour-hand moved further and further toward midnight; still, no husband came. The children were put to bed, and soon were fast asleep; the fire in the stove died out; the cricket became silent; but the wife grew more and more wakeful, while ever and anon she would go to the window and nervously snuff the candle burning there. Then again she would open the door and listen—listen with all her ears; but she heard only the throbbing of her heart and boisterous voices in the direction of the liquor-saloon. “Well, I’ll watch and pray till he arrives,” said Helen; then kneeling beside the crib where her children were sleeping, she lifted her thoughts to God. But the many hours she had been awake, the busy day prolonged so far into night, proved at last too much for her; and just as the clock struck one her weary eyes closed and her guardian angel took up the prayer which she left unfinished. How long Helen slept she did not know; but when she awoke the candle had burned out and the chamber was pitch dark. “Oh! what is the matter? What did I hear? Was it only a dream?” she cried, starting to her feet. “Come, now, I want my supper!” growled Mike, staggering further into the room. “Where’s my supper?” Pen cannot describe the wife’s feelings as she groped about for the match-box. And when finally, after letting three or four matches drop out of her quivering fingers, she succeeded in lighting a fresh candle, what a sight did she behold! Was this man scowling at her, with one eye battered and swollen, her own Michael? “I say, where’s my supper?” he repeated with an oath. Without uttering a word, but with a sinking of the heart which she had never experienced till now, Helen made haste to kindle a fire and heat up the potatoes and pork which she had laid aside for him in the evening. While thus employed Roony dropped down on a bench; then, after grumbling at her a few minutes, began suddenly to giggle. “I want you to know,” said he, “that I’m now a member of the Black-eye Club. But that’s plain enough by looking at me, eh? And when I’ve eaten supper, I’m going to make you cut my hair—cut it short to fighting trim.” “O husband!” replied Helen, in a voice of sorrowful entreaty, “do not break my heart, I love you so.” “Break your heart! Ha! ha! that’s a good joke.” Then, glancing up at the clock: “Well, by jingo, Nell, I’d better call this meal breakfast. Why, it’s pretty nigh four, isn’t it?” Encouraged, perhaps, by the somewhat milder tone in which these last words were spoken, she now approached him, and, bending down, proceeded to examine his wounded eye. “Yes, bathe it for me,” he continued. “But, for all it hurts, I’m deuced proud of it; for it’s the christening mark of the Black-eye Club.” “Oh! hush, dear. Don’t mention that wicked gang any more,” said the wife. “I hate them; they are fiends.” “Fiends? Ha, ha! Well, well, hurry up with my breakfast or supper, whichever you choose to call it; then get the scissors and cut off my hair.” “Let me bathe your poor eye first,” she answered; “then, after you have done eating, ’twill be daylight, and I want you, love, to come to Mass this morning, and to see the priest; we’ll go together. O Michael! dark clouds are lowering over us; come with me to the priest.” “To the priest? No, indeed! The Black-eye Club have nothing to do with priests.” “O husband! do not talk so; save yourself before it is too late,” she went on, as she sponged the clotted blood off his cheek. “I can’t, wife. The craving for spirits is too strong. It all comes, I know, from that one little drink Christmas morning. Now I’m not master of myself; I believe there’s a devil in me.” A long, shadowy silence followed, during which Helen wept, while ever and anon Roony would say, “It’s no use crying.” While he was at his breakfast she once more begged him to go with her to Mass. But again he refused, saying, “Our club don’t go to Mass; nor must you, until you have trimmed my hair.” “Why, ’tis short enough,” replied Helen. “Is it? Look!” And as Mike spoke he clutched a fistful of it, then gave a pull. “Now, don’t you see that some chap might grab me and get my head in ‘chancery’? I want my hair short as pig’s bristles, and well greased too; then I’ll be like an eel, and grab me who can.” The wife obeyed without a murmur, performing the operation to his entire satisfaction; after which, approaching the crib where her children were sleeping, she gave each a soft kiss, then went off by herself to church. Helen had never been wanting in devotion; her faith had always been strong. But now, as she took her way along the lonely street, with the morning star still shining in the heavens, she felt as though God were come nearer to her; and all her former prayers were cold compared with the prayers which she offered this morning at the foot of the altar. And when Mass was over and she turned her steps homeward, ’twas with a more cheerful heart and a firm resolution to be a loving and faithful wife to the end, the bitter end, whatever it might be. When Helen entered the shanty she found her husband gone. But little Mike was there, and he looked so like his father; and little Nell was there too. Oh! surely they would not be abandoned. “No, God is with us,” she murmured. “My prayers will be heard, and Michael will one day be what he used to be. Yes, yes! I know it.” As she spoke a radiant look spread over her face; then, making the sign of the cross, she straightway set about her daily duties as if nothing had happened. O blessed Faith! which makest the darkest hour bright; richer, indeed, in gifts than a gold-mine art thou, and stronger than a mountain to lean upon in moments like these! When evening came round, Helen placed the candle in the window as usual, although she had faint hope that Mike had been at work. And again she set up till a very late hour, keeping the fire burning and taking good care not to fall asleep this time. It was one o’clock when Roony returned. He was not tipsy, but surly, and when she laid her hand on his arm he flung it away, saying, “Now, I want no preaching and petting; I want my supper.” The poor woman was a little frightened, and waited upon him awhile in silence. “Yet I must speak,” she murmured; “I must brave his anger. No husband was ever kinder than he, no spouse happier than I have been till now; I must make one more effort to save him from ruin.” With this, she again gently touched his arm and said, “Dear love—” “D—— your preaching; I won’t listen to it,” he snarled, cutting short her words, and in a voice so loud that it awoke the children. Then, presently, shrugging his shoulders, “Oh! you needn’t whimper. I’m bound to be master here.” “Have I ever denied your authority?” inquired Helen, looking calmly at him through her tears. “Oh! hush. Don’t bother me,” continued Roony, lifting up his plate. Then, as if he had changed his mind about throwing it at her, he dashed it into shivers on the floor. “Alas! what a curse liquor is,” she cried in a tone of passionate energy. “What a terrible curse!” “Well, I’m not drunk, am I?” “But you have been drinking; and the poison is in your veins. O Michael! for God’s sake abandon the villanous set you belong to!” Here he clenched his fist. But heedless of the threat she went bravely on: “Think how happy we were, Michael. This bare rock was more lovely than a garden to us. And we have two dear children; look at them yonder! Look at them!” “I say, woman, go to bed and leave me alone,” thundered Roony, bringing down his huge fist on the table with a thump which made everything in the shanty rattle. Poor, poor Helen! With a heart torn by anguish, she obeyed. But not a wink of sleep came to her—no, not a wink, and never night seemed longer than this one. But her husband slept like a top, nor opened his eyes until ten the next morning; then, as soon as he was dressed, and without waiting for breakfast, out he went to take a drink. “Oh! what is coming? What is going to happen now?” thought Helen, as she watched him enter the bar-room. Then kneeling down, she said a prayer. The clock had just struck noon when Mike returned, accompanied part of the way by another man, who helped him mount the difficult path which wound up the rock; and Roony needed assistance, for even when he gained the summit he could not walk straight, and fell within a yard of his door. Quick Helen ran to him; for, although his condition filled her with disgust, yet she could not abide the thought of other eyes than hers discovering him thus. “Come in, husband, come in the house,” she said, taking his arm. Scarcely, however, had she got him on his feet again when he caught her by the throat and exclaimed, in the voice of a wild beast, “Ah, ha! now I’m going to beat you.” But in an instant Helen broke loose from him; then rushing back into the shanty, she called her children and bade them hurry out on the rock. The little things obeyed, too innocent to know what the trouble was. Then facing her husband, who was scowling at her from the threshold, “Now enter,” she said, “and beat me if you will. Here, at least, nobody will witness the deed.” Roony staggered in and Helen closed the door. That evening, after pressing her children many times to her poor bruised heart, Helen went away. She quitted the home where she had once been so happy, and, as she went, she said to herself: “If on my wedding day an angel from heaven had told me this, I should not have believed him.” But the step she was now taking was all for the best. In his madness Roony had threatened to kill her. “And he might do it,” she sighed, “for when he is intoxicated he doesn’t know what he is doing. And then all his life afterward he would be haunted by remorse. Poor Michael! I believe he still loves me. For his own sake I am going away.” It was Helen’s intention to seek refuge with a family who dwelt not far off, and for whom she had once done some work. They received her very kindly, and wondered ever so much at the ugly cut under one of her eyes, from which the red drops were still oozing; and her upper lip, too, was cut. But Helen refused to tell who had ill-used her. “Pray, ask no questions,” she said. “Only furnish me with employment; I’ll drudge; I’ll do anything to earn a little money.” Accordingly, they gave her a number of shirts to make; and being a deft hand at needle-work, she was able to gain quite a good livelihood. But it was not for herself that Helen labored, ’twas for those whom she loved better than herself. And every evening, when the stars began to twinkle, she visited her old home, and there, peeping through the window, would watch little Mike and Nell with yearning eyes. And once she saw her husband seated by the stove, eating a piece of the bread and meat which she had left at the door the previous evening. “Oh! thank God!” she said, “that I am able to support him and the children. Perhaps ere long my prayers will be heard, and I shall be happy again.” But Roony was still drinking steadily; even now, as he ate the cold victuals, he was barely able to sit on the chair, and so the poor woman did not venture to show herself. Next day, however, the fifth since she left home, the longed-for opportunity presented itself; Mike was sober, and with bounding heart Helen went into the shanty. “O wife!” he exclaimed, rising to meet her, “’tis an age since I laid eyes on you. Where have you been?” Then his countenance suddenly growing dark as a thundercloud, “but, by heaven! what’s happened? How came those bruises on your face? Somebody has ill-treated you! Tell me the villain’s name, that I may take his heart’s blood.” “I’ll never tell his name,” answered Helen, in a low but firm voice. “Never!” For about a minute Roony gazed on her in silence; the mournful, the shocking truth seemed to be gradually dawning upon him. “Oh! is it possible? Could I have done it—done such a wicked, brutal thing?” he asked himself. Then, falling on his knees, he bathed her feet with bitter tears. Helen wept also, while the children ceased their gambols and wondered what was the matter. But presently the wife bade him rise, then, twining her arms round his neck, gave him a tender embrace, by which he knew that he was forgiven. And now for a brief half-hour, oh! how happy he was, and how happy she was! During the dark days which followed Helen often looked back to those fleeting moments; ’twas like a gleam of sunshine flung across a scathed and desolate landscape. “Now, husband dear,” she said after he had fondled her a little while, “let me put things to rights.” Whereupon she took her broom, swept the floor, and sprinkled it with clean sand; the pictures were dusted; the clock set agoing; the rosebush watered; nor was the poor goat forgotten. And delighted, indeed, was the half-starved creature to see her again. “Helen!” exclaimed Mike, while she was thus employed, “a wife like you is a priceless treasure. Would to Heaven I had listened to you Christmas morning! What a different man I’d be now!” “Well, love, all is bright once more,” answered Helen, cheerily. He made no response save a deep sigh. “Why, husband dear, what troubles you?” she asked, her look of joy vanishing in a moment. “No slave was ever bound by such chains as bind me,” he groaned, dropping his forehead in his hands. “And it all comes from that one fatal drink.” “Well, pray, dear, pray to God, and I will pray with you.” “Too late! The craving for liquor which seizes me at times is irresistible; ’tis seizing me now—the demon!” “O my Saviour!” cried Helen, trembling and turning pale. The words had hardly left her lips when the door opened and a strange face—at least it was new to her—peeped in. “Time!” spoke the chief of the Black-eye Club in a voice which caused Roony to start to his feet. “Begone!” cried Helen, advancing boldly toward the intruder. “Time!” he repeated, now holding up a pistol. But, nothing daunted, she was about to try and close the door on him, when her husband slipped past, and ere she could recover from her amazement they were both beyond the rock and half way to the grog-shop. That night the poor woman remained in the shanty, watching, and weeping, and praying. But her husband did not come back till sunrise; and then he was so crazy with drink that she deemed it best to quit her home once more. Accordingly, she returned to the kind people who had given her shelter and employment. But it was not easy to settle down anew to her sewing; the needle would drop from her fingers and a cold fear thrill through her veins as she thought of the repulsive, sin-stamped face which had peeped into the shanty and enticed her dear Michael away. We may imagine, also, her agony of mind when it was reported that a burglary, accompanied by murder, had been committed during the night, and that suspicion pointed to certain members of the Black-eye Club. But, to her unspeakable relief, Mike was not among those who were arrested. The chief of the gang, however, was; and condemned, too, to be hanged; which sentence would doubtless have been carried out had he not managed to escape from prison. This incident, far from ruining the Black-eyes, only afforded them a pleasing excitement; like rats when the cat comes, they dived into their holes for a space; then out they came as flourishing as ever, and Roony was one of their most popular members. But let us be brief with our story. Why linger over poor Helen’s misery? Why tell of all the brutal treatment she suffered? Month after month rolled by. Spring came; summer followed spring. Yet there was no change for the better in Mike. His shanty, once the prettiest and cleanest of all the shanties on Manhattan Island, grew to be the dirtiest and most forlorn-looking. The door was kicked off its hinges, ugly rags and papers fluttered in the broken windows, and occasionally the Black-eye Club assembled on the rock, making it the scene of a drunken revel. But brave, faithful Helen continued to visit her children every evening after dark, carrying them food and clothing. She would not remove them from the spot which she still called home, for she hoped that the sight of the little innocents would sooner or later call her husband back to his old self again. And every day Helen went to St. Paul’s church and made the Stations of the Cross; this was her favorite devotion. “And if my Saviour suffered so much,” she would say, “oh! surely, I can bear my load.” Yet there were moments when she seemed well-nigh ready to sink under it. Ay, more than once Hope wrestled with Despair; but Hope always came off victorious. If the wife’s faith was still glowing, if her trust in God continued strong as ever, nevertheless in one respect a woful change appeared in her. Oh! sad was the havoc which this year of grief, of cruel ill-treatment wrought on her once bright and lovely face! ’Twas as if a coarse hand had rubbed off the delicate tints of that sweet picture, and left behind, not the ruins of her beauty, but the ruins of those ruins. And now in time’s monotonous circle winter is come round again; another Christmas is at hand. Evergreens and toys, laughing children and good-humored parents, with well-filled purses, all tell it to you. And papa and mamma, as they dash hither and thither in their jingling sleighs, doubt not but everybody else is happy too: Santa Claus will visit every home; Santa Claus will fill every stocking. Why, who could help feeling merry at this holy season?—unless, perhaps, the turkeys. Yes, it is Christmas Eve. “How well I remember last Christmas!” sighed poor Helen as she leaned back in her chair and gazed with tearful eyes at the shirt which, alas! she was unable to finish. How could she finish it? She was barely able to see. Yet those livid, tell-tale marks on her visage, painful as they are, are easier to bear than the curses and unfeeling words which have broken her heart at last. As night approached, snow began to fall and the wind to blow—a keen, angry wind from the north-east; one of those winds we love so to hear howling round the house while we sit toasting our slippers by the fire. But, bitter cold as it was, Helen did not shrink from going to church; although half-blind, she could still find the way there. She went; she made anew the stations of the Cross, and said, as she had so often said before, “If my Saviour suffered so much, oh! surely I can bear my load.” As she breathed these words to herself the ugly black-and-blue marks which disfigured her seemed to fade away, a glow of heaven shone in her face, and for a moment, one brief moment, she became once more the beautiful Helen—Helen, “the Belle of the Shanties,” as Mrs. McGowan used to call her—then suddenly she gave a start and the mien of rapture changed to a look of wonder and alarm. Who had spoken her name? There was nobody near; who could it be? While Helen was gazing about her, she heard the voice again. “Who is calling me?” she asked, her heart now throbbing violently. The words were scarcely uttered when for the third time, and more distinctly, “Helen!” sounded in her ear. “It is Michael!” she exclaimed, hastening to the door. “Yes, it is he calling me.” But ere she passed out of the church she broke off a sprig of evergreen and dipped it into the holy-water font. Then hiding it in her bosom, so that the angry wind might not snatch it away, she sped homeward on winged feet. But ’twas no easy matter to get to the rock at this hour with her poor bruised eyes and in such a driving storm. Yet she did find the way. And up the rude path she climbed with marvellous agility; ’twas as though an invisible hand were leading her on. The sight which Helen beheld on entering the shanty might have appalled any heart but hers. Her husband, his face streaming with blood, was engaged in a deadly struggle with a horrible-looking being much larger than himself, who seemed striving to make him drink from a cup which he pressed to his lips. “O Ellen!” cried Michael in a tone of despair, “save me! save me!” Quick she flew towards him, stretching forth at the same time the branch of evergreen. In another instant ’twas in his hand; then, just as he grasped it, his strange adversary uttered a demoniac cry and the cup fell to the floor, shattered in many pieces. “Oh! I am saved,” exclaimed Roony—“saved! saved! Thank God!” But while his joyful words were ringing through the house, the fiend turned upon his deliverer and out into the black night Helen was driven. Vainly she struggled; a powerful hand, which seemed mailed in iron, thrust her out, and presently, when released from its ruthless grip, she found herself blindly groping here and there in the darkness. Round and round the house she wandered—near it always, yet never finding it. And during these sad moments, the last moments of her life, her husband was anxiously seeking her. But it was easy to miss each other in such a snow-storm, and when he shouted her name the wild wind carried away her response, until at length, numbed by the cold, she answered him no more. And so, within a few feet of home, the brave Helen, the faithful Helen, was wrapt in a winding-sheet of snow. * * * * * Next morning—sweet Christmas morning—the sun rose in a cloudless sky; and as its bright beams flashed from window to window, from spire to spire, every object, the humblest, the least beautiful, became suddenly transformed into a thing of beauty. Ay, even those two icy hands peeping above the snow hard by Mike Roony’s shanty door sparkle as if they were covered with gems and have a golden halo round them. They were clasped as if in prayer, and when poor Mike discovered them he cried aloud: “Oh! she prayed for me to the last; she prayed for me to the last!” His wail was heard at the next rock, and far beyond it. Then a crowd began to collect, a very large crowd; for Helen was known to many, and her husband was not the only one who shed tears over her remains this bright Christmas morning. “I had a feeling that something was going wrong,” spoke Mrs. McGowan. Then, when Roony told of the infernal being who had attacked him, and how he had been rescued by the blessed evergreen which Helen had brought, the good woman solemnly shook her head, and whispered: “This house ought to be exorcised—indeed it ought.” “Well, one thing I vow by all that’s holy,” ejaculated Mike, crossing himself and lifting his voice so that the crowd might hear him—“I vow never again to touch liquor—never, never, never!” “I join you!” exclaimed a bystander. “So do I!” “And I too!” “And I!” shouted a number of voices. And those who spoke were members of the notorious Black-eye Club. Then they all knelt around the body and swore, hand-in-hand together, never to drink another drop of intoxicating spirits. And thus by Helen’s death many sinners were converted, many a drunkard’s home made happy again; for the ways of the Lord are mysterious. Good is not seldom wrought out only through tears and suffering. Oh! who will say it was not well for Helen to die? But poor Mike was inconsolable. He who had once been so blithe and frolicsome now spoke scarcely a word. Days and weeks rolled by, yet he did not change. We may pity him indeed! There was no light in the window now to welcome him from afar as he trudged back from his work in the dusk. And when he sat down to warm himself by the stove, instead of lighting his pipe as of yore and falling into a pleasant doze, he became strangely wakeful. Then the spectre remorse would glide out of some shadowy corner and whisper bitter words in his ear. If at times he succeeded in silencing its voice, and would give himself up to a reverie of other days, when this miserable shanty was more gorgeous to him than a palace, oh! the pleasure which the sweet vision brought was like music heard from withinside a prison wall, like sunshine seen through the bars; for those golden days would come never more. Eternity stood between him and them. Then back remorse would creep and whisper: “You beat her—you broke her heart—you killed her—you did—you did!” And one evening, while these torturing words were wringing his soul, he threw up his right hand—the hand which had struck her so often—and groaned aloud: “Oh! this is hell. Where’s the axe?” Forlorn wretch! well it was that as he bared his arm and clutched the axe—ay, well it was that at that very moment the minister of God appeared to check the rash deed he contemplated, to speak soothing words, to save him, perhaps, from madness. And as from this hour forth a new life began for Michael Roony, we end our tale with the closing advice which the priest addressed him. “My dear friend,” he said, “do not weep any more, for tears will not bring back your wife. There is nothing in this world so vain as regret. Therefore cease to mourn; strive your best to be cheerful.” Then pointing to little Mike and Nell, who were playing at his feet, “work hard, too, for these children whom she bore you. For their sake, as well as your own, keep true to the pledge of temperance, and so live here on earth that one day you may meet again your dear Helen in heaven.”
Cor magis Sena pandit. The railway from Empoli to the south passes through a rough, hilly country, following its sinuosities, spanning the valleys on gigantic arches, or plunging through the tunnelled mountains. One tunnel is a mile long—through the hill of San Dalmazzo; and when you issue from it, you see before you another hill, on which rises, stage after stage, the strange, mediÆval city of Siena, to the height of nearly a thousand feet above the level of the sea. It was rather a disappointment not to enter it, as carriages from Florence do, by the celebrated Porta Camollia, where the traveller is greeted by the cordial inscription, Cor magis Sena pandit—Siena opens her gates even more willingly than her heart—testifying to the hospitable character of the inhabitants. The city is built on three hills, with deep ravines between them. These hills are crossed by three main streets, meeting at the Piazza del Campo, around which the city radiates like a star. There is scarcely a level spot in the whole place. Even the central square descends like the hollow of a cone. Nothing could be more favorable to the picturesque. The old brick walls of the thirteenth century, with their fortifications and thirty-eight gate-ways, go straggling up the heights. Narrow, lane-like streets, inaccessible to carriages, rush headlong down into deep ravines, sometimes through gloomy arches, the very houses clinging to the steep sides with a giddy, top-heavy air. On one of these three hills stands the cathedral, with its lofty arches and magnificent dome, a marvel of art, full of statues and bronzes, carvings and mosaics. On another is the enormous brick church of San Domenico, for ever associated with the divine raptures of St. Catharine of Siena. Palaces, as well as churches, adorn all the heights—palaces grim and time-worn, that bear old, historic names, famed in the great contests between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, in which live, secluded in their own dim halls, the aristocratic owners, keeping up their ancient customs, proud as the imperial Ghibellines or lordly Guelphs from whom they sprang. Amid all the towers, and domes, and palaces, rises, from the central square, light and slender, the tall, arrow-like Torre del Mangia, which shoots up to a prodigious height into the sapphire sky, crowned with battlements, as if to defend the city against the spirits of the air. Yes, Siena is singularly picturesque and striking as no other city in Italy is, but sad and melancholy with its recollections of past grandeur. It cannot forget the time when it sent forth its legions to triumph over the Florentines, and had two hundred thousand inhabitants. Now it has only about a tenth of that number. Once it was great in war. It was a leader in art. Eight popes sprang from its territory, among whom were Pius II., the poet, diplomatist, and lover of art, from the Piccolomini family; the great Hildebrand, so prominent in the history of the church; and Alexander III., who deposed Frederick Barbarossa, and gave his name to a city—styled by Voltaire himself the benefactor of the human race. And like so many stars that blaze in the heaven of the Italian Church—nay, the church universal—are the Sienese saints, wondrous in life and glorified by art. The first place into which the traveller inevitably drifts, if he attempts to explore the city alone, is the Piazza del Campo, now called, of course, Vittorio Emmanuele, in spite of Dante. This piazza is singularly imposing from its unchanged, mediÆval aspect. It slopes away like an amphitheatre, being intended for public games and spectacles; Murray says, like a shell. Yes, a shell that whispers of past storms—of the tempestuous waves that have swept over the city; for it has witnessed many a popular insurrection, many a struggle between the nobles and people. Among the interesting associations we recall the haughty Ghibelline leader, Provenzano Salvani, whose name, as Dante says: “Far and wide Through Tuscany resounded once; and now Is in Siena scarce with whispers named.” It was here, when a friend of his, taken prisoner by Charles of Anjou, lay under penalty of death, unless his ransom of a thousand florins in gold should be paid within a certain time, that Provenzano, the first citizen of the republic, the conqueror of Monte Aperti, unable to pay so large a sum, humbled himself so far as to spread a carpet on this piazza, on which he sat down to solicit contributions from the public. “When at his glory’s topmost height, Respect of dignity all cast aside, Freely he fixed him on Siena’s plain, A suitor to redeem his suffering friend, Who languished in the prison-house of Charles; Nor, for his sake, refused through every vein to tremble.” Dante, who meets him in Purgatory, alludes to the grandeur of this act as atoning for his ambition, which “Reached with grasp presumptuous at the sway Of all Siena.” So stanch a friend would seem to have deserved a less terrible fate. On the disastrous day of Colle he was taken by the Florentines, who cut off his head, and carried it around the battle-field, fastened on a lance. On one side of the piazza is the massive Palazzo Pubblico, bristling with battlements. On its front blazes the holy name of Jesus, held up by St. Bernardin of Siena for the reverence of the whole world. The busy throng beneath looks up in its toilsome round, and goes on, the better for a fleeting thought. Below is a pillar with the wolf of pagan Rome that bore Siena. From this palace rises the beautiful tower del Mangia, seen far and wide over the whole country, so called from the automaton which used to come forth at mid-day, like the Moor at Venice, to strike the hours. This figure was to the Sienese what Pasquino was to Rome. To it were confided all the epigrams of the city wits; but, alas for them! one day, when it came forth to do its duty, a spring gave way, and it fell to the ground and was dashed in pieces. This tower commands an admirable view. North, the country looks barren, but the slopes of Chianti are celebrated for their wines, and Monte Maggio is covered with forests. South and west, it is fresher and more smiling, but leads to the fatal marshes of Maremma. Santa Fiora, the most productive mountain, annually yields vast quantities of umber. The happy valleys are full of olives and wheat-fields. Farther off, to the south, the volcanic summits of Radicofani, associated with Boccaccio’s tales, blacken the horizon. To the east everything is bleak and dreary, the whole landscape of a pale, sickly green. At the foot of the tower is a beautiful votive chapel of the Virgin, built in the fourteenth century after a pestilence which carried off eighty thousand people from Siena and its environs. It is like an open porch resting on sculptured pillars. Over the altar within are statues and a fresco of the Madonna, before which are flowers and lamps burning in the bright sunlight—all open to the air, as if to catch a passing invocation from the lips of those who might otherwise spare no thought, amid their toils, for heaven. Siena is peculiarly the city of Mary. Before the great battle with the Florentines, “That colored Arbia’s flood with crimson stain,” the Sienese solemnly placed their city under the protection of the Virgin, and vowed, if victorious, to regard her as the Sovereign Lady of the land, from whom they would henceforth hold it as her vassals. After their triumph they came to lay their spoils at her feet, and had her painted as Our Lady of Victory, throned like a queen, with the Infant standing on her knee. When Duccio, some years later, finished his Madonna, he wrote beneath it: Mater sancta Dei, sis causa Senis requiei!—Give peace to Siena!—and the painting was transported, amid public rejoicings, to the cathedral. Business was entirely suspended. All the shops were closed. The archbishop, at the head of the clergy and magistrates, accompanied it with a vast procession of people, with lighted tapers in their hands, as if around a shrine. The trumpets sounded; the bells rang; nothing could equal the enthusiasm. The picture was placed over the high altar of the church. This was during the height of Siena’s grandeur, when the wisdom of its laws corresponded to the depth of its religious sentiments, so that, while most of the Italian republics were ruined by intestine commotions between the nobles and people, Siena had the wisdom to modify its constitution in such a way as to admit the representatives of both parties to the government, and so preserve the vigor of the nation. It was thus she was enabled to extend her dominion and win the great victory of Monte Aperti, in which ten thousand Florentines were left dead on the field. On one side of the piazza is the palace of the Sansedoni, one of the great Ghibelline families belonging to the feudal aristocracy of Siena—a frowning, battlemented palace, with a mutilated tower built by a special privilege in 1215. In it is a chapel in honor of the Beato Ambrogio Sansedoni, a Dominican friar who belonged to this illustrious family. It was he whom Pope Clement IV., after a vain effort to save the unfortunate Conradin of Souabia from death, sent to administer the sacraments and console the young prince in his last moments. Ambrogio distinguished himself as a professor of theology at Paris, Cologne, and Rome. Close beside the Palazzo Buonsignori, one of the finest in the city, is the house said by tradition to have been inhabited by the unhappy Pia de Tolomei, indebted for her celebrity to Dante, rather than to her misfortunes. He meets her in the milder shades of Purgatory, among those who had by violence died, but who, repenting and forgiving, “Did issue out of life at peace with God.” Her death was caused by the deadly miasmas of “Maremma’s pestilential fen,” to which her cruel husband had banished her. It was a member of the Tolomei family—the Beato Bernardino—who, in the fourteenth century, founded the Olivetan Order. He was previously a professor at the university of Siena, but, being struck blind while discussing some philosophical subject in his lecture-room, he resolved, though he soon recovered his sight, to embrace the religious life; and when he next appeared in his chair, instead of resuming his philosophical discussions, he astonished his audience by insisting on the vanity of all earthly acquirements, and the importance of the only knowledge that can save the soul. Several of his pupils were so impressed by his words that they followed him when he retired to one of the family estates not far from Siena, which he called Monte Oliveto, whence the name of the order. Bernardino fell a victim to his zeal in attending to the sick in the time of a great plague. The convent he founded became a magnificent establishment, with grounds luxuriantly cultivated, a church adorned by the arts, and apartments so numerous that the Emperor Charles V., and his train of five thousand, all lodged there at once. The Palazzo Bandanelli, where Pope Alexander III. was born, is gloomy and massive as a prison, with iron gratings at the arched windows, brick walls black with age, from which project great iron rings, and on the doors immense knockers of wrought iron, made when blacksmiths were genuine artists. But, however dismal his birthplace, Alexander III. was enlightened in his views. It was in 1167 he declared, in the name of a council, that all Christians ought to be exempted from servitude. To go back to the Piazza del Campo. Before the Sansedoni palace is the Fonte Gaja—so called from the joyful acclamations of the people, when water was brought into the square in 1343. It is surrounded by an oblong basin of white marble, elegantly sculptured by Giacomo della Quercia, to whom was henceforth given the name of Del Fonte. Siena, being on a height, was, from the first, obliged to provide water for its inhabitants at great expense. Aqueducts were constructed in the time of the Romans. But a still grander work was achieved in the middle ages, when water was brought from the neighboring mountains by an aqueduct about twenty miles long, that passed beneath the city, giving rise, perhaps, to the derisive report in Dante’s time that the hill was tunnelled in search of the river Diana: “The fancied stream They sought, of Dian called.” These vast subterranean works so excited the admiration of Charles V. that he said Siena was more wonderful below ground than above. Now there are three hundred and fifty-five wells in the city, and eighteen fountains. The deep well in the cloister of the Carmine is called the Pozzo di Diana. The most noted of the fountains is Fonte Branda, whose waters were so famous in Dante’s time for their sweetness and purity that he makes Adamo of Brescia, the coiner of counterfeit money, exclaim, amid the flames of the Inferno, that to behold the instigators of his crime undergoing a like torture would be sweeter to him than the cool waters of Fonte Branda: “For Branda’s limpid font I would not change The welcome sight.” This fountain has also been celebrated by Alfieri, who often came to Siena to visit his friend, Francesco Gori, with whom he remained months at a time. He liked the character of the people, and said, when he went away, that he left a part of his heart behind. And yet Dante, perhaps because a Florentine, accused the Sienese of being light and vain: “Was ever race Light as Siena’s? Sure, not France herself Can show a tribe so frivolous and vain.” Formerly, if not still, giddy people in Tuscany were often asked if they had been drinking water from the Fonte Branda, as if that would account for any excess. The Sienese are proud of the fame and antiquity of this fount, which is known to have existed in 1081. It flows at the very bottom of one of the deep ravines which makes Siena so peculiar, between two precipitous hills, one crowned by the Duomo, and the other by the church of St. Dominic, and you look from one to the other in silent wonder. The whole quarter is densely populated. The people are called Fontebrandini—mostly, as five centuries ago, tanners, dyers, and fullers, who are reputed to be proud, and are to Siena what the Trasteverini are to Rome. The streets around diverge from a market-place, on one side of which is the fount under a long, open arcade of stone, of immense thickness, built against the hillside. You go down to a paved court, as to something sacred, by a flight of steps as wide as the arcade is long. Here are stone seats around, as if to accommodate the gossips of the neighborhood. Three pointed archways, between which lions look out with prey between their outstretched paws, open into the arcade, where flow the waters, gathered from the surrounding hills, by three apertures, into an enormous stone reservoir. The surplus waters pass off into other tanks beyond the arcade, for the use of the workmen of the quarter. Lemon-trees hang over the fount, and grape-vines trail from tree to tree. The steep hillside is covered with bushes and verdure up to the church of San Domenico, which stands stern and majestic, with its crenelated tower amid the olive-trees. An old Sienese romance is connected with the Fonte Branda. Cino da Pistoja, a poet and celebrated professor of jurisprudence at Siena in the fourteenth century, whose death Petrarch laments in a sonnet, promised his daughter, a young lady of uncommon beauty, to any one of his pupils who should best solve a knotty law-question. It was a young man, misshapen in form, to whom the prize was adjudged, and the poor girl, in her horror, threw herself into the Fonte Branda. Her suitor, sensible of the value of the prize, plunged in after her, and not only saved her life, but fortunately succeeded in winning her affections. Turning to the right, and ascending the Costa dei Tintori, you come in a few moments to the house of St. Catharine of Siena, once the shop of her father, a dyer, but now a series of oratories and chapels, sanctified by holy memories and adorned by art. It is built of brick, with two arched galleries, one above the other, of a later period. SposÆ XPI. KatharinÆ Domvs is on the front, with a small head of the saint graven in marble, and another tablet styling her the Seraphic Catharine. Below hang tanned skins, probably for sale. The memories of the place are truly seraphic, but the odors would by no means be considered so by those who do not believe in the dignity and sacredness of labor; for the whole quarter—at least, when we were there—was redolent of tan. Skins hung on all the houses. Tan-cakes for fuel were displayed on shelves for sale at every door. Everybody seemed industrious. There was none of the far niente we like to associate with Italy. It was a positive grievance to find great heaps of tan around the Fonte Branda, so poetical to us, because associated with the Divine Poet. But it was still harder to have the same odors follow us to the very house of the seraphic St. Catharine, the mystic Bride of Christ. Very little change can have taken place during the last five centuries in the neighborhood where bloomed this fair lily of the church, and, in one sense, this is a satisfaction. The house itself is of the most touching interest. There are the stairs Catharine, when a child, used to ascend, with an Ave at every step, and over which the legend says she was so often borne by the angels. Everywhere through the passages are the emblematic lily and heart. An oratory has been made of the kitchen which became to Catharine a very sanctuary, instead of a place of low cares, where she served Christ under the form of her father, the Blessed Virgin under that of her mother, and the disciples in the persons of her brothers and sisters. Her father’s Bottega has also been converted into an oratory. In the garden where she loved to cultivate the symbolic rose and lily and violet for the altar, is a chapel in which hangs the miraculous crucifix painted by Giunta of Pisa, framed in pillars of black marble, over the altar. Before this crucifix she received the stigmata in the church of St. Christina at Pisa. In these various oratories are a profusion of paintings by Sodoma, Vanni, and other eminent artists. Del Pacchia has attained the very perfection of feminine beauty in his painting of St. Catharine’s visit to the shrine of St. Agnes of Monte Pulciano—a genuine production of Christian inspiration. Salimbeni represents her calm amid the infuriated, ungrateful Florentines after her return from Avignon; and Sebastian Folli, her appearance before Gregory XI. But the most sacred part of the house is her chamber, a little, dark cell about fifteen feet long and eight or nine wide. A bronze door now opens into this sanctuary. Here you are shown the board on which she slept, and other relics of the saint. Here she passed nights in prayer and converse with the angels. Here she scourged her frail body, unconscious that her mother was weeping at the door. Here she wrote the admirable letters so remarkable for their purity and elegance of style. Here took place the divine Sposalizio which, immortalized by art, we see all over Italy. Here, when calumniated by the repulsive object of her heroic charity, she came to pour out her pure soul, that shrank from the foul accusations, before the heavenly Bridegroom; but when he appeared with two crowns, one of gold set with jewels, and the other of thorns, she unhesitatingly chose the latter, pressing it deep into her head, thus becoming for all time, in the world of art, the thorn-crowned Catharine. Pius IX., when he visited the house in 1857, prayed long in this cell, where lived five centuries ago the obscure maiden who, for a time, almost guided St. Peter’s bark. On St. Catharine’s day the house is richly adorned and resplendent with light. The walls are covered with emblems and verses commemorating her life. The altars have on their finest ornaments. The neighboring streets are strewn with flowers and hung with flags. Hangings are at all the windows. A silver statue of the saint is borne into the street by a long procession of clergy and people. The magistrates join the cortÈge, and they all go winding up to San Domenico with chants, perfumes, and flowers, where a student from the college Tolomei pronounces a eulogy on their illustrious townswoman. When night comes on, the whole hill around Fonte Branda is illuminated, the rosary is said at the foot of the Madonnas, and hymns are sung in honor of the saint. St. Catharine’s life, in which everything transcends the usual laws of nature, has been written by her confessor, the Blessed Raymond of Capua—the life of one saint by another. He was not a credulous man easily led away by fantasies of the imagination, but one of incontestable ability and knowledge, who relates what he witnessed in the soul of whose secrets he was the depositary, who scrutinized every prodigy, but only to give additional splendor to the truth. Raymond was a descendant of Piero della Vigna (the celebrated chancellor of Frederick II.), whose spirit Dante finds imprisoned in “the drear, mystic wood” of the Inferno, and, plucking a limb unwittingly from “The wild thorn of his wretched shade,” to his horror brings forth at once cries and blood. For nineteen years Raymond was general of the Dominican Order. Pope Urban VI. confided the most delicate and difficult missions to him; called him his eyes, his tongue, his feet, and his hands; held him up to the veneration of princes and people; and would have raised him to the highest dignities but for the opposition of the saint. No one, therefore, could have greater claims to our confidence. Catharine Benincasa was born in 1347. From her earliest years she was a being apart, and favored with divine communications. Uncomprehended at first by those around her, her home became to her a place of trials. Her parents tried to draw her into the world, and she cut off her long, golden hair. They wished her to marry, and she consecrated herself to a higher love. They then subjected her to household labor, but she found peace in its vulgar details. She worked by day. At night she prayed till lost in ecstasy, insensible to everything earthly. She wished to enter the Third Order of St. Dominic, but was refused admission because she was too young and beautiful. It was only after an illness that made her unrecognizable that she was received; but she continued, like all the members, an inmate of her father’s house. Her soul was peculiarly alive to the sweet harmonies of nature. She liked to go into the woods, at springtime, to listen to the warbling of the birds and watch the mysterious movements of awakening vegetation. She loved the mountain heights, with their wild melodies of winds and torrents, as well as the gentle rustling of the air among the leaves, which seemed to her like nature’s whispered prayer. She said, as she looked at the ant, a thought of God had created it. She loved flowers. She had a taste for music, and liked to sing hymns as she sewed. The name of Mary from her lips was said to leave a singular harmony in the ears of her listeners. She sympathized in every kind of misery to aid it; lent a helping hand to every infirmity, and often served in the hospital, choosing those who were abandoned by the rest of the world as the objects of her care. She rose above the wants of the body. From her childhood she never ate meat, the very odor of which became repugnant to her. For years she subsisted from Ash Wednesday till Whitsuntide solely on the Holy Eucharist, which she received every morning. She entered into all the troubles of the times, diffusing everywhere the pure light of divine charity. Though without human instruction, she astonished the doctors of the church by her profound knowledge of theology. “The purest Italian welled from her untutored lips.” She wrote to popes, cardinals, princes, and republics. Some of her letters are to Sir John Hawkwood, or, as the Italians call him, Giovanni Aguto, the ferocious English condottiere, who stained the flag of the church, and then entered the service of her enemies. She takes a foremost rank among the writers of the age—that of Boccaccio, who lacks her touching grace and simplicity. Siena, at the time of St. Catharine, was no longer the powerful, united city it had been a century before, but in its turn had become the prey of anarchy and division. The different classes of people were at war with each other. They proscribed each other; and private hatred took advantage of the disorder to indulge in every kind of revenge. The Macconi were at variance with the Rinaldini; the Salimbeni with the Tolomei; the Malvotti with the Piccolomini. War reigned all over Italy. Milan and all Lombardy were ravaged by the Visconti. Naples was a prey to the excesses caused by Queen Joanna. Florence, that had been devoted to the church, was now governed by the Ghibellines, who went to every extreme against the Guelphs, whose cause, says Dean Milman, “was more (!) than that of the church: it was that of freedom and humanity.” The States of the church were ravaged. Rome itself, widowed and abandoned, “with as many wounds as she had palaces and churches,” as Petrarch says, was in a complete state of anarchy. Amid all these horrors St. Catharine moved, an angel of peace. God gave her a wonderful power of appeasing private resentments and calming popular tumults. Inveterate enemies clasped hands under her influence. Veteran warriors, and republics themselves, listened respectfully to her voice. She wrote to Pope Gregory XI. at Avignon, pleading the cause of all Italy, and urging him to return to Rome, where he could overrule the passions that agitated the country, and restore dignity to the Apostolic See. Her heart bled at the sight of so much misery and crime. “Peace! peace!” she wrote to the pope—“peace for the love of a crucified God! Do not regard the ignorance and blindness and pride of your children. You will perhaps say you are bound by conscience to recover what belongs to holy church. Alas! I acknowledge it; but when a choice is to be made, it should be of that which is most valuable. The treasure of the church is the Blood of Christ shed for the redemption of souls. This treasure of blood has not been given for temporal dominion, but for the salvation of the human race. If you are obliged to recover the cities and treasures the church has lost, still more are you bound to win back the souls that are the true riches of the church, which is impoverished by losing them. It is better to let go the gold of temporal than the gold of spiritual wealth. You must choose between two evils—that of losing grandeur, power, and temporal prosperity, and the loss of grace in the souls that owe obedience to your Holiness. You will not restore beauty to the church by the sword, by severity and war, but by peaceful measures. You will combat more successfully with the rod of mercy and kindness than of chastisement. By these means you will recover what belongs to you both spiritually and temporally.” Noble liberty on the part of the dyer’s daughter! And it is to the honor of Pope Gregory that he listened to her with respect. It was time to pour oil on the troubled waters. The proud republic of Florence, after revolting against all spiritual authority, torturing the priests, declaring liberty preferable to salvation, and exciting the papal cities to rebellion, had been laid under an interdict. The people began to feel the disastrous effects on their commerce, and came to solicit Catharine’s intervention with the pope. She went to Avignon, where she made known her mission in a public consistory. “She passed from her father’s shop to the court of princes, from the calmness of solitude to the troubles of factions; and everywhere she was in her place, because she had found in solitude a peace above all the agitations of the world, and a profound charity.” Pope Gregory left her to dictate the terms of peace with the Florentines, though he foresaw their ingratitude. Nay, more: after some hesitation he decided to return to Rome. Nor was St. Catharine the only woman that urged him to do so. St. Bridget of Sweden added the influence of her prophetic voice. Ortensia di Gulielmo, one of the best poets of the day, thus begins a sonnet: “Ecco, Signor, la greggia tua d’intorno Cinta da lupi a divorla intenti. Ecco tutti gli onor d’Italia spenti, PoichÉ fa altrove il gran Pastore soggiorno.” [108] Catharine’s return to Siena was celebrated by festive songs: “Thou didst go up to the great temple, Thou didst enter the mighty consistory; The words of thy mouth were full of power; Pope and cardinals were persuaded to depart. Thou didst direct the course of their wings towards the See of Peter. O virgin of Siena! how great is thy praise—soul prompt in movement, energetic in action.” On the tomb of Gregory XI., in the church of St. Francesca at Rome, St. Catharine is represented walking before the pope’s mule as he makes his triumphal entrance into the city—a symbol of her guiding influence. From this time she took a prominent part in all the affairs of Italy. But the re-establishment of the papal throne at Rome was her last joy on earth. At the death of Pope Gregory fresh disorders broke out. Catharine’s life slowly wasted away, inwardly consumed, as she declared, for the church. She died in Rome at the age of thirty-three, and lies buried under the high altar of the Minerva, surrounded by lamps and flowers. Her countryman, Pius II., canonized her, not only at the request of the magistrates of Siena, but of several of the sovereigns of Europe. Siena boasts of other saints: St. Ansano, the first apostle of the country, beheaded on the banks of the Arbia in the time of Diocletian; Galgano di Lolo, who led an angelic life in the mountains; the founder of Monte Oliveto, whose order sheltered Tasso; Ambrogio Sansedoni, the confessor of Conradin, noted for his eloquence and sanctity; St. Bernardin, on whose breast glows the potent Name; Beata Nera Tolomei, noted for her ascetic charity; the poor Pietro Pettinajo, who devoted himself to the plague-stricken in the hospital della Scala; Aldobrandescha Ponzi, who wished to be crowned with thorns like Christ; the Blessed John Colombini, whose only passion was to be like Jesus; and many more besides. But St. Catharine—the heroine of divine love—is the most sublime expression of Sienese piety, and of her is the city especially proud. Her statue was placed by the republic on the front of its glorious cathedral, and she is represented in the gorgeous picture of Pinturicchio in the library, where, as Mrs. Stowe says, “borne in celestial repose and purity amid all the powers and dignitaries of the church, she is canonized as one of those that shall reign and intercede with Christ in heaven.” From St. Catharine’s house you go winding up under the mulberry-trees to San Domenico, soon leaving the tops of the houses below you. On the way is the place where Catharine, when a child, coming down the hill one evening with Stefano, her favorite brother, turned to look back, and saw the heavens opened above the campanile of the church, and the Great High-Priest seated on a radiant throne, around which stood SS. Peter, Paul, and John, who seemed with uplifted hands to bless her. Keeping on to the top of the hill, you come to a large green, silent and deserted, before the church. The street that properly leads to it is well named the Via del Paradiso. The church of St. Dominic is vast and imposing, though of severe simplicity of style, offering a marked contrast to the richness of the Duomo. It is shaped like the letter T, without aisles or apsis. Rafters support the vault, but at the entrance to the transepts is an enormous arch of singular boldness. There is something broad and expansive about the atmosphere of the church, as often found in the churches of the Dominican Order. Even with a considerable number of worshippers it would seem solitary. In one of its chapels is a Madonna, celebrated in the history of art, long attributed to Guido of Siena, but now proved to be by Guido di Graziano, a contemporary of Cimabue, whose Madonnas it resembles, with its oblique eyes, large head, and a certain angular stiffness. Among other noted paintings is one of Santa Barbara by Matteo da Siena, very beautiful in expression. She sits, crowned by two angels, with a palm in one hand and a tower-like tabernacle in the other, in which the Host is exposed above a chalice. SS. Magdalen and Catharine are at her side. A domed chapel, protected by a balustrade of alabaster, has been built on the east side of the church, in which is enshrined the head of St. Catharine—evidently the most frequented part of the church, from the numerous seats before it, mostly with coats of arms and carved backs. Framed prayers, as is common in Italy, are chained to a prie-Dieu—one to St. Catherine with the anthem: Regnum mundi et omnem ornatum sÆculi contempsi propter amorem Domini mei Jesu Christi, quem vidi, quem amavi, in quem credidi, quem dilexi. Three lamps were burning before the relics of St. Catharine. The walls are covered with exquisite paintings by Sodoma, which were lit up by the morning sun. Nothing could be more lovely than St. Catharine swooning at the Saviour’s apparition—a figure full of divine languor, grace, and softness. Two nuns tenderly sustain her. Her stigmata are radiant. An angel bears a lily. The whole painting is delicate, ethereal, and heavenly as a vision. It is on the gospel side of the altar; on the other side she kneels between two nuns with her eyes raised to heaven, where, above the Virgin and Child, appears the Padre Eterno. Angels bear the cross and crown of thorns. Another brings the Host. A death’s head and lily are at her feet. The whole is of wonderful beauty. On the left wall, as you enter the chapel, is painted the execution of a young knight, beheaded at Siena for some slight political offence. St. Catharine went to comfort him in his despair, and induced him to receive the sacraments. She even accompanied him to the block, where his last words were “Jesus” and “Catharine,” leaving her inundated with his blood, but in a state of ecstasy that rendered her insensible to everything but his eternal welfare. The odor of his blood seemed to intoxicate her. She could not resolve to wash it off. She only saw his soul ransomed by the blood of the Lamb, and, in describing her state of mind to her confessor, she cries: “Yes, bathe in the Blood of Christ crucified, feast on this Blood, be inebriated with this Blood, weep in Blood, rejoice in Blood, grow strong in this Blood, then, like an intrepid knight, hasten through this Blood to defend the honor of God, the liberty of the church, and the salvation of souls.” Her letters often begin: “I, Catharine, servant and slave of Jesus Christ, write you in his precious Blood,” as if it was there she derived all her strength and inspiration. In the picture before us nothing could be more peaceful than the face of the young knight just beheaded, whose soul two beautiful angels are bearing to heaven. On the pavement is traced in the marble Adam amid the animals in Paradise, among whom is the unicorn, the ancient emblem of chastity. At the extreme end of the church is the Chapel delle Volte, to which you ascend by six steps. Over the door is this inscription: En locus hic toto sacer " et venerabile orbe, Hic Sponsu Catharina suum " sanctissima sepe, Vidit ovans Christum " dictu mirabile, sed tu Quisquies ades hic funde " preces venerare beatam Stigmata gestantem " Divini insignia amoris;— Behold this place, sacred and venerable among all on earth; here holy Catharine rejoicing often beheld, wondrous to say, the Christ, her spouse. But thou, whosoever approachest, here pour forth thy prayers, to venerate the holy one who bore the sacred stigmata, the insignia of divine love. This chapel, the scene of so many of St. Catharine’s mystic visions, is long and narrow, with one window. The arches are strewn with gilt stars on a blue ground. The floor is paved with tiles, with tablets here and there. On one, before the altar, are the words: CathÂ. cor mutat XPUS—Christ changes the heart of Catharine; for it was here she underwent that miraculous change of heart which transformed her life. Our Saviour himself appeared to her, surrounded by light, and gave her a new heart, which filled her with ecstatic joy, and inspired a love for all mankind. Over the plain altar is an authentic portrait of St. Catharine by the poetic Andrea Vanni, a pupil of Sano di Pietro. He was one of her disciples and correspondents, though a Capitano del Popolo. He painted this portrait in 1367, while she was in an ecstatic state in this very chapel. It represents her with delicate features, a thin, worn face, and must have been a charming picture originally, but it is now greatly deteriorated. On one of the pillars of the chapel is the inscription: CatÂ. cruce erogat XPO—Catharine bestows the cross on Christ; referring to the silver cross she one day gave a beggar in this church, which was afterwards shown her set with precious stones. And on another pillar is: CatÂ. vesti induit XPUM—Catharine clothes Christ with her garment; in memory of the tunic she here gave our Saviour under the form of a beggar, who showed it to her some hours after, radiant with light and embroidered with pearls—acts of charity full of significance. Three lovely little paintings by Beccafumi, at the Belle Arti, represent the three mystic scenes commemorated in this chapel. In the adjoining convent, now a school-house, lived for a time St. Thomas of Aquin and the Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, whose tomb is in the cloister. Here, in 1462, was held a chapter of fifteen hundred Dominicans, and here Pius II. blessed the standard of the Crusaders. On our way to the Porta Camollia we turned down at the left, by a steep, paved way, to the church of Fonte Giusta, erected in memory of a victory over the Florentines. It is a small brick church with four small windows, four pillars to which are attached four bronze angels holding four bronze candlesticks, and on the walls hang four paintings of note. One is a beautiful coronation of the Virgin with four saints, by Fungai. Then there is a Visitation by Anselmi, in which two majestic women look into each other’s eyes, as if to fathom each the other’s soul. In an arch of the right aisle is the sibyl of Peruzzi—a noble figure—said to have been studied by Raphael when Agostino Chigi, the famous banker of the Farnesina palace (a Sienese by birth), commissioned him to paint the celebrated sibyls of the Della Pace at Rome—sibyls that have all the grandeur of Michael Angelo, and the grace that Raphael alone could give. But what particularly brought us to this church was to see the Madonna of Fonte Giusta, to which Columbus made a pilgrimage after the discovery of America, and presented his sword, shield (a round one), and a whale’s bone, which are still suspended over the entrance. The Madonna turns her fair, sweet face towards you, while the Child has his eyes turned towards his mother, with his hands crossed on his breast. Both have on silver crowns, and pearls around their necks. The picture is in a frame of cherubs’ heads, surrounded by delicate arabesques. Beneath is the inscription: Hic requies tranquilla, Salus hic dulce levamen: Hic est spes miseris ?sidiuq reis— Here is tranquil repose; here safety and sweet consolation; here is hope for the wretched, and for the guilty an unfailing refuge. Columbus’ devotion to the Blessed Virgin is well known. It was under her auspices he undertook, in a vessel called by her name, the discovery of a new world. He daily said her office on board ship from a valuable MS. given him by Alexander VI. before his departure and afterwards bequeathed to Genoa, and the Salve Regina was sung every evening by his followers. Porta Camollia is not remarkable in an architectural point of view, but it has its sacred associations. It was here St. Bernardin of Siena used to come every night, when a boy, to pray before the tutelar Madonna of the gate. His aunt, hearing him speak of going to see the fairest of women, followed him at a distance one night and discovered his secret. The chapel of the Confraternity of San Bernardin is a museum of art. The walls are covered with fine frescoes of the life of the Virgin by Beccafumi, Sodoma, and Pacchia. One of the most beautiful is Sodoma’s “Assumption,” in which Mary—pulchra ut luna—in a mantle like a violet cloud, is borne up to her native heaven by angels full of grace. The apostles, with thoughtful, devout, but not astonished faces, stand around the tomb, out of which rise two tall lilies amid the white roses. St. Thomas lifts his hands to receive the sacred girdle. Everywhere about this chapel is the sacred monogram so dear to San Bernardin. The holy name of Jesus is inscribed on the front, on the holy-water basin, on the walls; placed there in more devout times, when even genius sought to “Embalm his sacred name With all a painter’s art and all a minstrel’s flame.” There are more than sixty churches and chapels at Siena, but perhaps not one without some work of art that is noteworthy. Siena was the cradle of art in the thirteenth century, and has its aureola of artists as well as of saints. The school of Florence only dates from the fourteenth century. Guido da Siena, Bonamico, and Diotisalvi were the glorious precursors of Cimabue, and Simone Memmi, a century later, shared with Giotto the friendship and admiration of Petrarch. “Ma certÒ il mio Simon fÛ in Paradiso.” The old Sienese artists were profoundly religious. In their statutes of 1355 they say: “We, by the grace of God, make manifest to rude and ignorant men the miraculous events operated by virtue, and in confirmation, of our holy faith.” The efflorescence of the arts is one of the expressions of a profound faith. We have only to visit the galleries of Italy, filled with the sad spoils of numberless churches and convents, to be convinced of this. And there is not a tomb of a saint of the middle ages out of which does not bloom some flower of art, fair as the lilies that spring from the sepulchre of the Virgin. What wreaths of art entwine the tombs of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Antony of Padua! The collection of paintings at the Academy of Siena is very interesting. Here Beccafumi represents St. Catharine receiving the stigmata. She is in soft, gray robes, with a lovely face, kneeling before a crucifix under an archway, through which you see the landscape. A dead, thorny tree is behind her. By way of contrast to her beauty and grace is the austere St. Jerome, haggard and worn, with his lion, before one of the pillars of the arch. At the other is a Dominican in black and white garments. Above are the Madonna and Child attended by angels. The whole picture is very soft and charming. Sodoma has also here a St. Catharine with a delicate, thoughtful face, and a crucifix in her pierced hands. Perhaps the most striking picture in the gallery is Sodoma’s “Christ Bound,” which is wonderful in expression. The face and form are very human and of grand development. From under the crown of thorns flows the long, amber hair. The eyes are sad, inexpressibly sad, and the bleeding form is infinitely pathetic. “It is a thing to stand and weep at,” says Hawthorne. “I suffer binding who have loosed their bands. Was ever grief like mine?” Sodoma’s “Judith,” in a blue dress and orange mantle, stands beside a leafless tree, holding up the bloody knife with one hand, and the head of Holofernes with the other. She has a gleaming jewel on her forehead, though the old rabbis represent her with a wreath of lilies, believed by the ancients to be a protection against witchcraft and peril. The university of Siena existed in the thirteenth century. Among its noted members was Cisto da Siena, a Jew, who became a Catholic and a monk, and finally a Calvinist. Condemned to death for his apostasy, he was indebted for his life to the friendship of Pope Julius III. and Cardinal Ghislieri, afterwards Pius V. M. Taine speaks of the deplorable ignorance of the present Sienese, and says there is no library, not a book, in the place.[109] As he seems, by his journal, to have been there only two days, he probably, like many travellers, noted down his preconceived opinion. The library of Siena, one of the oldest in Italy, has always been famous. It was founded by Niccolo Oliva, an Augustinian friar, and contains fifty thousand volumes—a respectable number for an inland town. About seven hundred belong to the very first age of printing. There are also five thousand manuscripts, among which are a Greek Gospel of the tenth century that came from the imperial chapel at Constantinople, bound in silver, and many other rare MSS. and documents, such as the original will (in Latin) of Boccaccio, and autograph writings of Metastasio, St. Catharine, and St. Bernardin. Siena has several charitable institutions. The asylum for deaf mutes, founded by Padre Pendola is spacious and agreeable. The great hospital della Scala, opposite the cathedral, founded by Fra Sorore, is one of the most ancient in Italy. It is vast and sunny, with a fine view over the valley around Siena. Its atmosphere is thoroughly religious, with its walls frescoed by the old masters, its numerous altars and religious emblems. St. Catharine used to come here to attend the sick. It is now served by Sisters of Charity. It is dreadful to say, but the first glimpse we had of the Duomo, with its striped wall of black and white marble, reminded us of good old Sarah Battles—“now with God”—and her cribbage-board, which Charles Lamb tells us was made of the finest Sienese marble, and brought by her uncle from Italy. But on coming nearer to it every trivial thought vanishes before its grandeur and expressive richness of detail. The impression it makes on the mind is so profound, M. Taine says, that “what we feel on entering St. Peter’s at Rome cannot be compared to it.” He calls it “a most admirable Gothic flower, but of a new species that has blossomed in a more propitious clime, the production of minds of greater cultivation and genius, more serene, more beautiful, more religious, and yet healthy; and which is to the cathedrals of France what the poems of Dante and Petrarch are to the chansons of the French trouvÈres.” On the pavement before the entrance is represented the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went up into the Temple to pray—a lesson to ponder over as we enter the house of prayer. The faÇade is of marvellous workmanship. Amid angels and prophets and symbolic sculpture, delicate as lace-work, are St. Ansano, St. Catharine, and San Bernardin—the special patrons of Siena. On entering the church you are at first dazzled by its richness. The pavement is unrivalled in the world, with its pictures in niello, by an art now lost, where we find page after page from the Scriptures, some written by the powerful hand of Beccafumi, whose cartoons are to be seen at the Belle Arti; sibyls noble as goddesses; Trismegistus, who received his knowledge from Zoroaster, offering the Pimandra in which is written: “The God who created all things, the maker of the earth and starry heavens, so greatly loved his Son that he made him his Holy Word”; and Socrates climbing the mountain of Virtue, who sits on its summit, holding forth a palm to him, while with the other hand she offers the book of wisdom to Crates, who empties a casket of jewels to receive it. The walls are covered with paintings, by Duccio, of twenty-six scenes of the Passion, full of life and power, dramatic and yet strictly Scriptural, forming a book one is never weary of studying as Christian or artist. The stalls by Fra Giovanni, the Olivetan monk, are the very perfection of intarsia work, which here, as Marchese says, “almost rises to the dignity of painting.” The wondrous pulpit, with its nine columns resting on lions, its sides covered with scenes from the life of Christ by Nicholas of Pisa, and the seven sciences on the central octagonal pillar, is a prodigy of richness and elegance. The frieze around the nave is adorned with the heads of the popes down to Alexander III. Among these, strange to say, was once Pope Joan, such hold had that popular error on the public mind. It was Florimond de Raymond, a counsellor of the parliament of Bordeaux, and a friend of Montaigne and Justus Lipsius, who, in the sixteenth century, protested against such an insult to the Papacy, and by his efforts had it effaced. He wrote to the Sovereign Pontiff himself: “Avenge the injury done to your predecessors. Order this monster to be removed from the place where Satan, the father of lies, has had it set up. Do not suffer an image to remain of that which never existed. If there was no body, let there be no shadow”; and he calls upon the pope to destroy this idol, raised to the disgrace of the church. Besides this, he wrote a book, now rare, completely exploding the fable, showing by incontestable documents there was not the least place for Joan in the succession of popes. This work, together with his appeal, produced such an effect as to procure the removal of her portrait from the cathedral of Siena. The illustrious Cardinal Baronius wrote to him in 1600 that it had just been removed by order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany according to his wishes, and he congratulated him in magnificent terms on such a triumph. On an altar in the left nave is the crucifix borne by the Sienese at the battle of Monte Aperti, and beneath the arches are still suspended, after so many centuries, the long flag-poles captured from the Florentines Sept. 4, 1260, the most glorious day in the history of Siena. At the right is the chapel of the Madonna del Voto, built by Alexander VII., a Sienese pope (Fabio Chigi), with its Byzantine-looking Virgin amid paintings, bronzes, mosaics, and precious stones. The family of Piccolomini is glorified in this church. To it belonged the great Æneas Silvius, as well as Pius III., also a lover of the arts, and Ascanio Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, a friend of Galileo, to whom he gave hospitality when he came forth from what people are pleased to call the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome—that is, from pleasant apartments in the delightful palace of the Tuscan ambassador on the TrinitÀ de’ Monti, now the French Academy. The Piccolomini chapel has five statues sculptured by Michael Angelo, and the beautiful hall, known as the Library, is world-famous for its frescoes of the life of Pius II. by Pinturicchio. The whole church is a temple of art, with its sculptured altar, its bronze tabernacle, its rare paintings, its beautiful pillars of differently-colored marbles, and its rich windows of stained glass. Nothing could be more serene and calm than the atmosphere of this glorious church. Amid the sacred silence, the struggling light, with the grandest symbols of religion on every side, you feel lifted for a moment out of your own mean imprisonments into a very heaven of art and piety.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE. FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON. XVI. Whilst Margaret and Pierre Gilles were thus conversing, above their heads, in a magnificent gallery flashing with gilt, and adorned with portraits of all the archbishops who had occupied this palace, destined for their residence, the court had assembled, and there the jury was called which was to try, or rather to condemn, Sir Thomas More. At the extremity of this hall, upon an elevated platform all covered with carpet and fringe, were seated the new lord chancellor, Thomas Audley; near him, Sir John Fitz-James, Lord Chief-Justice; and beyond, Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; the Duke of Norfolk, several lords of the Privy Council, among them the Duke of Suffolk, the Abbot of Westminster, and Cromwell, who on this occasion acted as secretary. To the left of the court, and near the jury, was seated Richard Rich, the creature of Cromwell, and his worthy associate, newly appointed, on account of his efficient services, solicitor-general. “Sir Thomas Palmer, knight?” said the clerk. “Sir Thomas Peint, knight? George Lowell, esquire? Thomas Burbage, esquire? Geoffrey Chamber, gentleman? Edward Stockmore, gentleman? Joseph Leake, gentleman? William Brown, gentleman? Thomas Bellington, gentleman? John Parnell, gentleman? Richard Bellam, gentleman? George Stokes, gentleman?” All responded to their names. “Sir Thomas More,” said the lord chancellor, in a slow and hard tone, “do you challenge any one of these gentlemen of the jury?” “No, my lord,” replied Sir Thomas, who was standing up before the court, leaning upon a cane he held in his hand, and which had been of great assistance to him during the long sessions he had already been obliged to endure in that fatiguing and inconvenient position. Meanwhile, he anxiously watched the door through which the accused entered, and was uneasy at not seeing the Bishop of Rochester; for they met only in court, and it was a moment of relief when he beheld his friend near him, although he every day remarked with sadness that Rochester was failing in a lamentable manner. “The accused challenges none of the members of the jury,” proclaimed the lord chief-justice. He then arose, and began to recite the formula of the oath to be taken by each member of the jury. “Now, Sir Thomas,” said the chancellor, “I desire to address you yet a last observation, and I wish with all my heart that you may yield to it; because the king, not having forgotten your long services, is deeply grieved at the perilous position in which your obstinacy, too evidently the result of malice, has placed you. He has ordered us to unbend again, and for the last time, so far as to implore you, in his own name and for the love of him, to take the oath of obedience which you owe to the statute of Parliament, and of fidelity to his royal person—an oath he has a right to exact of you according to all laws, divine and human.” “In fidelity, my lord,” replied Sir Thomas, “in respect, in attachment, I have never been wanting to the king. It has been a long time, a very long time, an entire lifetime, since I took the oath. It cannot be changed; therefore it can never be necessary to have it renewed.” “You persist, then, in your culpable obstinacy?” said the lord chancellor. “Nay, my lord, I am not obstinate.” “Then say, at least,” cried Cranmer, wishing to appear animated by an officious zeal, “what offends you in this oath, what word you would reject—what is the reason, in fine, that prevents you from taking it.” Sir Thomas raised his head, and paused a moment to consider the court. There was the Abbot of Westminster, who, during the days of his prosperity and favor, had overwhelmed him with visits and surfeited him with flattery; by his side the Duke of Norfolk, who without emotion beheld him to-day near death, and yet he had formerly loved him as a friend in whom he felt honored; Cromwell, whom he had always treated with respect, in spite of the antipathy he felt for him; the Duke of Suffolk, who had solicited him unceasingly, and almost gone down on his knees to him to obtain money from the king or a place for one of his creatures; Sir John Fitz-James, finally, to whom he had rendered an eminent service, and who had in other times sworn eternal gratitude to him, and to remain devoted to him in life and in death. Now death was approaching him, and he counted Sir John Fitz-James among the judges who were going to demand his head. Absorbed in the sad and dolorous conviction that in this world he could rely upon no one, he hesitated for a reply. “You have heard, prisoner?” said Richard Rich brusquely. “Pardon me, sir,” answered Sir Thomas gently; “but the lords have already spoken so much about the king’s displeasure that, if I should refuse to take this oath of supremacy, I fear to augment it still more by giving the reasons.” “Ah! this is too much,” cried all the lords. “You not only refuse to take the oath, but you are not even willing to say why you refuse.” “I would rather believe,” said Cromwell, “that Sir Thomas has returned to reason, and that he is no longer so sure that the oath may wound his conscience. Sir Thomas, is it not the case that you are now rather in a state of doubt and uncertainty in this regard? You know,” he continued, “that we owe entire obedience to the king; therefore you should take the oath he demands of you, and the scruples you feel would be removed by this imperious necessity.” “It is true, my lord,” replied Sir Thomas, “that I ought to obey the king in all things as a faithful subject—which I am, and will be until death. But this is a case of conscience, in which I am not bound to obey the prince. Listen to me, my lord of Canterbury,” he said, fixing his eyes upon him with an expression full of benevolence. “I would blame none of those who have taken the oath; but, at the same time, I must say, if your argument was solid, there would be no more cases of doubtful conscience, because it would be sufficient for the king to pronounce yes or no in order to annihilate them all.” “Truly,” cried the Abbot of Westminster, hurriedly interrupting him, “you are very obstinate in your own opinions; you ought to see that, from whatever point you view this question, you are necessarily mistaken, since you are entirely in opposition to the chief council of the kingdom, and that without doubt it possesses light enough to remove and destroy the scruples of your conscience.” “My lord,” replied Sir Thomas, “if it is true that I am alone in my opposition to the entire Parliament, I ought certainly to feel alarmed. Nevertheless, in refusing the oath I listen to and follow the voice of the greatest of all counsellors—one to which every man should listen before any other; a monitor which he carries always within his own bosom. Besides, I will add that the opinion of the English Parliament cannot overbalance that of the Council of all Christendom.” “Then you blame the Parliament, and refuse to adhere to the act of succession it has established?” angrily exclaimed Norfolk, the uncle of Anne Boleyn. “My lord,” replied Sir Thomas, “your lordship knows that my intention is not, as I have already explained, to find fault either with the act or with the men who have drawn it up, nor to blame the oath nor those who have taken it. As far as I am personally concerned, I cannot take this oath without exposing myself to eternal damnation; and if you doubt that it is my conscience which causes me to refuse, I am ready to swear to the sincerity of my declaration. If you do not believe what I say, it is a great deal better not to impose the oath; and if you believe me, I hope you will not demand one in opposition to my conscience.” Norfolk made a gesture of impatience. Then Audley, lord chancellor, turned toward his colleagues. “You see, you hear,” he said, “that Sir Thomas believes that he knows more than all the priests in London—than the Bishop of Rochester himself!” And he dwelt with a slight tone of irony on the last sentence. “What! the Bishop of Rochester,” cried Sir Thomas. “Without doubt, the Bishop of Rochester,” repeated Audley. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, turning towards Cromwell and giving him a preconcerted signal, “communicate to the accused a certain fact in which he is interested.” Cromwell, descending from the platform, approached Sir Thomas and whispered in his ear: “The Bishop of Rochester has consented to swear; they have conducted him to the king, who has forgotten all his past conduct, and intends to load him with new favors.” “Fisher has sworn!” cried Sir Thomas; and he was struck with consternation. “Certainly!” said Cromwell, with an ill-disguised expression of irony and satirical joy; “they concealed it from you, that it might not be said you had pinned your opinion to the sleeve of another.” “Sir,” answered More in a tone of profound sorrow, but with an expression of dignity greater still, “rest perfectly satisfied they will not say that. While bishops are appointed to do good and teach us to do it, it does not follow that, if they fall into error, we should imitate them. I am deeply afflicted by what you tell me, but do not change my opinion for all that. My conscience alone has directed me; now she alone remains with me, but I cannot, neither must I, cease to listen to her. I blame nobody—nobody! O my friend! what anguish has been reserved for me. My God! thou hast permitted it. Rochester has fallen!” said More in a low voice. “Lord, if the cedars break, what, then, will become of the reeds?” Sir Thomas was unable to comprehend how Fisher could have been induced to yield or become so weak, and he was reduced to a state of mortal affliction. “What!” said Cromwell, “can you not make up your mind?” “Nay, sir, nay; I cannot make up my mind to this. There remains nothing more for me to do in this world, and I pray the Lord to remove me from it!” “The accused refuses everything,” replied Cromwell in a loud voice, as he turned away from him. “What obstinacy!” exclaimed the lords in one voice. “Sir Thomas, swear!—we conjure you in the name of all you hold most dear.” “Alas!” said Sir Thomas to himself, “this is why he has not appeared. Alas! each day when I have suffered so much seeing him stand so long by my side, pale with fatigue and weakness, I was nevertheless happy. To-day—can it be? No, he has not been able to endure their tortures longer. God forgive them and save this country! Your pardon, my lords,” he said, remembering that they had addressed him. “What were your words to me?” “He does not even listen,” they remarked. “We conjure you to swear; we implore you to do so with all our power.” “I cannot,” replied Sir Thomas firmly, “and I positively refuse.” On hearing him pronounce these words, which left them no alternative, there was a sudden commotion among the lords; they regarded each other with anxiety. “A man of such merit, of such virtue,” thought Fitz-James, filled with remorse—“what business have I here?” “Truly, Sir Thomas,” cried Secretary Cromwell, feigning compassion, “I am sorely grieved to hear you speak thus, and I declare here, before all this respectable assembly, that I would like better to lose an only son than to see you refuse the oath in this manner. For very certainly the king will be deeply wounded by it; he will conceive the most violent suspicions, and will not be able to believe that you have had no part in that affair of the Maid of Kent.” “I am very much moved by your affection,” replied Sir Thomas; “but whatever penalties I may have to undergo, it is impossible for me to redeem them at the price of my soul.” “You hear him, my lords,” said the chancellor, looking at his colleagues. “Sir Thomas, deaf to all our prayers, forgetting the favors with which the king has overwhelmed him for twenty years, tramples under foot the authority of Parliament, the laws of the kingdom, and persists traitorously, maliciously, and in your presence, in refusing to take an oath which every subject of this kingdom cannot and ought not to refuse. Consequently, I order the act of accusation to be read to the court, after which it will render judgment and pronounce its sentence.” The clerk then began reading, in a nasal voice and monotonous tone, an accusation so long, the grievances of which were so multiplied, divided, extended, and diluted by a crowd of words and phrases, inductions, prejudices, and all kinds of suspicions, that it would require too much time to report them; but it was easy to see that it had been fabricated in bad faith and with the absence of all reasonable proofs. This reading continued for two hours, and, when it was finished, the lord chancellor began: “What have you to reply to all this?” said Audley. “You see, Sir Thomas, and you should acknowledge, that you have gravely offended his majesty; nevertheless, the king is so merciful, and is so much attached to you, that he would pardon your obstinacy, if you changed your opinion, and we would be sure of obtaining your pardon, and even the return of his favor.” He looked at Sir Thomas to see if he was relenting; for, except Cromwell, who desired More’s death, all the others, while too ambitious, too base, or too cowardly to dare sustain him, would have preferred seeing him yield to their entreaties. “It would rejoice us greatly!” said Sir John Fitz-James. “Most surely,” cried the Duke of Norfolk. “Ay, verily,” slowly repeated Cromwell. “He will listen to nothing!” said the Abbot of Westminster. “Noble lords, I am under infinite obligations to your lordships for the lively interest you have manifested in my case; but, by the help of God, I wish to continue to live and die in his grace. As to the accusation I have just heard, it is so long, the hatred which has dictated it so violent, that I am seized with fear in realizing how little strength and understanding the sufferings of my body have left in my mind.” “He should be permitted to sit down,” said Sir John Fitz-James in a low voice, the tears gathering in his eyes. “Nobody objects,” said the Duke of Norfolk. “I demand it, on the contrary,” he added, elevating his voice. “This will never end, then,” murmured Cromwell. “Let a chair be brought to the accused,” said Audley, who dared not resist the Duke of Norfolk. Sir Thomas seated himself for a moment, because he was able to stand no longer; then, summoning all his strength, he again arose to his feet, and spoke: “My accusation can be reduced, it seems to me, to four principal heads, and I will try and take them in order. The first crime with which I am accused is of being in my heart an opponent of the king’s second marriage. I confess that I have said to his majesty what my conscience dictated, and in that I can see no treason. But, on the contrary, if, being required by my prince to give him my opinion on a matter of such great importance, and which so deeply concerns the peace of the kingdom, I had basely flattered him, then indeed I should have been a treacherous and perfidious subject to God and to the king. I have not, then, offended, nor wished to offend, my king in replying, with the integrity of my heart, to the question he has asked me; moreover, admitting that I have been at fault in this, I have been punished for it already by the afflictions I have endured, the loss of my office, and the imprisonment I have undergone. The second charge brought against me, and the most explicit, is of having violated the act of the last Parliament, in this: that being a prisoner and examined by the council, I have not been willing, through a spirit of malice, of perfidy, of treachery, and obstinacy, to say whether or not the king was supreme head of the church, and that I have not been willing to confess whether that act was just or unjust, for the reason which I gave—that, having no other rank in the church than that of a simple layman, I had no authority to decide those things. Now, I will avow to your lordships that this was my reply: ‘I had neither done nor said anything which could be alleged and produced against me on the subject of this statute’; and I added that I no longer desired to occupy myself with anything here below, in order to be entirely absorbed in meditating on the Passion of my Saviour Jesus Christ in this miserable world, where I have such a short time to remain; that I wished ill to no one—on the contrary, every kind of prosperity; and also, if that was not sufficient to preserve my life, I did not desire to live; I had violated no law, and that I was not willing to surrender myself as guilty of any crime of high treason—for there are no laws in the world by which a man can be punished for his silence; they can do no more than punish him for his words and actions, and it is God alone who judges the heart.” As Sir Thomas said these words, the advocate-general, Christopher Hales, suddenly interrupted him: “You say you have not uttered a word nor committed an act against this law; but you admit that you have kept silence, which is a conclusive sign of the malice of your heart, no good subject being able to refuse without crime to reply to this question when it is set before him as the law ordains.” “My silence,” replied More, “is not a sign of the malice of my heart, since I have answered the king when he has consulted me on divers occasions; and I do not believe a man can be convicted of having attacked a law by keeping silence, since this maxim, ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur,’ is adopted and recognized as true by all the most learned and enlightened men of the law. With regard to what you say about a good subject having no right to refuse a direct reply to this question, I believe, on the contrary, that such is his duty, unless, indeed, he wish to be a bad Christian. Now, it is better to obey God than man, and it is better not to offend one’s conscience than everything else in the world, above all when this conscience cannot be the occasion of revolt against, or injury to, the king and the country. I protest to you, on this subject I have not revealed my opinion to any man living.” “You know very well, on the contrary,” said the Duke of Norfolk sharply, “that your example will be followed, and a great many will refuse the oath on seeing you reject it.” “Pardon me, my lord,” replied Sir Thomas; “but I have the right to think thus, since a moment ago my lord the chancellor reproached me with being the only one of my opinion in the kingdom. I can say, then, that my silence is neither injurious to the prince nor dangerous to the state.” “How can you assert,” cried Christopher Hales, “that your refusal will not be the cause of any sedition or of any injury toward the king? Do you not know, then, that all his enemies have their eyes fixed on you, in order to confirm themselves by your audacity, and take advantage of the malice of which you have given proof? What, then, would you call an injury, if not a refusal thus contemptuous and unlawful with respect to the submission you owe to the will of your king, the living image of God upon earth?” “The king has no enemies, sir,” replied Sir Thomas; “he has only some faithful subjects who wish to sigh in silence over the perfidious counsel which has been given him. I will dare almost to say,” he cried, laying his hand on his breast, “some tender and respectful friends, who would have given all for his glory, sacrificed all for his salvation, but who, for that same cause, cannot approve the error into which he has been made to fall.” “Alas! he is lost,” thought Sir John; and he turned away his head. “Well,” said Cromwell to himself, “the case becomes clear; they cannot draw back.” While a low murmur of surprise and admiration arose among the jury, their foreman leaned toward Mr. Rich, and whispered to him excitedly. “Truly! It is so, sir!” said the latter, looking fixedly at him. “It seems to me, Sir Thomas Palmer, that your remarks have much weight. Have you been called here to interpret the wishes of the king, or have you, by chance, a mind to make a short sojourn in the Tower or some part of its environs?” And he made his fingers crack. “With your short-sighted justice,” he replied, “do you believe that there are not some great reasons, which they do not wish you to know, which have led Sir Thomas to the bar of this tribunal? And if I should say to you—” He paused. “The dogs!” he murmured, looking at the faces of the jurors. “And if I should say to you,” he continued, “that this is an extortioner, and that he has devoured the revenues of the state—sucked—sucked the hearts’ blood of the poor people!” “It cannot be possible!” said Palmer, awaiting each word of Rich, which seemed to fall drop by drop from his lips. “What! like the other?” “Exactly, precisely like the other! Wonderful!” said Rich to himself. “They themselves furnish me with the words, the fools! I hope, indeed, that I may be exalted a grade from this; for this herd of jurors make me sweat blood and water. They called them so well chosen! So it appears; one goes to the right, the other to the left, a third to the middle. To the death—that is too hard; no, confiscation, or rather imprisonment. They wish to enter into the spirit of the law, as if they regarded the law! Condemn him, sirs—that is all they ask of you—and then go to your beds! Every one to his trade; theirs is not to inquire what we do, but what we wish them to do!” And Rich, much excited, shaking his great sleeves, leaned forward in order to listen. “I come, then, to the third article of my accusation,” said Sir Thomas, “by which I am accused of malicious attempts, efforts, and perfidious practices against the statute, because, since being confined in the Tower, I have sent several packages of letters to Bishop Fisher, and in those letters I have exhorted him to violate this same law, and encouraged him in the resistance he has made to it. I have already demanded that those letters should be instantly produced and read to the court; they could thus have acquitted me or convicted me of falsehood. But as you say the bishop has burned them, I am only able to prove what I advance here by my own words; therefore I will state what they contained. The greater portion of those letters related to my private affairs, especially to our old friendship; in one of them alone I responded to the demand he had made to know how I would reply in my interrogatory upon the oath of supremacy, and I wrote to him thus: that I had examined this question in conscience, and he must be content with knowing that it was decided in my mind. God is my witness, as I hope to save my soul, that I have made no other reply, and I cannot presume that this could be considered an attack upon the laws.” “Oh! no, by no means,” said several of the jurors. “Nevertheless, it would be necessary to see these documents.” “That is the custom,” said a voice loudly enough. “The jury examines the documents,” said another; “that is always done.” “My lord judge! my lord advocate! it is necessary, it is customary—indispensable—” Audley looked angrily at Rich. “Gentlemen, the jurors are perfectly right,” he cried in a shrill voice; “but these letters have been destroyed. They will proceed to examine other documents; then the witnesses of these facts will be heard.” “Silence! silence!” cried the court usher. “Gentlemen, do not interrupt the court,” said Cromwell gravely; “we should listen religiously to the least word of the prisoner’s defence.” And thus he stifled by his awful voice the truth which had been excited in those troubled hearts. Fatigued and weary, More kept silence; he was thinking, moreover, of his letters to the Bishop of Rochester. “If I had spoken more strongly to my friend,” he sorrowfully reflected, “perhaps he would not have succumbed. My God and my only Saviour! behold the afflictions that overwhelm my soul; for I fear I have only listened to the cowardly prudence of the children of men. And yet what could I do?” More reproached himself with not having done enough, with having been mistaken. He groaned in spirit and humbled himself to the dust before God; whereas this tribunal by which he was being judged, in the face of which he found himself placed, before which he was traduced, was composed of men whom avarice, fear, and ambition caused to walk rapidly and firmly, without remorse and without shame, in the road, strewn with thorns, of vice, falsehood, and slavery. “Speak on,” said Cromwell, provoked by his silence; “they will not dare to interrupt you again.” Sir Thomas raised his eyes to his face, and regarded him fixedly. So much suffering, so many conflicting emotions, were weighing on his mind, that he no longer knew how to resume his discoveries or where he had left the thread of his ideas. “You had replied to the third article,” said Cromwell, promptly assisting him, for fear of giving the assembly time for reflection. “Now, what else have you to say, and what have you to oppose to the testimony of Master Rich, who has heard you say in the Tower that the statute was a two-edged sword which killed necessarily either the soul or the body?” “What I have to reply to that,” said Sir Thomas, “is that Master Rich called on me continually while they were removing the books I had in my prison. Fatigued by his importunate demands, I replied to him conditionally (which makes the case very different) that, if it was true, it was equally dangerous to avow or disavow this act; and that if it was similar to a two-edged sword, it was very hard to make it fall on me, who had never contradicted the statute either by my words or my actions. As to their accusing me of having drawn the Bishop of Rochester into my conspiracy, and induced him to make a reply similar to my own—alas! no, I have not done so. I have nothing more to add.” And he took his seat without a word more. “You have nothing more to say?” repeated the chancellor. “No, my lord.” “That is well,” said Audley. “He is here no longer,” said More; and he looked around him. “Where have they dragged him? To the king, perhaps. We should have received our sentence together. O Fisher! O my friend! No, it cannot be,” said More; “they are surely deceiving me! Does not falsehood flow naturally from their lips? Oh! how I would joy to see him, for one moment only. However, if he has not taken the oath, he will be here.” And he sank again into his silent sadness. “We will proceed to examine the witnesses,” said the chancellor. Master Rich, relieving himself immediately of his great robe, slowly descended from the platform and the chair from which he had surveyed the jury, and took his seat in the midst of the hall, in front of the tribunal. He raised his hand and took the oath without hesitation. He then related how, having entered the prison cell of Thomas More with Palmer and Sir Richard Southwell, he had heard Sir Thomas express himself strongly against the statute and declare that no Parliament in the world would be able to submit to the question of the supremacy. “You hear, Sir Thomas!” cried all the lords. “There is nothing to reply to this.” Sir Thomas arose immediately, and an expression of deep emotion showed itself on his weary features. “My lords,” he replied, “if I was a man who had no regard for my oath, I would not be here before you as a criminal. And you, Master Rich,” he continued, turning toward him, “if what you have declared be true, and the oath you have taken be not perjury, then may I never look upon the face of God!—and this I would not assert for all the world contains, if what you have testified was the truth. Listen to me, my lords; judge between us, and learn what I have said to Master Rich. When he came to carry away my books from the dreary prison where I was confined, he approached me, took my hands, overwhelmed me with compliments, and, protesting to me that he had no commission touching the supremacy, during the course of a long conversation he recalled all the circumstances of our childhood, and proposed to me this question: ‘If Parliament recognized me as king, would you recognize me? and would it be treason not to do it?’ I answered that I would recognize him, but it was a casus levis. And in my turn I said to him: ‘If an act of Parliament should declare that God is not God, do you think it would be treason not to submit to that act?’ “Then Master Rich said that this question was too remote, and they could not discuss it. Whereupon he left me, and went away with those whom he had brought with him. “In good faith, Master Rich,” pursued Sir Thomas, “I am more concerned on account of your perjury than because of the danger into which you have so heartlessly thrown me, and I must tell you that neither I nor any one else has ever regarded you as a man to whom they could confide a thing of so much importance as this. You know that I am acquainted with your life and conversation from your youth up to the present time. We were of the same parish; and you know right well, although I am very sorry to say and speak of it, that you always bore the reputation of having a very flippant and very lying tongue, that you were a great gambler, and you had not a good name in your parish and in the Temple, where you have been reared. “Your lordships,” continued Sir Thomas, “can you believe that, in an affair of so great moment, I would have had so little discretion as to confide in Master Rich, entertaining the opinion I do of his want of truth and honesty; that I would have disclosed to him the secret of my conscience touching the supremacy of the king—a subject upon which I have been so strongly pressed, and which I have always refused to reveal to any of his grave and noble counsellors, who, your lordships know well, have been so often sent to the Tower to interrogate me? I submit it to your judgment, my lords: does this appear to you credible or possible? “Moreover,” he immediately continued, “supposing Master Rich speaks the truth, it should still be remarked that this might have been said in a secret and private conversation upon some supposed questions and without any offending circumstances. Therefore they cannot, at least, say there was any malice on this occasion; and that being so, my lords, I cannot believe so many reverend bishops, honorable personages, so great a number of wise and virtuous men of which the Parliament is composed, would wish to punish a man with death when he has had no malice in his heart—taking, most certainly, this word malice in the sense of ill-will and open rebellion. Finally, I would again recall to your lordships’ attention the inexpressible kindness his majesty has manifested toward me during more than twenty years since he called me into his service, constantly appointing me to some new charge, some new office, and finally to the position of lord chancellor—an honor he had never bestowed on any lawyer before, this dignity being the greatest in the kingdom, and coming immediately after that of the crown; lastly, in relieving me of this charge, and permitting me to retire, and allowing me, at my own request, the liberty of passing the remainder of my days in the service of God, in order that I might occupy myself no more with aught but the salvation of my soul. And therefore I say that all the benefits his majesty has for so long a time and so abundantly showered upon me, in elevating me far beyond my merits, are enough, in my opinion, to break down the scandalous accusation so injuriously formulated by this man against me.” Having said these words, Sir Thomas was silent. The tribunal looked at him. This earnest and truthful attack on the reputation of Master Rich was hard to weaken, although the latter, after having resumed his seat, had already cried out sneeringly three or four times: “Palmer and Southwell will testify if I have told the truth, yes or no.” “Yes or no,” repeated Cromwell to himself—“the world is summed up in those two words; only it is necessary to manage them well. Go, clerk,” he said, “call Master Southwell.” And the clamorous voice of the clerk resounded through the vast enclosure where he kept the witnesses. “Master Palmer! Master Richard Palmer!” he repeated; and Master Palmer presented himself. “You swear,” said Audley to the witness, “that the testimony you are about to render before this court, and before the jury interposed between your sovereign lord the king and the prisoner here present at the bar, will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God!” As the chancellor said these words, they brought the book of the Holy Evangelists, and opened it, in order that Palmer might lay his hand on it to swear. “But, my lord,” said Palmer, anxiously looking around him, “I know nothing, nothing at all, about what you are going to ask me.” “Well, you need only tell what you know,” said Audley brusquely. “Very well, then,” said Palmer in a low voice; and laying his hand on the book, he was sworn in the usual manner. “What did you hear while removing the books belonging to Sir Thomas?” “Nothing, my lord. I threw the books as fast as possible into a sack. They made some noise in falling one upon the other, and I heard nothing else.” “That is not possible!” said Audley. “The chamber is very small; you would have been very near Sir Thomas and Master Rich, who were conversing together, and you must have heard their conversation.” “I have heard that Sir Thomas stooped down to pick up a book I let fall from my hands, and that it seemed to give him pain when they took his books away from him; so that when I saw the dismal little cell, the pallet they had given him for a bed, the broken earthen pitcher which was in one corner, with an old candle standing in the neck of a bottle, and that they had forbidden him for the future to light that candle—for fear, they said, that he might set fire to the prison—the tears came into my eyes, and I felt my heart ache with sorrow as I thought I had seen him lord chancellor such a little while ago. That is all, my lord.” “But,” said Cromwell, provoked by this recital, “Sir Thomas spoke; you have declared that already.” “Oh! he spoke, without doubt. I do not deny that he could speak; certainly he spoke. For instance, when he saw the sack of books carried away he said: ‘Now that the tools are removed, there is nothing more to do but close the shop.’ But we saw, in spite of this pleasantry, that it distressed him very much,” added Palmer after a moment’s silence. “How prolix is this witness!” said the Abbot of Westminster in a contemptuous tone. “Come, that’s enough,” said Cromwell. “You know nothing more?” “No, my lord, nothing more—nothing at all.” And he hastened to withdraw. As he retired, Richard Southwell appeared. Audley immediately began to interrogate him. “Your name?” “Richard Southwell.” “Your age?” “Twenty-four years.” “Your profession?” “The king’s clerk.” “You swear,” said the chancellor to the witness, “that the testimony you are about to render before the court, and before the jury interposed between our sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar, will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.” “I have no testimony to offer,” said Richard. “What!” exclaimed Audley. “Here is Master Rich, who cites you as having been present at a conversation he had in the Tower prison with Sir Thomas More.” “Master Rich says just what it suits him to say. The truth is, I went with Master Palmer to remove the books of Sir Thomas because I was obliged to do it. I found Master Rich there, whereat I was surprised. Everybody knows what Rich is, and what confidence should be placed in anything he asserts. I will swear, then, to nothing, nor take any oath on a matter of business in which he is mixed up, being well assured in advance that it can only be something bad.” Rich’s face became purple. “My lord chancellor,” cried the new solicitor-general, “the witness insults the court.” “Master Rich, yes; but the court, no,” growled Audley. He answered nothing, and had not the appearance of heeding what Richard Southwell was saying, if even he was not pleased with it; for the vile and corrupt men with whom Henry VIII. each day surrounded himself, in order to serve his frenzies, abhorred him and sought only his destruction, or to elevate themselves one above another by crushing each other. “You refuse to swear, then?” said he to the witness, without deigning to listen to the recriminations of Rich. “Yes, my lord,” replied Southwell. “The witness will pay a fine.” “Very well, my lord! I know that I owe it.” And Southwell retired. Then a profound silence reigned throughout the assembly, because the decisive moment approached. Meanwhile, the lord chief-justice, the timid Fitz-James, arose at a sign given him by Audley, and in a trembling voice propounded the following questions to the jury: “Has Sir Thomas More rendered himself guilty of the crime of high treason towards our lord the king in refusing, through a spirit of malice, treachery, and obstinacy, the oath which he demands of him as supreme head of the church on earth? Is Sir Thomas More guilty of resisting the statute of Parliament which has conferred this dignity on our lord and master, King Henry VIII.?” The court officers struck a blow with their maces. The judges all arose, and the court marched out majestically, while the jury retired into another room. “Now we shall see if Rich is sure of his jury,” said Cromwell to himself, following them with his eyes; and not looking before him, he trod on the train of the chancellor’s robe, who turned round, impatiently saying that he had offended his dignity. Cromwell began to laugh; for he cared little for the dignity of this chancellor of recent date and mediocre worth—and he continued to look behind him. “Well! this will soon be ended,” said Sir Thomas; and he asked the yeomen who guarded him permission to approach one of the windows looking out on the courtyard. More humane than the tigers who had just gone out, these rude men granted his request. Sir Thomas looked out, but a broad, sculptured cornice extending around the gallery prevented him from seeing if his daughter was still below, and his eyes rested only on the magnificent view to be enjoyed from the apartments of Lambeth Palace. The sun was reflected upon the surface of the river, and he could see even the smallest boat that glided on the water. “Is she still there?” thought Sir Thomas, as he leaned his head against the window. “Well, it is all over.” He stepped back, and gazed out into the distance. “This whole city,” he said, “comes, goes, stirs, agitates itself. What matters it to them that a man is condemned in a corner? Had they need of my services, they would run—‘Sir Thomas! there is Sir Thomas!’ They would follow; they would call me. Now the crowd forgets us in two days! An immense abyss, an entire chaos, almost a generation, separates the evening from the morrow! My friends are afraid—those, at least, who remain to me. They grieve in secret. The tears will be wiped from their eyes in obscurity; but my daughter, who will dry hers? She will pass away like myself, alone in this world; she will have need to pass quickly, and without looking around her.” He wiped his forehead; for it was damp and hot. “It is impossible for them not to condemn me!” And he leaned against the window-sill, scarcely able to stand on his feet; he experienced a sort of faintness for which he could not account, and which obliged him to change his posture every moment. “Nothing! There is no word from them. My God! they are a long time. And for what purpose, when all was decided in advance? O Rochester! where art thou? It is this that lowers my courage. Well! they do not return. What can this jury be doing? It seems to me that it is already two hours since they went out.” He looked around him, and saw that the two guards had commenced a game of cards. “How much a game?” said the bigger of the two. “A penny.” “A penny!” cried the other. “Of what are you dreaming, Scotchman? The profit of a week! A half-penny now, and more on trust if—You understand me?” And he made a gesture as if drinking. “Always drinking, always drinking!” replied his adversary. They were dealing the cards, when the maces of the court officers resounded on the floor, announcing that the deliberations were ended and the court was returning. “What!” cried the two gamesters, “they have finished already? How they have hurried over this business! Ordinarily they take an hour, at least.” They hastened to gather up their cards and conceal them under their jackets. At a signal given by the officers Sir Thomas came hurriedly out from the deep embrasure of the window where he was leaning. He then observed a man and a young girl, who, alone in the midst of this vast enclosure, were gazing in every direction, astonished at the solitude in which they found themselves, and seeking him whom their hearts loved. “Margaret!” cried Sir Thomas—“Margaret here at this fatal moment! No grief must, then, be spared me!” At the voice of More his daughter rushed toward him. She covered his face with kisses and tears. Pierre Gilles was at her side. “Pierre Gilles here!” cried More. Meanwhile, the heavy doors rolled on their hinges, and the judges approached. “O More! O my friend! is the trial ended, that I see you alone and at liberty here?” “Yes! it is over,” said More; “but not as you think,” he added, lowering his voice. “My friend, in the name of our tender friendship, take Margaret away! I will see you again in a moment. I pray you, one minute, one minute only, go, take her out, if you love me, if you have loved me! Ah! Pierre Gilles, thou here? I confide her to thee!” And Sir Thomas cast on him a glance so imploring, and an expression so deep, that the heart of one father was immediately comprehended by the other. Pierre Gilles made a rapid movement to lead the young girl out. He was too late; the court had entered, and the judges had taken their places. The chancellor remained standing in the midst of them, and, turning to the foreman of the jury, who advanced, he put the terrible question: “Is the accused guilty?” “Yes,” said the foreman, “upon all the counts.” And his voice failed in adding the last words. “Upon all the counts!” repeated Pierre Gilles. “What did he say?” cried Margaret, transfixed with expectation and terror. “My father guilty? No, never! Pierre Gilles, what did he say? Guilty? Oh! no, no. My father!” The young girl pronounced this word so tenderly, with a cry so piercing, an accent of despair so heartrending, that Sir Thomas trembled from head to foot, and it seemed his soul was shaken to its very depths. “In mercy take her away!” he said in a faint voice. “Guilty!” repeated Margaret—“guilty! They have dared say it. Guilty! Then all is finished! He is lost, condemned! O cowardice! O horror! Guilty!” And a change so horrible came over her features that Margaret was unrecognizable. “Sir Thomas More guilty before God and before man!” she pursued with a smile of frightful bitterness, while her eyes remained dry. “Pierre Gilles, you have heard it; have I not told you? O ignoble creatures! Behold them, these bloody judges—this Cromwell, with his livid face, and envy corroding his heart; this Audley, vender of consciences; this Cranmer, renegade archbishop! No, you do not know them! There they are before your eyes, and they invoke the name of Almighty God! One day, yes, one day, we also will see them before the tribunal of the Sovereign Judge—before that tribunal without appeal and without mercy—to receive the reward of perjury and of murder. May Heaven hear my cry; may my tears mount to the skies, and fall back upon them to add new strength to the remorse which they have so long sought to tear from their hearts!” “What woman is this,” said Cromwell, “who dares to disturb the court?” “Nay, Master Cromwell,” replied More in a stifled voice, “pardon her! She is a child. Alas! you know her well.” “Bear her away,” said Audley instantly. “Officer, lead that woman out!” exclaimed Cromwell in a voice of thunder. “My daughter, my cherished daughter, follow Pierre Gilles! My friend, take her out!” cried Sir Thomas. “I will not go!” exclaimed Margaret, bracing her feeble feet against the long stone slabs. “Will you suffer a varlet to lay his hands on you, Margaret?” said Pierre Gilles, whose tears streamed down his cheeks and stifled his voice. “Yes, anything! If I leave him, they will let me see him no more.” “Sheriff, do you hear?” cried Cromwell. “O Master Cromwell!” exclaimed Margaret, falling on her knees and raising her suppliant hands toward him. “But, no,” she said, immediately rising again, “I will not descend so low! Implore him? You may annihilate but never demean me!” And casting a withering glance upon Cromwell, she seized the arm of Pierre Gilles, and, dragging him away, left the place without even looking toward her father. This scene created some disturbance in the horrible assembly, and a moment of silence and hesitation followed, when Cromwell made a sign to the lord chancellor not to let it be prolonged. Audley then began to pronounce the formula of the sentence, but Sir Thomas interrupted him. “My lord chancellor,” he said, “when I had the honor of being at the head of justice, the custom was to demand of the prisoner, before pronouncing sentence, if he had anything to say that might arrest the judgment about to be rendered against him. I ask, then, to say a few words.” “And what can you have to say?” asked Audley brusquely. “Much, my lord,” answered Sir Thomas; “for, now that I have been condemned, and it can no more seem like presuming on my own strength in exposing myself to death, I can discharge my conscience, and speak freely and without restriction. I therefore declare, in the presence of your lordships here present, that I regard the statute of Parliament as entirely illegal and contrary to all laws, divine and human, and my accusation, consequently, as being completely null. Parliament has no right, and cannot in any manner have the power, to give the church a temporal head. In conferring the spiritual government of one portion of Christendom on another than the Bishop of Rome, whose universal supremacy has been established in the person of St. Peter, chief of the apostles, by the mouth of our Lord Jesus Christ himself when he was present and visible on earth, Parliament has exceeded the limits of its authority. There are not, therefore, and there cannot be, among Catholic Christians, laws sufficient to oblige a Christian to obey a power which might have been usurped in order to prove this assertion. I will say, moreover, that the Parliament of this kingdom can no more bind all Christendom by such an act than one small portion of the church can make a law in opposition to the general law of the church universal; or than the city of London, which is only a member in comparison with the body of the state, can make a law against an act of Parliament which would bind the whole kingdom. I will add, furthermore, that this law is contrary to all the statutes and to all the laws in force until this day, and any yet reported, especially to these words written in the great charter: ‘The English Church is free, her rights shall remain untouched, and none of her liberties shall be cut off’; finally, that it is contrary to the oath taken by the king at his consecration, in presence of all the assembled people. And I say that there is far more ingratitude in the English Parliament refusing to acknowledge the authority and spiritual supremacy of the pope than there would be in a child refusing to obey its father; because it is to Pope St. Gregory that we are indebted for the knowledge of the Holy Gospel; it is he who regenerated us—a heritage richer and more desirable than that which any father according to the flesh can bequeath to his children. Yes, noble lords, I confess before you that, since this question has been raised among us, I have spent days and nights in examining it, and I have been unable to find in the centuries passed, or in the works of any doctors, a single example, or even a sentiment, which may authorize a temporal king to usurp the spiritual government of the church. And consider: this divine authority, necessary to the unity and the purity of the Christian faith, would then be committed, in the course of time, in following the order of succession established in this kingdom, to the feeble hands of a woman or the blind keeping of an infant in its cradle! Truly, my lords, it is a thing which shocks not only the unchangeable rule followed up to our day, but even the most ordinary judgment and common sense.” “Then,” said Audley, interrupting him with a smile of mockery and disdain, “you esteem yourself wiser than, and believe you possess a knowledge and degree of enlightenment far above that of, the bishops, the reverend doctors, the nobility, and the people of the kingdom generally!” “I doubt, my lord,” replied Sir Thomas firmly, “of there having been this unanimity between them in which your lordship appears to believe; but, supposing it existed, if we are to judge by the number, it must be very much less even than that of the Christians who are spread throughout the whole world, and of those who, having gone before them in life, are now among the glorious saints in heaven.” “Sir Thomas,” cried the Duke of Norfolk, reddening, “you show clearly how far your malice and obstinacy extend.” “Noble duke,” replied More, “you are mistaken: it is neither malice nor obstinacy which makes me speak thus, but rather the desire and the necessity of clearing my conscience; and I call upon God, who sees and hears us, to witness that this is the only sentiment inspiring my heart!” Cromwell, in the meantime, grew very impatient at this debate, and made signals in vain to Audley that he should impose silence on Sir Thomas; but the former hesitated, stammered, and delayed pronouncing his sentence, resolving in his mind not to take upon himself the responsibility of the proceeding. All at once he turned toward the lord chief-justice, Fitz-James. “Why,” said he, “Sir John, do you not assist me with your opinion? Could it be true that our sentence were unlawful? Speak! Are you not the lord chief-justice?” At this question a frightful apprehension arose in the soul of the weak judge; he was conscious of the adroit snare into which he had been drawn. They questioned him directly; they placed in the hollow of his hand the weights which were to turn the balance and decide the fate of Sir Thomas, his benefactor and friend. He paled visibly and answered nothing. “Well!” said Cromwell, “the chancellor interrogates you, my lord, and it seems you hesitate in your reply!” If he had had courage, he might, perhaps, have saved More; it failed him. “I think,” he answered in an evasive way, less odious perhaps, but none the less criminal, “that if the statute of Parliament was illegal, the process of law would be equally so.” “Assuredly,” said Cromwell with a bitter smile, “this is very judicious. If there was no law, there could be no criminal; and if there was no day, there would be no night—there are some things which reason themselves so naturally that we cannot but concede them.” As he said these words, he passed to the chancellor the sentence of condemnation. Audley read it in a very loud tone, which he lowered, however, when he came to the details of the execution, which set forth that Sir Thomas, after having been carried back to the Tower by Lieutenant Kingston, should be dragged through the streets of the city on a hurdle; led afterward to Tyburn, where, after having been hanged by the neck, he should be taken down, when half dead, from the gallows, to be disembowelled and his entrails cast into the fire; after which his body should be cut into four pieces, to be placed above the gates of the city, the head excepted, because the head must be exposed on London Bridge in an iron cage. While the sentence was being read the face of Sir Thomas More remained impassible. At the end only a slight start seemed to denote some feeling. He lowered his head, and it was seen, by an almost imperceptible movement of his lips, that he prayed. A profound silence reigned around him, and it seemed that no human voice or respiration dared be raised in the presence of such cool atrocity. After a moment a slight sigh was heard. “A death of infamy may not be,” murmured the Duke of Norfolk; “he has been lord chancellor!” He leaned over toward Cromwell. “You have deceived me,” he said. “Decapitation is the only punishment which can be inflicted on him. He has been lord chancellor! Have you thought of that?” “But,” replied Cromwell, “the law is positive; such is the penalty that follows the refusal of the oath.” “The king will dispense with the gibbet,” said Norfolk angrily, “or I am not chief of his council!” “We will see,” said Cromwell. “That will matter nothing, provided he dies,” he added to himself. Lord Fitz-James had heard Norfolk’s remark, and, unable to restrain his tears, addressed him. “My lord,” he said in an oppressed voice, “the king might be willing to grant his pardon. Ask Sir Thomas if he have not yet something to say. Perhaps, alas! perhaps he may be induced to make some act of submission.” Norfolk made a sign of approval. “Sir Thomas,” he said, “you have heard what are the rigors of the law, and the penalty that your inconceivable obstinacy calls down upon your head. Speak, then; have you nothing to reply that may give us the means of mitigating it?” Sir Thomas raised his head, and looked at him for a moment with an expression of calmness, of gentleness, benevolence, and dignity which it is impossible for any human pen to describe. “Noble duke,” he answered, “no, I have nothing more to say; I have only to submit to the sentence you have passed on me. There was a time when you honored me with the name of friend; I dare believe that I still remain worthy of it. I regard the words you have addressed to me as a souvenir of that good-will, old and proven, which you have felt for me. I would thank you for it at this last moment; for I hope that we may meet again in a better world, where all these dissensions shall have passed away. And even as the holy Apostle Paul, who was one of those who stoned St. Stephen, is now united with him in heaven, where they love with an eternal love, so I hope also that your lordships, who have been my judges here on earth, and all those who have participated in any way in my death, may be eternally reunited and happy in possession of the salvation which our divine Saviour Jesus Christ has merited for us on the cross. To this end I will pray from my heart for your lordships, and above all for my lord the king, that God may accord him faithful counsellors, and that the truth may no longer remain hidden from him.” And saying these words with much sweetness and fulness of heart, Sir Thomas was silent. As soon as he had ceased speaking the guards, by Cromwell’s order, pressed around him. An axe was raised, the edge of which was turned toward the condemned by a man who walked before him. And so he was led back on foot, through the streets, to the Tower, there to wait until the hour of execution should be appointed by the king, after he had affixed his signature to the death-warrant. TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
Mr. Withrow claims to have produced the only English book on the Catacombs in which the latest results of exploration are fully given and interpreted from a Protestant point of view. We must decline to acknowledge the justice of his claim. His book is very far indeed from giving the latest results of exploration, and he certainly is not the first who has attempted to interpret them from a Protestant point of view. He is, however, as far as we know, the last; and as he has pretty faithfully repeated all the misstatements and mistakes of his various predecessors in the same subject, only adding a few more of his own, it will be worth while to set before our readers a short refutation of some of them. Indeed, this work of refutation is the more necessary because “the testimony of the Catacombs relative to primitive Christianity” is daily increasing in value, as our knowledge of the Catacombs is becoming more exact and scientific. Some years ago, and to some intelligences even now, a painting or an inscription from the Catacombs was “a monument of ancient Christianity,” and one such monument was as good evidence as another of primitive Christian doctrine. It has been reserved to the labors of De Rossi to introduce light and order into this chaos; and those who profess to publish the fruits of his discoveries ought not to withhold this most important portion of them; at least, they ought scrupulously to follow the lines of chronology which he has established, or else themselves to establish others on surer foundations. Mr. Withrow’s neglect of these distinctions—indeed, of all chronological order whatever—is quite unpardonable. Whilst in the title of his work he promises to examine “the testimony of the Catacombs relative to primitive Christianity,” we sometimes find that the greater portion of the evidence he adduces on some of the most important questions of Christian doctrine is not even taken from the Catacombs at all. Let us look, by way of example, at a single doctrine—the elementary doctrine of the Resurrection—and see how he deals with it. “This glorious doctrine,” he says, “which is peculiarly the characteristic of our holy religion as distinguished from all the faiths of antiquity, was everywhere recorded throughout the Catacombs. It was symbolized in the ever-recurring representations of the story of Jonas and of the raising of Lazarus, and was strongly asserted in numerous inscriptions” (p. 431). But of the inscriptions which he proceeds to quote, one is spurious (Alexander mortuus non est, etc.); others belong to the years 449, 544, etc., long after the practice of burial in the Catacombs had ceased. And we shall presently have occasion to notice other sins, scarcely less flagrant, against every canon of chronology belonging to the subject which he professes to handle. But first let us say a few words as to what those canons are, and how they have been established. It is only in our own day that the study of inscriptions generally, and especially of Christian inscriptions, has received that development which entitles it to a place among real sciences. It has now acquired a light and a solidity which constitute it one of the most trustworthy founts of ancient history. To confine ourselves, however, strictly within the limits of our present argument, we will speak only of the method which has been followed by De Rossi during the thirty years he has devoted so assiduously to this subject, and whereby he has been enabled to discover the laws which regulated the gradual development of Christian epigraphy. If we must summarize his method in a single word, we should say that his secret consists in a minute study of the topography of all inscriptions. In every fresh excavation—i.e., in every reopening of the galleries and chambers of the Catacombs, and clearing away the dÉbris with which they have been so long encumbered—he has carefully marked and registered every stone, and even every fragment of every stone, bearing so much as a single letter or symbol engraved upon it, and taken note of the precise spot where it has been found. When a sufficient space has been cleared to enable him to make a study of its contents, he collects all the stones that have been discovered within this area; carefully eliminates all those which have evidently fallen through the luminaria, or in other ways have been introduced from the upper world; next, makes a separate class of those whose place of origin is doubtful—those which there is some reason, either from their size, their shape, or for some other cause, to suspect may have come from outside; and then there remain, finally, those only which beyond all question belong to the subterranean cemeteries. Many of these he has, perhaps, discovered in situ, still closing the graves to which they were originally attached—and these, of course, are cardinal points in his system of arrangement; of many others he knows the chamber or gallery whence they came; and of all he minutely examines the language, the symbols, monograms or other ornaments, the form of the letters, the names, and, finally, the style and epigraphic formulÆ; and the minute study of the inscriptions of innumerable areÆ of various cemeteries according to this strict topographical system has led to wonderfully interesting and important discoveries, both as to their history and chronology. This process of examination, it need hardly be said, is laborious and wearisome in the extreme; even the material difficulties which surround it are not slight. It sometimes happens that within the limits of a single area—e.g., in that of St. Eusebio’s monument in the cemetery of San Callisto—there are upwards of a thousand fragments of epitaphs to be sifted and classified. De Rossi, therefore, occasionally gives utterance to a pathetic lament as to the dry and tedious character of the task he has imposed upon himself. Nevertheless, he has persevered in it with the most conscientious fidelity, even when at times the attempt at arrangement seemed almost desperate, and the results have in the end abundantly rewarded his labors. It is with these results that we are at present concerned; and it is obvious that in these pages we can only reproduce them: we cannot enter into an examination of the evidence upon which they rest. This is the less necessary, however, since even the most bitter of Protestant controversialists admit that “De Rossi has the rare merit of stating his facts exactly and impartially, precisely as he finds them,” and that “his assiduous researches have been conducted with a sincere zeal for truth.” Let us proceed, then, to state some of the conclusions to which De Rossi’s researches have led him—first, upon the general subject of the chronology of the inscriptions which have come to us from the Catacombs, and next as to the dogmatic allusions contained in them. And first, as to the inscriptions, it is patent that not one in ten bears its date on the face of it. Are the other nine (speaking generally) older or more recent? De Rossi pronounces quite positively in favor of their greater antiquity. He says that the most ancient Christian epitaphs make no mention either of the day or year of decease; that during the time of the first emperors there are very few exceptions to this rule; that in the third century the mention of the day and month of the decease was not uncommon, though the year was still passed over in silence; finally, that in the fourth century this also was added.[111] But he says that there are other tokens, such as the number and character of the names or of the symbols employed, the style of diction, the form of the letters, etc., which, if carefully examined and compared with one another, enable us not unfrequently to make a very probable statement as to the age of undated inscriptions (probabili non raro sententi definies); if, in addition to this, we know the place where the inscription was found, and have had the opportunity of examining other inscriptions found in the same neighborhood, then it will rarely happen that there is any doubt at all about the age to which it belongs. It is not, of course, meant that it is possible to fix the year, or even the decade or score of years, perhaps, to which it belongs; but De Rossi would certainly fix its chronology within the limits of half a century or less (tum de Ætate latÈ saltem sumpt vix unquam grave dubium supererit); he certainly would never be in doubt with reference to any particular inscription, still less with reference to a whole class of inscriptions, whether it belongs to the ages of persecution or to the end of the fourth century. Now, Mr. Withrow is either aware of these canons whereby the chronology of the inscriptions from the Catacombs is fixed, or he is not. If he is not, he is quite incompetent to follow by their means (as he professes to do, p. 415) “the development of Christian thought from century to century, and to trace the successive changes of doctrine and discipline.” If he is aware of them, his reasoning is most disingenuous when he first seeks to settle a disputed question by the testimony of the dated inscriptions of the first three centuries (p. 426)—which are not more than thirty in number altogether—and then proceeds to argue that “if those inscriptions which apparently favor Romish dogmas, of which we know the date, are all of a late period, we may assume that those of a similar character which are undated are of the same relative age, and therefore valueless as evidence of the antiquity of such dogmas” (p. 446). There is no necessity, and indeed no room, for “assumption” at all. The question can be decided by scientific rules whether such and such inscriptions belong to the third century or the fifth, and he ought honestly to have told his readers as much, and to have stated what that decision is. As he has failed to do so, we must supply the omission. First, however, let the limits of our task be clearly defined. We are not undertaking to establish any point of Christian doctrine by the unaided evidence of inscriptions or paintings from the cemeteries, though we are far from saying that there are none which might be so established. But at present we are only concerned to refute Mr. Withrow’s Protestant interpretation of these monuments, and to show that they at least favor, if they do not demand, a Catholic interpretation. We know that not even the writings of the Fathers present a complete picture of the whole doctrinal system of the age to which they belong, but must be studied by the light reflected upon them from the more developed and systematic expositions of those who came after them. Still less do we think it reasonable to look in a collection of epitaphs for a clear statement of the articles of faith professed by those who wrote them; the utmost that can be expected is that they should contain what De Rossi calls “dogmatic allusions”—more or less distinct, if you will, but always, or at least generally, merely indirect and casual. And as to drawing any trustworthy conclusions with reference to the antiquity of this or that Christian doctrine from the supposed absence of all allusion to it in the dated tombstones of the first three centuries, the mere enunciation of such a theory is enough to demonstrate its absurdity. Yet we are sorry to say that Mr. Withrow has been guilty of even worse absurdity than this, if it ought not rather to be called dishonesty. It is certainly worse than mere literary or dialectic trifling—it looks like a wilful throwing of dust in the reader’s eyes—to assert in the text (p. 517) that the order of acolytes, “discontinued in the Protestant communion,” was “probably the offspring of the increasing pomp and dignity of the bishops to whom they acted as personal attendants, especially in public processions and religious festivals,” and that “the only dated epitaphs of acolytes are of a comparatively late period,” whilst forced to acknowledge in a note that “Cornelius, Bishop of Rome in the third century” (A.D. 250)—i.e., at a time when “the pomp and dignity of bishops” consisted in their being the special objects of imperial persecution, and the only “public processions” in which they can have taken part were those in which they were led forth to public execution—that Cornelius, Bishop of Rome in the middle of the third century, “says there were in that church forty-two acolytes.” What does Mr. Withrow mean by placing these two statements together in the way we have described? Does he really wish to insinuate that the absence of an ancient dated epitaph of a deceased acolyte ought to counterbalance the testimony of the bishop to the existence of forty-two living ones? or does he think that the Protestant public, for whose tastes he so unscrupulously caters, will read his text and overlook his notes? or, finally, that, reading the notes, they will nevertheless give greater weight to the uncharitable suggestion of a Protestant clergyman in the nineteenth century than to the testimony of an eye-witness, who was also pope, in the third? Had the order of acolytes been retained instead of being rejected by the Protestant communion, doubtless Mr. Withrow would have recognized the conclusiveness of the evidence of Pope Cornelius; he would have seen that the forty-two acolytes who were alive in A.D. 250 must sooner or later have died, and been buried in Christian cemeteries, and consequently that the non-discovery there of any dated epitaphs recording their decease is “valueless as evidence” against the antiquity of their order. But we will not detain our readers any longer by pointing out the curiosities with which Mr. Withrow’s volume abounds, but proceed at once to redeem our promise of setting before them the real state of “the testimony of the Catacombs relative to primitive Christianity” on one or two of the more prominent doctrines of the Catholic faith. We have said that it is unreasonable to look for a profession of faith in an epitaph. But there is one point on which we should be disposed to make an exception to this remark. We think it is quite natural to expect from a large collection of sepulchral inscriptions considerable information as to the belief of those to whom they belonged with reference to the present condition or future prospects of the dead, and their relations with the survivors; and in this expectation the inscriptions from the Catacombs do not disappoint us. Let us call them into court, and hear what evidence they can give. Mr. Withrow shall open the pleadings, and it must be allowed that he does so with a very loud blast of his trumpet, and one which “gives no uncertain sound” (p. 418). “There is not a single inscription,” he says, “nor painting, nor sculpture, before the middle of the fourth century, that lends the least countenance to the erroneous dogmas of the Church of Rome. All previous to this date are remarkable for their evangelical character, and it is only after that period that the distinctive peculiarities of Romanism begin to appear.” Presently he quotes what he calls “the first dated inscription possessing any doctrinal character.” It belongs to the year 217, and states of the deceased that he was “received to God” (receptus ad Deum) on such a day; whereupon our author exclaims: “We have here the earliest indication of doctrinal belief as to the condition of the departed. It is not, however, a dark and gloomy apprehension of purgatorial fires, but, on the contrary, the joyous confidence of immediate reception into the presence of God.” Twenty pages later, however, he is obliged to acknowledge that “there occur in the Catacombs frequent examples of acclamations addressed to the departed, expressive of a desire for their happiness and peace; and these acclamations have been quoted by Romanist writers as indicating a belief in the doctrine of purgatory and in the efficacy of prayers on behalf of the dead”; and he proceeds to give a score of examples, such as these: Vivas in Deo, in Deo Christo—Mayest thou live in God, in God Christ; Vivas inter sanctos—Mayest thou live among the saints; Deus tibi refrigeret, spiritum tuum refrigeret—God refresh thee, or refresh thy spirit; Pax tibi—Peace be to thee, etc. But, he says, “it will be perceived that these are not intercessions for the dead, but mere apostrophes addressed to them; they were no more prayers for the souls of the departed than is Byron’s verse, ‘Bright be the place of thy rest.’” Mr. Withrow continues, and is presently obliged to make a still further concession—viz., that “the wish does sometimes take the form of a prayer for the beloved one,” and he gives half a dozen examples, one of which he curiously misunderstands, and another we do not recognize as belonging to the Catacombs. However, five at least are genuine, and we could have furnished him with a score or two of others, all containing distinct prayers “to God,” “to the Lord,” “to the Lord Jesus,” “to remember the deceased,” “to remember him for ever,” “to refresh his spirit,” “not to suffer his spirit to be brought into darkness,” etc. How is such evidence as this to be withstood? Mr. Withrow shows himself quite equal to the occasion: “They are intense expressions of affection of the ardent Italian nature, that would fain follow the loved object beyond the barrier of a tomb” (p. 443). “They are the only witnesses that keen Roman Catholics can adduce from the Christian inscriptions of the first six centuries,” but “no accumulation of such evidence affords the slightest warrant for the corrupt practice of the Church of Rome.” We need hardly say that Mr. Withrow is not the first who has thus “interpreted” these epitaphs “from a Protestant point of view.” Mr. Burgon had long since given the same explanation, and even quoted the same poetical illustration from Byron. But we must confine ourselves to Mr. Withrow, and follow him through his graduated scale of confessions. They may be cast in this form: the earliest inscription bearing on the subject of prayers for the dead discountenances them; there are frequent examples of acclamations or good wishes for the departed, but these are not prayers; moreover, they are, comparatively speaking, few in number—Bishop Kip puts them as “half a dozen among thousands of an opposite character”—and, being undated, we may “assume” that they are of a late age; finally, there are a few prayers, but these are only the untutored outburst of the ardent Italian nature. Let us set side by side with these the statements of De Rossi on the same subjects. And, first, as to the antiquity of these formulÆ. He says: “There are two distinct classes of epitaphs to be found in the Catacombs; the one, brief and simple, written apparently without a thought of handing down anything to the memory of posterity, but designed by the survivors mainly as a means of identifying, amid so many thousands of graves of the same outward form, those in which they were specially interested.[112] These are the more ancient, and most of them contain nothing beyond the name of the deceased and some of those short acclamations or prayers of which we have just given examples. Inscriptions of the second class record the age of the deceased, the day of his death, or more specially of his burial, and, in fact, omit nothing which is wont to be found on sepulchral monuments. They are also often defaced by bombastic exaggerations of praise and flattery; and the pious acclamations or prayers we have spoken of are rarely or never found.” It appears, then, according to the evidence of De Rossi—which on this question is surely of supreme authority—that the presence on a tombstone of acclamations or prayers for the dead, so far from being evidence of the corruption of a later age, is an actual test or token of primitive antiquity. Some indication of this may be gathered, by a careful observer, even from an inspection of the volume of dated inscriptions already published. “May you live among the saints” is engraved on a tombstone of the year 249, and “Refresh thyself, or Be thou refreshed, with the holy souls,” on another of 291; that is to say, there are two distinct examples out of the 32 dated inscriptions prior to the conversion of Constantine. Among the 1,340 dated inscriptions subsequent to that event you will scarcely find another. And next, as to the relative numbers of the epitaphs which speak positively (in the indicative mood) of the present happiness of the deceased, and of those which speak only optatively and breathe the language of prayer. We cannot, indeed, give any exact statement of figures until De Rossi’s great work on the inscriptions shall have been completed and the whole number brought together in print. But wherever we have had an opportunity of instituting a comparison, we have always found the optative or deprecatory form in the ascendant. It is so in the epitaphs collected in the Lapidarian Gallery of the Christian Museum at the Lateran in Rome; it is so in the inscriptions of each separate area of the great cemetery of San Callisto, so minutely registered by De Rossi in his Roma Sotterranea; and he himself writes as follows: “Some of these acclamations are affirmative, and these may be considered as salutations to the deceased, full of faith and Christian hope, substituted for the cold, hopeless dreariness of the pagan vale;[113] but for the most part they are optative, and ask for the deceased life in God, peace, and refreshment. We should inquire whether these have not often a real deprecative value, and were not uttered or written with the intention of praying to God for the peace and refreshment of the departed souls.” A full and satisfactory answer to this question, he says, cannot be given till all the inscriptions of this class have been brought together, so that they may mutually explain and illustrate one another. Nevertheless, he refers to what he had said in another place[114] on the same subject; and there we read: “These auguries or good wishes are not mere apostrophes, giving vent to the feelings of natural affection (sfoghi d’affetto); some of them express confidence that the soul received into the heavenly peace of God and his saints is already in the enjoyment of a life of bliss, and these speak positively—vives; others, again, are equivalent to real prayers to obtain that peace, and are expressed in another mood—vivas.” Mr. Withrow, however, and his co-religionists, may plead that, though constrained to yield to De Rossi’s statement of facts, they are not bound by his interpretation of them. Waiving, therefore, all dispute as to the number and antiquity of the inscriptions which seem to favor the practice of prayers for the dead, they may still persist that they should be taken, not as the voice of the church, but the errors of individuals; or, as Mr. Withrow himself expresses it, “they are not a formulated and authoritative creed formed by learned theologians, but the untutored utterances of humble peasantry, many of whom were recent converts from paganism or Judaism, in which religions such expressions were a customary sepulchral formula.” If Mr. Withrow merely means to say that Christian epigraphy was the spontaneous growth of the natural feelings and supernatural faith of the people, rather than the result of any written or traditional law devised and imposed by ecclesiastical authority, we are heartily at one with him. We do not doubt that it was the natural fruit of the religious feeling which pervaded all classes of the new society, that was reflected in their epigraphy as in a mirror. But Mr. Withrow clearly meant something different from this; he intended to insinuate that these inscriptions which are distasteful to himself would have been disapproved of also by all well-instructed members of the church, especially by her pastors and doctors. Yet Tertullian, at least, could hardly have disapproved, who takes for granted in one of his treatises, and uses it as the foundation of an argument, that every Christian widow will be continually praying for the soul of her departed husband, and asking for him refreshment (refrigerium), and offering sacrifice for him on the anniversary of his decease. Neither could such prayers have been deemed either objectionable or useless by St. Cyprian and his predecessors in the see of Carthage, who decreed the loss of them as a fitting punishment for any man who should presume to leave the care of his children or of his property after his decease to a cleric, because “he does not deserve to be named in the prayer of the priest at the altar of God who has done what he could to withdraw a priest from the service of the altar.”[115] However, it is not worth while, easy as the task would be, to justify the inscriptions in question by a catena of venerable authorities from among the bishops and teachers of the primitive church; we will only mention one fact about them which seems to us conclusive—viz., that they are in exact accordance, not to say in verbal and literal agreement, with the most authoritative formularies that have come down to us from ancient days; we mean the ancient liturgies. The language of the public offices of the church—if not an apostolic tradition, which Mr. Withrow would not easily admit—was surely formulated by somebody and formulated according to the dogmas of the faith, and not in a spirit of weak indulgence to any poetical fancies or excess of passionate feeling, whether of affection or of grief. We turn, then, to the oldest sacramentaries,[116] and the prayers we find there run as follows: “We pray that thou wilt grant to all who rest in Christ a place of refreshment, light, and peace”; “Grant to our dear ones who sleep in Christ refreshment in the land of the living”; “Refresh, O Lord! the spirits of the deceased in peace”; “Cause them to be united with thy saints and chosen ones”—the very words and phrases which we have read on the ancient tombstones, and which we still hear from the lips of all devout Catholics when they pray, either in public or in private, for those who are gone before them. Not without reason, then, does De Rossi describe these prayers for the dead, which are of such frequent recurrence in the Catacombs, as a faithful echo of the prayers of the liturgy. Of such an inscription as this, In pace Spiritus Silvani, amen, he says very truly that one seems to hear in it the last words of the solemn burial rite, just as the tomb is being closed and the sorrowing survivors bid farewell to the grave.[117] But Mr. Withrow would have us look for the original of these prayers, not to the Christian liturgy, but to the monuments of “paganism and Judaism, in which religions such expressions were a customary sepulchral formula.” No doubt there was in many pagan epitaphs an address, or acclamation, or apostrophe—call it what you will—to the deceased. But it was either a brief and sad farewell—an “everlasting farewell,” as they mournfully felt it to be—or it was an idle wish “that his bones might rest well,” or (far more commonly) “that the earth might lie lightly upon him”; or there was a still more unmeaning and unnatural interchange of salutations between the living and the dead. The passer-by was exhorted to salute the deceased with the customary Ave or Salve, and the imaginary response of the dead man stood engraven on the stone, ready for all comers. Surely it is impossible that anybody (e? ? ??s?? d?af???tt??, as old Aristotle has it) can be so blind as to confound this empty trifling of the pagan with the hearty yet simple and touching prayers of the Christian. Between the Christian epitaphs and those of the ancient Jews we might naturally have expected a somewhat closer degree of affinity; and so there is. Yet even here the closest point of resemblance that we are able to find is this: that the Jews ordinarily spoke of death as sleep, and very commonly wrote on the grave-stones, “His sleep is in peace.” We do not remember ever to have seen one of ancient date in which peace is prayed for, neither does Mr. Withrow produce one, though it has suited his purpose to give a deprecatory form to his translation of Dormitio in bonis. The Christian epitaphs, then, have this in common with Jewish epitaphs: that they speak of the dead as sleeping in peace; it still remains as peculiar to themselves that they supplicate for the deceased life—life in God, life everlasting, life with the saints—light, and refreshment. But we must pass on to another point of doctrine connected with the dead, on which inscriptions in the Catacombs might reasonably be expected to throw some light, and on which the testimony they give is sometimes disputed. Mr. Withrow shall again be permitted to make his own statement of the case: “Associated with the Romish practice of praying for the dead is that of praying to them. For this there is still less authority in the testimony of the Catacombs than for the former. There are, indeed, indications that this custom was not unknown, but they are very rare and exceptional. In all the dated inscriptions of the first six centuries there is only one invocation of the departed.” It is of the year 380, and by an orphan. “But the yearning cry of an orphaned heart for the prayers of a departed mother is a slight foundation for the Romish practice of the invocation of the saints. Previous to this date we have found not the slightest indication of Romish doctrine.… The few undated inscriptions of a similar character are probably of as late, or it may be of a much later, date than this.” We have already had occasion to expose the fallacy of this favorite argument of Mr. Withrow’s founded on the paucity and relative antiquity of dated inscriptions. We have pointed out its direct contradiction to all the canons of chronology so laboriously and conscientiously established by De Rossi. Here, however, we must be allowed again to quote his testimony, given precisely upon this particular subject: “Invocations of the deceased,” he says, “asking them to pray for the survivors, are found only in the subterranean cemeteries, not in those made above ground; always in epitaphs without dates, never in those bearing dates of the fourth and fifth centuries. They belong to the period before peace was given to the church, and the new style inspired by the changed conditions of the times sent them quickly into disuse.” The simple and natural character of earlier Christian epigraphy gave place to colder and more artificial announcements. But whilst the more ancient and more religious style prevailed the following are fair specimens of the epitaphs that were written: Vivas in pace et pete pro nobis. Christus spiritum tuum in pace et pete pro nobis. Bene refrigera et roga pro nos. Spiritus tuus bene requiescat in Deo petas pro sorore tuÂ. Vincentia in Christo petas pro Phoebe et pro Virginio ejus. Vivas in Deo et roga. Spiritus tuus in bono, ora pro parentibus tuis. In orationis tuis roges pro nobis quia scimus te in Christo—“Mayest thou live in peace, and pray for us. May Christ refresh thy spirit in peace, and pray for us. Mayest thou be well refreshed, and pray for us. May thy spirit rest well in God; pray for thy sister. Vincentia in Christ, pray for Phoebe and for her husband. Mayest thou live in God, and pray. Thy spirit is in good; pray for thy parents. In thy prayers make petition for us, because we know thee to be in Christ.” In all these instances—and many more might easily be given, in Greek as well as in Latin, some edited, others still inedited—it is clear that the survivors had a firm hope that their departed friends had been called by the ministry of angels to the enjoyment of the promised bliss and heavenly peace, and this faith was the foundation of these fervid petitions for their prayers. But, objects our author, “these invocations are almost invariably uttered by some relative of the deceased, as if prompted by natural affection rather than by religious feeling.” No doubt the invocations that have been quoted are the utterances of loving and sorrowing relatives; for to them it usually belongs to bury their dead and to write the epitaphs on their tombstones. But does it therefore follow that they were extravagant, unwarranted, and out of harmony with the teaching of the church? First, their very number and antiquity is prim facie evidence against so unjust a suspicion; and, next, they in no way go beyond the eloquent invocations of the martyrs, whether in the graffiti on the walls near their tombs or in the more formal inscriptions of the bishops themselves—e.g., of Pope Damasus at the tomb of St. Agnes; but, lastly and above all, these again are in exact agreement with the public liturgy of the church. In a fragment of a very ancient liturgy, only published in our own day, and bearing internal evidence of having been used during the days of persecution, the priest is instructed to pray “for grace to worship God truly in times of peace, and not to fall away from him in times of trial,” and then, after the accustomed reading of the diptychs—i.e., reading the names of the martyrs, the bishops, and the dead for whom the Holy Sacrifice was being offered—he proceeds as follows: “May the glorious merits of the saints excuse us or plead for us, that we may not come into punishment; may the souls of the faithful departed who are already in the enjoyment of bliss assist us, and may those which need consolation be absolved by the prayers of the church.” The different gradation of ranks and the different sense of the liturgical commemoration of the saints, the faithful who are dead and those who are still living, could hardly be defined with greater distinctness in “a formulated and authoritative creed formed by learned theologians.” We need hardly add that the same doctrine is to be found more or less explicitly in all the old liturgies—e.g., in a prayer that “Christ will, through the intercession of his holy martyrs, grant to our dear ones who sleep in him refreshment in the abode of the living”; “that the prayers of the blessed martyrs will so commend us to Christ that he will grant eternal refreshment to our dear ones who sleep in him,” and several other petitions to the same effect. But we are already exceeding the limits of space assigned to us, and we must be content with a general reference to the old sacramentaries; neither can we find room for the passages which are at hand from St. Cyril, St. Chrysostom, and other patristic authorities containing the same doctrine. We must not, however, altogether omit another branch of evidence belonging to the Catacombs themselves—namely, the frescoes and other monuments in which the saints are represented as receiving and welcoming the deceased into heaven, conversing with them, lifting up the veil, and introducing them into the garden of Paradise, etc. Everybody knows the inscription scratched in the mortar round a grave in the cemetery of Pretextatus fifteen centuries ago, and now brought to light again some twenty years since, in which the martyrs Januarius, Agapetus, and Felicissimus are invoked to refresh the soul of some departed one, just buried near their own tombs; and the anxiety of the faithful of old to obtain a place of burial near the graves of the martyrs is too notorious to need confirmation in this place. This practice had, of course, a doctrinal foundation. St. Gregory Nazianzen, Paulinus of Nola, or other Christian poets may use the language of mere poetical fancy when they talk of the blood of the martyrs penetrating the adjacent sepulchres; but the spiritual meaning that underlies their words is plain—viz., that the merit of the martyrs’ pains and sufferings, and the intercession of their prayers thus sought by the living, were believed to profit the souls of the deceased. In a recently-discovered fresco in the cemetery of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, a deceased matron, Veneranda, is manifestly commended to the patronage of St. Petronilla, who is represented standing at her side; and there are not wanting inscriptions in which the survivors distinctly commend the souls of their children or others whom they have buried to the care of that particular martyr in whose cemetery they have been laid. We do not quote them at length, not only from want of space, but also because this class of monuments belongs, generally speaking, to the fourth century, when no one doubts that invocation of the saints was in common use; and we have already quoted a large class of inscriptions, more ancient and quite as conclusive to all minds of ordinary candor. We mention them, however, because they are links in the chain of evidence we have been inquiring about—evidence given by the Catacombs—and yet more especially because they remind us of the beautiful language of our ritual, which none can forget who have ever heard it sung to the solemn chant of the church: In Paradisum deducant te angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. We cannot help suspecting that these prayers or acclamations are as old as the monuments which they so faithfully interpret. The invocation of the martyrs, and of them only amongst “the spirits of the just made perfect” who have already “come to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels,” seems to point to such a conclusion; it has a flavor of quite primitive times about it, certainly of the age of persecution. It may well have been contemporary with the following inscription, at present in a private museum, but originally taken from the Catacombs: “Paulo filio merenti in pacem te suscipiant omnium ispirita sanctorum.”
The very thought of a journey to distant lands is invigorating. We throw off the dust of old habits, quit the routine of daily life, shut out the customary thoughts of business, and, with hearts that in some mysterious way seem suddenly to have grown younger, turn towards other worlds. Even the uncertainty which is incident to travel has a peculiar charm. The love we bear our country and friends grows warmer and assumes unwonted tenderness when we leave them, not knowing whether it will be given us to look upon them again; and as the distance widens, the bonds of affection are drawn closer. Amid strange faces we reflect how sweet it is to dwell with those who love us; a thousand thoughts of home and friends come back to us, the heart is humanized, and we resolve to become more worthy of blessings for which we have been so little grateful. Indeed, I think that the chiefest pleasure of travel is in the thought and hope of communicating to others our own impressions of all the lovely things we see. Who would care to look on blue mountains, or ocean sunset, or green isles, if he might never speak of their beauty, never utter the deep feelings which they awaken? All strong emotion, whether of joy or sorrow, seeks to express itself. Nature is beautiful only when we associate it with God or man. No greater torment can be imagined than to think and feel, and yet to live alone for ever with that which has no thought or feeling. I remained in Ireland too short a time to be able to form well-founded opinions or to reach just conclusions concerning the present condition or the future prospects of the country. I was compelled to travel hurriedly, and therefore observed superficially; and in my haste I doubtless often failed to remark what was most worthy of attention. At least, I approached the sacred island with reverence. Whatever I might see, I knew that my feet were upon holy ground, and that I was in the midst of the most Catholic people on earth; I felt that if sympathy could give insight or reveal beauty, I should not look in vain. And now, with the liberty and quickness of thought, passing the vast expanse of ocean, I shall place myself at Oban, on the western coast of Scotland, opposite the island of Mull; for though we are not here on Irish soil, yet this whole region is so full of Irish memories and Irish glories that we may not pass it in silence. The scenery is sombre, bleak, and wild. It is not lovely nor yet sublime, though there is about it a kind of gloomy and desolate grandeur; and, indeed, this is the general character of all scenery in the Scotch Highlands. It is rugged, harsh, and waste. It does not invite to repose. Amid these barren moors and fog-covered hills we are chilled, driven back upon ourselves. We involuntarily move on, content with a passing glance at dark glens and lochs from whose waters crags and peaks lift their heads and frown in stern defiance. The gloomy tales of murder and treachery, of war and strife, and the ruined castles which tell of battles of other days, deepen the impressions made by nature’s harsh aspect. Even in summer the air is heavy with mist and fog. A day rarely passes without rain, and in the middle of August the traveller finds himself in an atmosphere as damp, cold, and dreary as that of London in November. Before us is the dark sea of the Hebrides, from whose sullen waters a hundred naked and desert islands rise in rough and jagged outlines. As we sail through the narrow straits of this archipelago, we see nothing but barren rocks, covered with black fog. There is no grass, there are no pleasant landscapes, no cultivated fields. We hear only the moaning of the waves, the howling wind, and the hoarse cry of the sea-bird. Nothing could be less beautiful or less attractive; and yet it is in this wild sea and among these rocky islands that we find the sacred spot from which Scotland and northern England received religion and civilization. During the summer a boat leaves Oban every morning to make the tour of the island of Mull, taking Staffa and Iona in the route. The steamer stops at Staffa to permit tourists to visit the Cave of Fingal, of which so much has been written. This cave, which is about seventy feet high and forty feet in width, with a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, opens into the ocean on the southern coast of the little island of Staffa. Its front and sides are formed of innumerable columns of basaltic rock, precisely similar to those which are found in the Giant’s Causeway. They are perfectly symmetrical, and one is almost tempted to think they must have been shaped by the hand of man. But, apart from this peculiarity, the only thing which struck me as very remarkable in this celebrated cave is the mighty surge of the ocean, whose angry waves, rushing into this gloomy vault, dash against its everlasting columns, and, with wild and furious roar that reverberates along the high arch in tones of thunder, are driven back, to be followed by others, and still others. And so all day long and through the night, from year to year, this concert of the waves far from human ears chants God’s awful majesty and infinite power. Nine miles south of Staffa lies Iona, St. Columba’s blessed isle. “We were now,” wrote Dr. Johnson one hundred years ago, “treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” It was in 563, more than thirteen hundred years ago, that Columkille, a voluntary exile from Erin, which he loved with more than woman’s tenderness, landed upon this island. Twelve of his Irish monks had accompanied him, resolved to share his exile. Others soon followed, drawn by the fame of his sanctity, and in a little while Columkille and his apostles issued forth from Iona to carry the religion of Christ to the pagans who dwelt on the surrounding islands and on the mainland of Scotland; and from this little island the light of faith spread throughout the Caledonian regions. All the churches of Scotland looked to it as the source whence they had received God’s choicest gifts, and for two hundred years the abbots who succeeded St. Columba held spiritual dominion over the whole country. The Scottish kings chose Iona as their burial-place, in the hope of escaping the doom foretold in the prophecy: “Seven years before that awful day When time shall be no more, A watery deluge will o’ersweep Hibernia’s mossy shore; The green-clad Isla, too, shall sink, While with the great and good Columba’s happy isle shall rear Her towers above the flood.” In an age of ferocious manners and continual war this holy and peaceful isle, far removed from scenes of strife and blood, might well be regarded not only as the fit resting-place of the dead, but as the happiest home of the living. Even to-day, in its loneliness and desolation, there is a calm, sweet look about it that makes one linger as loath to quit so sacred a spot. But the simple, great ones of old are gone; their bones lie buried beneath our feet. “To each voyager Some ragged child holds up for sale a store Of wave-worn pebbles.… How sad a welcome! Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir, Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.” A few poor fishermen with their families dwell upon the island. They are all Protestants. After the Reformation, the Calvinistic Synod of Argyll handed over all the sacred edifices of Iona to a horde of pillagers, who plundered and destroyed them. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these ruins were given up to the ignorant inhabitants of the island, who turned the cathedral into a stable, used the church of the convent of canonesses as a quarry, and broke and threw into the sea nearly all of the three hundred and sixty crosses which formerly covered the island. As late as 1594 the three great mausoleums of the kings were to be seen, with the following inscriptions: Tumulus regum ScotiÆ, Tumulus regum HiberniÆ, Tumulus regum NorwegiÆ. But these have also disappeared, and nothing remains but the site. Here were buried forty-eight kings of Scotland, four kings of Ireland, and eight kings of Norway; and it is even said that one of the kings of France found here a last resting-place. Macbeth closes the line of Scottish kings who were buried in Iona. His successor, Malcolm Canmore, chose the Abbey of Dunfermline as the royal cemetery. Shakspere does not fail to send Duncan’s body to Iona: “Rosse. Where is Duncan’s body? Macduff. Carried to Colmekill, The sacred storehouse of his predecessors, And guardian of their bones.” There are still many tombs in this cemetery, most of which are covered with slabs of blue stone upon which figures are sculptured in relief. Here a bishop or an abbot, in cope and mitre, holds the pastoral staff of authority, and by his side lies some famous chieftain in full armor. On one of these slabs the traveller may behold the effigy of Angus MacDonald, Scott’s Lord of the Isles, and the contemporary of Robert Bruce. In the centre of the graveyard stands the ruin of a chapel which was built at the close of the eleventh century by St. Margaret of Scotland, and dedicated to St. Oran, the first Irish monk who died in Iona after the landing of St. Columba. Near by is the ancient Irish cross which is said to mark the spot where St. Columba rested on the eve of his death, when he had walked forth to take a last view of his well-beloved island. A little farther north lies the cathedral, ruined and roofless, with its square tower, which is the first object to attract the eye of the pilgrim as he approaches the sacred isle. Iona is but three miles in length and about two miles wide. Unlike the islands by which it is surrounded, it has a sandy beach, which slopes to the water’s edge, and its highest point is but little over three hundred feet above the level of the sea. The ruins all lie on the eastern shore, and are but a few paces from one another. Some little care is taken of them, now that the facilities of travel have turned the attention of travellers to this former home of learning and religion. The chapel of the nunnery is no longer used as a cow-house, nor the cathedral as a stable, as in the time of Dr. Johnson’s visit. Nevertheless, many interesting relics which he saw have since disappeared. Still, enough remains to awaken emotion in the breasts of those whom the thought of noble deeds and heroic lives can move. In treading this sacred soil, and walking among the graves of kings and princes of the church, surrounded by broken walls and crumbling arches which once sheltered saints and heroes, we are lifted by the very genius of the place into a higher world. The present vanishes. The past comes back to us, and throws its light into the dim and awful future. How mean and contemptible seem to us the rivalries and ambitions of men! This handful of earth, girt round by the sea, holds the glories of a thousand years. All their beauty is faded. They are bare and naked as these broken walls, to which not even the sheltering ivy clings. The voice of battle is hushed; the song of victory is silent; the strong are fallen; the valiant are dead, and around forgotten graves old ocean chants the funeral dirge. Monuments of death mark all human triumphs. And yet St. Columba and his grand old monks are not wholly dead. To them more than to the poet belongs the non omnis moriar. Their spirit lives even in us, if we are Christians and trust the larger hope. What heavenly privilege, like them, to be free, and in the desert and ocean’s waste to find the possibility of the diviner life; like them, to be strong, leaning upon God only! The very rocks they looked upon seem to have gained a human sense; in the air is the presence of unseen spirits, and the waves approach gently as in reverence for the shore pressed by their feet. To have stood, though but for a moment and almost as in a dream, amid these sacred shrines, is good for the soul. It is as if we had gone to the house of one who loved us, and found that he was dead. The world seems less beautiful, but God is nearer and heaven more real. We have lingered too long among the ruins of Iona. Our ship puffs her sail, and we must go; but our faces are still turned towards the blessed isle; the cathedral tower rises sadly over the bleak shore, and in a little while the rough and rock-bound coast of the Ross of Mull takes the vision from our eyes. And now I am in Ireland. Landing at Belfast, I went south to Dublin; thence to Wicklow, where I took a jaunting-car and drove through the Devil’s Glen, to Glendalough, through Glenmalure and the Vale of Avoca, and back to Wicklow. Returning to Dublin, I went southwest to the Lakes of Killarney, passing through nearly the entire extent of the island from east and west. Having made the tour of the lakes and visited Muckross Abbey and Ross Castle, I went to Cork, where I took the train for Youghal, on the Blackwater. I sailed up this beautiful river to Cappoquin, near Lismore. From this point I visited the Trappist monastery of Mt. Melleray. Again taking a jaunting-car, I drove over the Knockmeledown Mountains into Tipperary, along the lovely banks of the river Suir, into Clonmel, thence to Cashel, to Holy Cross Abbey and to Thurles. Returning to Cork, I of course visited Blarney Castle, and then, sailing down the noble sea-avenue that leads to Queenstown, went aboard the steamer which was to bring me home again. In Rome, it has been said, none are strangers. So much of what is greatest and best in the history of the human race centres there that all men instinctively identify themselves with her life and are at home. In Ireland a Catholic, no matter whence he come, forgets that he is in a foreign land; and in proportion to the love with which he cherishes his faith is the sympathy that draws him to the people who have clung to it through more suffering and sorrow than have fallen to the lot of any other. More than other races they have loved the church; more than others they have believed that, so long as faith and hope and love are left to the heart, misery can never be supreme. The force with which they realize the unseen world leaves them unbroken amid the reverses and calamities of this life. They are to-day what they were in ages past—the least worldly and the most spiritual-minded people of Europe. They live in the past and in the future; cling to memories and cherish dreams. The ideal is to them more than the real. Their thoughts are on religion, on liberty, honor, justice, rather than upon gold. They fear sin more than poverty or sickness. When the mother hears of the death of her son, in some distant land, her first thought is not of him, but of his soul. Did he die as a Catholic should die, confessing his sins, trusting in God, strengthened by the sacraments? When he left her weeping, her great trouble was the fear lest, in the far-off world to which he was going, he should forget the God of his fathers, the God of Ireland’s hope; and when in her dreams she saw him back again, her heart leaped for joy, not that he was rich or famous, but that the simple faith of other days was with him still. The life that is to be is more than that which is. The coldest heart is warmed by this strong faith. In the midst of this simple and pure-hearted people, so poor and so content, so wronged and so patient, so despised and so noble, one realizes the divine power of religion. Whithersoever our little systems of thought may lead us, whatsoever mysteries of nature they may reveal, nothing that they can give us could compensate for the loss of honest faith and child-like trust in God. Whatever may be, this is the best. Better to die in a hovel, yearning for God and trusting to him, than without hope “to walk all day, like the sultan of old, in a garden of spice.” The first and deepest impression made upon me in travelling through Ireland was that it is a country consecrated by unutterable suffering. The shadow of an almost divine sorrow is still upon the land. Each spot is sacred to some sad memory. Ruined castles tell how her proudest families were driven into exile or reduced to beggary; roofless cathedrals and crumbling abbeys proclaim the long martyrdom of her bishops and priests; tenantless cottages and deserted villages speak of the multitudes turned upon the road to die, or, with weary step, to seek shelter in a foreign land. We pass through desolate miles of waste lands that might be reclaimed, through whole counties that have been turned into sheep and cattle pastures, through towns once busy, now dead; and John Mitchel’s cry of anguish, when last year, in triumphal funeral march, he went to meet the electors of Tipperary, strikes upon the ear: “My God, my God, where are my people?” Go to the abandoned ports of Wexford, of Youghal, of Waterford, of Galway, and you will be told of ships, freighted with human souls, that sailed away and never returned. It seemed to me on those silent shores that I could still hear the wail of countless mothers, wringing their hands and weeping for the loss of children whom a cruel fate had torn from them. Was ever history so sad as Ireland’s? Great calamities have befallen other nations—they have been wasted by war and famine, trodden in the dust by invading barbarians; but their evils have had an end. In Ireland the sword has never wearied of blood. “The wild deer and wolf to a covert may flee,” but her people have had no refuge from famine and danger. Without home and country, they have stood for centuries with the storm of fate beating upon their devoted heads, and in their long night of woe some faint glimmer of hope has shone out, only suddenly to disappear, leaving the darkness blacker. True were the poet’s words of despair: “There are marks on the fate of each clime, there are turns in the fortunes of men, But the changes of realms or the chances of time shall never restore thee again. Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe by links which the world cannot sever; With thy tyrant through storm and through calm shalt thou go, And thy sentence is—‘Banished for ever.’ Thou art doomed for the vilest to toil; thou art left for the proud to disdain; And the blood of thy sons and the wealth of thy soil shall be lavished, and lavished in vain. Thy riches with taunts shall be taken; thy valor with gibes is repaid; And of millions who see thee now sick and forsaken, not one shall stand forth in thy aid. In the nations thy place is left void; thou art lost in the list of the free. Even realms, by the plague or the earthquake destroyed, are revived; but no hope is for thee.” I stood in Glendalough, by the lake “Whose gloomy shore Skylark never warbles o’er.” The sun was just sinking to rest behind St. Kevin’s Hill, covered with the purple heather-bloom. There was not a sound in the air, but all the mountains and the valley held their breath, as if the spirits of the monks of old were felt by them in this hour, in which, in the ages gone, the song of prayer and praise rose up to God from the hearts of believing men, and all the plain and the hillsides were vocal with sweet psalmody. Here, a thousand years ago and more, a city grew up, raised by the power of holiness. To St. Kevin flocked men who sought the better way, and the Irish people, eternally drawn to religion and to their priests, gathered round, and Glendalough was filled with the multitude of believers. Those were the days which St. Columba sang when in far-off Iona he remembered his own sweet land: “From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my gray eye when I turn to Erin—to Erin, where the songs of the birds are so sweet, and where the monks sing like the birds; where the young are so gentle and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair to wed.” From St. Kevin to St. Lawrence O’Toole, Glendalough was the home of saints. When the Norman came, in the twelfth century, there was a bishop there. The hills were dotted with the hermitages of anchorets, and above the seven churches rose the round tower in imperishable strength. To-day there is left only the dreariness and loneliness of the desert. The hills that once were covered with rich forests of oak are bare and bleak; the cathedral is in ruins; the churches are crumbling walls and heaps of stones; the ground is strewn with fragments of sculptured crosses and broken pillars; and amid this wreck of a world are mingled in strange confusion the tombs of saints and princes and the graves of peasants. Still stands the round tower in lonely majesty, like a sentinel of heaven, to watch for ever over the graves of God’s people. What a weight of awe falls upon us amid these sacred monuments! We speak not, and scarcely breathe. An unknown power draws us back into the dread bosom of the past. The freshness of life dies out of us; we grow to the spot, and feel a kinship with stones which re-echoed the footsteps of saints, which resounded with the voice of prayer. It seems almost a sacrilege to live when the great and the good lie dead at our feet. But why stop we here? Is not Ireland covered with ruins as reverend and as sad as these? Throughout the land they stand “As stands a lofty mind, Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd, All tenantless, save to the crannying wind, Or holding dark communion with the cloud.” What need of history’s blood-stained page to tell the sad story of Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s woes? O’Connell never spoke as speak these roofless cathedrals, these broken walls and crumbling arches, these fallen columns and shattered crosses. The traveller who in Jerusalem beholds the weary and worn children of Israel sitting in helpless grief amid the scattered stones of Solomon’s Temple, need not be told how the enemies of the Holy City compassed her about; how the sword and famine and the devouring flame swallowed up the people; how her walls were broken down, her holy of holies profaned, her priests slaughtered, her streets made desolate, until not a stone was left upon a stone. The massacres of Wexford and Drogheda; the confiscation in a single day of half the land of Ireland; the driving her people into the ports of Munster to be shipped to regions of pestilence and death; the expulsion of every Catholic from the rich fields of Ulster; the exile of the whole nation beyond the Shannon; the violated treaty of Limerick, are but episodes in this tragedy of centuries. Even the Penal Code, the most hideous and inhuman ever enacted by Christian or pagan people, tells but half the story. That the Irish Catholic had for centuries been held in bondage by a law which violated every good and generous sentiment of the human heart, I knew. He could not vote, he could not bear witness, he could not bring suit, he could not sit on a jury, he could not go to school, he could not teach school, he could not practise law or medicine, he could not travel five miles from his home; he could own nothing which he might not be forced to give up or renounce his faith; he could not keep or use any kind of weapon, even in self-defence; his children were offered bribes to betray him; he could not hear Mass, he could not receive the sacraments; in his death-agony the priest might not be near to console him. All this I knew, and yet I had never realized the condition to which such inhuman legislation must reduce a people. That this Code, which Montesquieu said must have been contrived by devils, and which Burke declared to be the fittest instrument ever invented by man to degrade and destroy a nation, had failed to accomplish its fiendish purpose, I also knew. The Irish people, deprived of everything, and almost of the hope of ever having anything in this world, remained superior to fate. With a fidelity to religious conviction without example in the history of the world, they retained the chastity, the unbroken courage, the cheerful temper and generous love which had always distinguished them; and that in travelling among them I should find it more and more impossible to doubt of this was but what I had expected. But the generous, pure, and simple character of the people only made the impression which I received of the frightful wrongs and sufferings which have been and are still inflicted upon them the more painful. There is not in the civilized world another country where the evils of tyranny and misrule are so manifest. One cannot help but feel that Ireland does not belong to the Irish. It is not governed in their interest; it is not made to contribute to their welfare or happiness. They are not taken into account by its rulers; their existence is considered accidental; a fact which cannot be ignored, but which it is hoped time, with famine, poverty, and petty persecution such as the age allows, will eliminate. The country belongs to a few men who have no sympathy with the mass of the people, who do not even desire to have any. They are for the most part the descendants of needy adventurers who, under Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William of Orange, obtained as a reward of their servility or brutality the confiscated lands of Ireland; or if they belong to the ancient families, they inherit their wealth from ancestors who owed it to a double apostasy from God and their country. It was these men, and not England, who enacted the Irish Penal Code. They are the traditional enemies of Ireland, sucking out her lifeblood and trampling in contempt upon her people. They have filled the land with mourning and death, with the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan; they have freighted the ships which have borne the Irish exiles to every land under heaven; they have within our own memory crowded her highways with homeless and starving multitudes; have pushed out her people to make room for sheep and cattle; in ten years have taken from her three millions of her children. My heart grew sick of asking to whom the domains through which I was passing belonged. It seemed to me that the people owned nothing, that the paucis vivitur humanum genus was truer here than ever in ancient Rome. The very houses in which the Irish peasantry live tell the sad tale that in their own country they are homeless. Like the Israelites in Egypt, they must stand with loins girt and staff in hand, ready to move at a moment’s warning. If the little hut shelter them for a season, it is enough; for another year may find them where rolls the Oregon or on the bitter plains of Australia. Ask them why they build not better houses, plant not trees and flowers, to surround with freshness and beauty that family-life which to them is so pure and so sweet; they will answer you that they may not, they dare not. The slightest evidence of comfort would attract the greedy eye of the landlord; the rent would be raised, and he who should presume to give such ill-example would soon be turned adrift. The great lord wants cabins which he can knock down in a day to make room for his sheep and cattle; he wants arguments to prove that the Irish people are indolent, improvident, an inferior race, unfit for liberty. I know that there are landlords who are not heartless. The people will tell you more than you wish to hear of the goodness of Lord Nincompoop, of the charity of Lord Fiddlefaddle. The intolerable evil is that the happiness or misery of a whole people should be left to the chance of an Irish landlord not being a fool and yet having a heart. To any other people who had suffered from an aristocracy the hundredth part of what has been borne by the Irish, the very name of “lord” would carry with it the odium of unutterable infamy; among any other people the state of things which, in spite of all the progress that has been made, still exists in Ireland, would breed the most terrible and dangerous passions. For my own part, I could not look upon the castles and walled-in parks which everywhere met my view without feeling my heart fill with a bitterness which I could rarely detect in those with whom I spoke. What it was possible to do has been done to hide the land itself from the eyes of the people. Around Dublin you would think almost every house a prison, so carefully is it walled in. The poor, who must walk, are shut in by high and gloomy walls which forbid them even the consolation of looking upon the green hills and plains which surround that city. In the same way the landlords have taken possession of the finest scenery of the island. If you would see the Powerscourt waterfall, you must send your card to the castle and graciously beg permission. People who have no cards are not supposed to be able to appreciate the beauty of one of the most picturesque spots in Ireland. At the entrance to the Devil’s Glen the traveller is stopped by huge iron gates, symbolical of those which Milton has described as grating harsh thunder on their turning hinges; and when he thinks he is about to issue forth again into the upper air, suddenly other gates frown upon him to remind him of the lasciati ogni speranza voi ch’entrate, of Dante. Mr. Herbert has taken possession of half the Lakes of Killarney, and exacts a fixed toll from all who wish to see what ought to be as free to all as the air of heaven. If ten thousand dollars added to his annual income be a compensation for such meanness, he is no doubt content. It is on the demesne of this gentleman that lies the celebrated ruin of Muckross Abbey. It stands embosomed in trees on a green slope, overlooking the Lower Lake, and commanding one of the loveliest views to be had anywhere. The taste of “the monks of old” in selecting sites for their monasteries was certainly admirable. A church was erected on this spot at a very early date, but was consumed by fire in 1192. The abbey and church, the ruins of which are now standing, were built in 1340, by one of the MacCarthys, Princes of Desmond, for Franciscan monks, who still retained possession of them at the time of Cromwell’s invasion. A Latin inscription on the north wall of the choir asks the reader’s prayers for Brother Thadeus Holen, who had the convent repaired in the year of our Lord 1626. That such a place should have remained in the possession of the monks for more than a century after the introduction of Protestantism is of itself enough to show to what extent the Catholic monuments of Ireland had escaped the destroyer’s hand previous to the incursion of the Cromwellian vandals. The ruins of Muckross Abbey have successfully withstood the power of Time’s effacing finger. The walls, which seem to have been built to stand for ever, are as strong to-day as they were five hundred years ago; and to render the monastery habitable nothing would be required but to replace the roof. The library, the dormitories, the kitchen, the cellars, the refectory with its great fire-place, seem to be patiently waiting the return of the brown-robed sons of St. Francis; and in the corridors the silence, so loved of religious souls, is felt like the presence of holy spirits. In the centre of the court-yard there is a noble yew-tree, planted by the monks centuries ago. Its boughs droop lovingly over the roofless walls to shelter them from the storm. In the church the dead are sleeping, and among them some of Ireland’s princes. In the centre of the choir a modern tomb covers the vault where in ancient times the MacCarthys Mor, and later the O’Donoghue Mor of the Glens, were interred. These are the opening lines of the lengthy epitaph: “What more could Homer’s most illustrious verse Or pompous Tully’s stately prose rehearse Than what this monumental stone contains In death’s embrace, MacCarthy Mor’s remains?” This abbey, like most of the other sacred ruins of Ireland, is now used as a Catholic cemetery. No Protestant is buried here. Mr. Herbert, however, has got possession of it, and has secured the entrance with iron gates, which open only to golden keys. The living who enter here pay this needy gentleman a shilling, the dead half a crown. Elsewhere we find the same state of things. Even the most sacred relics of Ireland are in the hands of Protestants. It is not easy to find a more interesting collection of antiquities than that of the museum of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin; but the pleasure which we experience in contemplating these evidences of the ancient civilization of the Irish people is mingled with pain when we see that even their holiest relics have been taken from them and given to those who have no sympathy with the struggles and triumphs with which these objects are associated. We have here, for instance, the “Sweet-sounding” bell of St. Patrick, together with its cover or shrine, which is a fine specimen of the art of the goldsmith as it flourished in Ireland before the Norman invasion. Here, too, is preserved the famous “Cross of Cong,” upon which is inscribed the name of the artist by whom it was made for Turlough O’Conor, father of Roderick, the last native king of Ireland. No finer piece of work in gold is to be found in any country of Western Europe. Those who examine it will be able to form an opinion of the state of the metallurgic and decorative arts in Ireland before she had been blessed by English civilization. Another object of even greater interest is a casket of bronze and silver which formerly enclosed a copy of the Gospels that belonged to St. Patrick. The leaves of this, the most ancient Irish manuscript, have become agglutinated through age, so that they now form a solid mass. Another manuscript, almost as ancient and not less famous, is a Latin version of the Psalms which belonged to St. Columba. This is the copy which is said to have led to the exile of the saint and to the founding of his monastery. This was the battle-book of the O’Donnells, who in war always bore it with them as their standard. One cannot contemplate the exquisite workmanship and precious material of these book-shrines without being struck by the extraordinary care with which the ancient Irish preserved their manuscripts. These sacred relics bear testimony at once to their religious zeal and to their love of learning. They carry us back to the time when Ireland was the home of saints and doctors; when from every land those who were most eager to serve God and to improve themselves flocked to her shores, to receive there the warm welcome which her people have ever been ready to give to the stranger who comes among them with peaceful purpose. Those were the days of her joy and her pride; the glorious three centuries during which she held the intellectual supremacy of the world; during which her sons were the apostles of Europe, the founders of schools, and the teachers of doctors. Never did a nation give more generously of its best and highest life than Ireland in that age. These emblems of her faith and her science are in the hands of her despoiler. The great schools of Lismore and Armagh are no more. No more in the streets of her cities are heard all the tongues of Europe, which at matin hymn and vesper song lose themselves in the unity and harmony of the one language of the church. They who were eager to teach all men were forbidden to learn. Knowledge was made impossible, and they were reproached with ignorance. But the end is not yet. In contemplating the past we must not forget the present, nor the future which also belongs to Ireland. The dark clouds which so long have wrapped her like a shroud are breaking. In the veins of her children the full tide of life is flowing, warm and strong, as in the day when Columba in his wicker-boat dared the fury of the waves, or Brian drove the Dane into the sea, or Malachi wore the collar of gold. They are old and yet young; crowned with the glories of two thousand years, they look with eyes bright with youthful hope to a future whose splendor shall make the past seem as darkness.
FROM THE FRENCH. June 1, 1868. What a beautiful Whitsuntide, carissima! Only a minute ago Marcella was singing to me the Tarantella della Madonna, “Pie di Grotta.” Do you recollect the pretty child in rags who used to make such long trills and quavers as she tossed back her dark tresses? How far off now, dear Kate, seems our time at Naples! Margaret sends me a summons to go to her. I answer by telling her how it is that we are detained in Brittany until July. You can understand what the family journey will then be. Oh! it is so sweet and good a thing to be together that it costs much to each one of us to absent ourselves from the rest even for a day. We have had High Mass and Vespers worthy of a cathedral. On leaving the chapel Anna, whose musical organization leaves nothing to desire, threw herself into my arms, exclaiming: “It must be like that in Paradise!” We all had the same impression. What worldly festivities are worth ours? This morning a walk with RenÉ in the woods, among the thyme and early dew. Made a resolution to go out in this way every day, quietly, before a single shutter is opened. We pray and meditate. RenÉ draws me on to heights of faith and love. If you heard him when he walks out with the twins! And how they listen to him, with their large eyes fixed on his! Would you like to have news of Isa? “She is very thin,” Margaret tells me, “but is still beautiful; she personifies the angel of charity. The good she does all around her will never be known. Make haste, then, dear, and come; it is not good of you thus to refuse yourself to our desires.” God keep you, my dear Kate! La Tarantella della Madonna, Pie di Grotta. (Neapolitan Ballad.) O lark that singest sweetly At the rising of the sun, Whose blithe wing bears thee fleetly To where the day’s begun! Rise, rise through rosy skies To the gate of Paradise. At that gate so fair What should be my quest? Shall I enter Paradise With the angels blest? Thou shalt pray our Mother fair, With azure eyes and golden hair, To touch our fruits with ripening hand, And bless the harvests of our land. By her soft eyes bending down, Watching over field and town— Eyes more fair than fairest day That from heaven hath strayed away— Entreat her from her throne above Thus to recompense our love. O my friends! I will do so, At the gate of Paradise: To Mary with the brow of snow I will breathe your ardent sighs. O lark that singest sweetly At the rising of the sun, Whose blithe wing bears thee fleetly To where the day’s begun! Rise, rise through rosy skies To the gate of Paradise. While at that gate so dear Your Mother I do pray To bless your hopes alway, Friends, what will appear? Thou shalt see our Mother there, On her throne of rubies rare; On her head the diamond crown Set thereon by Christ, her Son; Queen is she of Paradise. Mercy raineth from her eyes, Pity flows from out her hands Unto all the furthest lands. Heaven makes music round her throne, Happiness dwells there alone. Thou shalt see her shining fair, More bright than envied princes are— Our Queen all powerful, yet all sweet, With the sun beneath her feet. O friends! my heart would leave its place, The brightness daze my eyes. Were I to look on Mary’s face, The Queen of Paradise. O lark that singest sweetly At the rising of the sun, Whose blithe wing bears thee fleetly To where the day’s begun! Rise, rise through rosy skies To the gate of Paradise. And at that threshold dread Where all the angels throng, When the golden gates are open spread, What theme shall wake my song? To our Mother shalt thou say That for her hearts burn alway; That to us her love’s more sweet Than native flowers to exiles’ feet; That her image graven deep On our hearts doth never sleep; That gazing from this earthly shore, Above its tumult and its roar, In dreams that come like blessed balm, We see her heaven’s unshaken calm. I go, I go! Sweet friends, good-by; For you to Paradise I fly. Dearest, the French is not equal to the naive language of the brown little Neapolitan girl. June 12, 1868. I have been ill, my beloved sister. What trouble they have all been giving themselves on my account! Happily, it was nothing—fever, headache, and general indisposition. The doctor orders much exercise, and from to-morrow we organize a cavalcade. Adrien has had some superb horses brought here; what riding parties we shall have! But sadness mingles with joy. Lucy’s mother is very ill. They have just set out; will they arrive too late? Oh! this journey, how full it will be of anxiety and apprehension. A despatch.… Poor Lucy! the goodness of God has spared her that last moment, so full of cruel distress and yet of ineffable hope—she did not see her mother die! What mourning! Why is death like our shadow, pitilessly mowing down the existences which are dearer to us than our own? But to what purpose is it to ask why? There is more true wisdom in a fiat than in curious researches. On Whitsunday, at the “drawing” of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, my lot was the Gift of Piety—love of God and of all that belongs to his service; and the Fruit of Patience—generous acceptance of the crosses God sends us. Must I own to you that this gift made me afraid? Oh! if my happiness were to be destroyed. You will be scolding me for this dreaming, and you will say to me with Mgr. Landriot: “If you would keep mind and body in a healthy condition, avoid with extreme care these states of reverie—the habit of taking aerial flights in which the heart and understanding exhaust themselves on emptiness.” Dear Kate, my dreams speak but of heaven. Marcella, so long a captive beneath the yoke of others, regards independence as the first of terrestrial benefits; on this subject our opinions differ. The poor Prisoner was quite right when he said to the swallows: Il n’est dans cette vie Qu’un bien digne d’envie: Yes, assuredly, liberty is a great good, and therefore it is that our soul has been made free, perfectly free. And how sweet it is to feel one’s self free, and to bend generously beneath the yoke of love and sacrifice! One of our first instincts is the need of liberty, and even the word alone has in it a magic which carries the mind away with it, and at critical times becomes the rallying word of revolutions. O my God! grant that I may love only the holy freedom of thy children—that freedom which can never be taken from me. Deliver the captives—the captives of the world, and above all of sin! Deliver also Ireland! Visits: an entire family, antique in dress and appearance, but modern in language, grace, and heart. Good Bretons!—I love them. This valiant faith, this sublime indignation, these courageous protestations for the church and her Head in a race of granite, is an incomparable spectacle. Brittany has indeed done well to preserve its customs, its manners, and its ancient faith eternally young and living. One of these ladies questioned us about Paris, whither she wishes to accompany her son, who is attacked by the fever of the times. I admire her maternal devotion. Imagine the astonishment of this Bretonne in the capital of mud and gold! Dear Kate, Marcella and RenÉ have some secrets to tell you. Love from us all. June 16, 1868. Our first ride has been most prosperous, dear sister. It was a nineteen—an unlucky day, declares the superstitious Marianne. What matters?—God protects us. “Who loves me follows me!” cried Adrien, and away we went, cantering after him through the thickets. Don’t suppose our expedition was for nothing but pleasure, however legitimate, but to make a wide circuit of poor. What store of benedictions we gathered on our way! A worthy tad coz[119] in his enthusiasm kissed the hem of Marcella’s riding-habit, saying: “It is certainly a saint who is come to us.” (Marcella already speaks Breton as if it were Italian.) We had taken provisions with us, and did not get home until nine o’clock, tired out, but so happy! My mother followed us in the carriage. She must be interested and have a little variety at any price; the death of her friend (the mother of our sister) has greatly impressed her. “It is,” she says, “the herald to warn me of the approach of my own death.” May God spare her to us! Yesterday, soon after day-break, the carriages were in readiness in front of the entrance for a visit to the old divor, as the Poles would call it: a sort of pilgrimage … to the saint of the sea-coast. It is so distant that we accepted an invitation to stay the night, and are come home this evening, not at all fatigued. We are to go there again, but have meanwhile obtained a kind promise. The chÂtelaine of the lake will be here on the 2d of July. How shall I describe her to you? On our way back we were speaking of the prestige of beauty, and Adrien quoted the words of an educational professor who says: “I have passionately loved both nature and study; the fine arts have also made me feel the power of their charms; but among all things under the sun I have found nothing comparable to man when he unites noble sentiments to physical beauty. He is truly the chef-d’oeuvre of the creation.” “I have often thought,” observed RenÉ, “that, God being infinite and sovereign Beauty, physical beauty is a reflection of the divine. Without sin man would never have been ugly or plain. We have in the soul the instinct of beauty, the love of the beautiful under every form; and although we say and know very well that human beauty passes in a day, that it is nothing, nevertheless there is no one living who has not some time in his life experienced the unique and irresistible charm which is shed around her by a creature who to high qualities of mind and heart joins the attraction of beauty and regularity of countenance.” And my mother: “The saints have a kind of beauty which I prefer to every other; it is like a transfiguration. This miserable mortal envelope which covers the soul becomes in some sort transparent, so that one can see the peace, the calm and serenity, of this interior in which God dwells by his grace and love. The sight of a saint is a foretaste of Paradise. Oh! how beautiful must the angels be. Why cannot our mortal eyes behold those who are here, near to us?” “As Lamartine says,” added Marcella: “Tout mortel a le sien; cet ange protecteur, Cet invisible ami veille autour de son coeur; L’inspire, le conduit, le relÈve s’il tombe, Le reÇoit au berceau, l’accompagne À la tombe, Et portant dans les cieux, son Âme entre ses mains, La prÉsente en tremblant au MaÎtre des humains.” [120] Dear Kate, do you not love these pious natures amongst whom God has placed me? “Great souls, great souls,” exclaimed a bishop—“I seek them, but I find them not; I call them, and none answer!” Yet some there are in France, and especially in Brittany. In the midst of the refinement of luxury and effeminacy of the times in which we live, everything dwindles and diminishes; people act in the midst of narrow and despicable interests; the life of the heart is daily deteriorating, and “soon we shall know no longer how to love with that generous love which thinks not of self, but whose self-devotion places its happiness in the felicity of others.” How happy a thing, then, is it to take refuge near to God, and within a circle where he is loved! I spoke of you to the saint of the sands. Let us love each other, dear Kate. June 22, 1868. FÉnelon said: “Education, by a capable mother, is worth more than that which is to be had at the best of convents.” This often comes into my mind when I see Berthe cultivating with so much care the two choice plants whose fragrance mounts so sweetly up to God. The surname of duchesse is abandoned for ever. At Mass, on the 1st of January, ThÉrÈse made the resolution to acquire humility; and she has attained it. How many charming actions the angels must have seen with joy! Her countenance, naturally haughty and self-asserting, has gained an expression of sweetness and gentleness. She is delightful; and what efforts it has cost her! Her mother has seconded, helped, and sustained her. Raoul, the greater part of whose time is absorbed in his literary labors, has not transferred to any one his own share in the education of his daughters. Kate, since my marriage I have regretted more deeply than ever that I never knew my father. I did not know before from what strength of affection we had been severed. Thank God! so long as my mother lived her heart was enough for us. Kind, saintly mother! how I bless her memory. The twins no longer wear anything but white. It reminds me of the early Christians’ preparation for baptism. Their thoughtfulness is my admiration. They count the days with a holy eagerness; they ask us for the hymns of Expectation. We are making a retreat with them, and all our friends of Brittany will fill the chapel on the 2d of July. This is a memorable date in the family—the birthday of Raoul, Berthe, and the twins. What a coincidence!—the wedding-day of the former, and the anniversary of our mother’s First Communion. Marcella is singing: “O jour trois fois heureux! O jour trois fois bÉni! Viens remplir tous nos coeurs d’un bonheur infini!” [121] Anna has this year shared in the life of the twins; she is only eleven years old. Her mother hesitated, but M. le CurÉ has just given his decision, and the delicate child embraced me with transports. She also will be at the holy table; she also, clothed in white. “Entreat Mme. Kate to pray for me.” Sweet little dove! Evening.—Do you know what I have just heard? The good little hearts! Unknown to every one, even to the vigilant Berthe, the twins and Anna rise every night to pray; and, besides this, they regularly deprive themselves of their goÛter[122] for the benefit of a poor child who is also preparing herself for her First Communion. This child has on her arm a horrible wound, and our little saints kiss it on their knees. Do you not think you are reading the Acta Sanctorum? Of the three, Picciola is still the most fervent. I am suspected of partiality with regard to her. Oh! if you saw her kneeling in the chapel, when a ray of sunshine plays upon her fair locks, you would say she was an angel. Dearest Kate, the great day draws near! I say nothing about our processions, our lovely reposoirs, the babies scattering roses—I should write until to-morrow. Pray with me. June 26, 1868. Dearest, I feel tired after my walk on the sands, and would fain rest myself with you, and talk to you again of the twins and of Anna, whose joy makes me fear for her, so fragile is her pretty frame. Marcella has given me a holiday from my Greek; she and Berthe no more quit their darlings. And I, who have no maternal rights over these almost celestial souls, leave them a little to their mutual happiness, and isolate myself the more with RenÉ. Our subjects of conversation are always grave—God, heaven, eternity. We had visitors on the 24th; beautiful fires of St. John in the evening. O son of Elizabeth and Zacharias, voice of one crying in the desert, the greatest among the children of men! give me of your humility, your love of penitence and sacrifice. Isa sends me a few lines, all enkindled with the love of God. Sarah, returned from Spain, is much amused at certain hidalgos, and quotes me the words of Shakspere: “Were it only for their noses, one would take them for the counsellors of Pepin or Clothair, so high do they carry them and so imposing is their mark.” I have not told you of our fÊte on the 19th for the twenty-second anniversary of the elevation of the holy and venerated Pius IX to the pontificate. What will arise out of all the trials of the Papacy? Solomon, after tasting every kind of enjoyment and happiness, exclaimed: “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity.” It is deeply sad hitherto, but consolation will come at last; it is like a ray from heaven. “All is vanity, except to love God and serve him.” Let us love, then, let us serve, God, who is so full of love. Everything is there! Isa writes to me: “When shall we say, Quotidie morior?” Alas! I have not arrived at this perfection. My good RenÉ has published, in an English periodical, a remarkable article, about which I want to have your opinion. We are convinced here that no means ought to be neglected that may serve the cause of God, and that every Catholic’s sphere of action is wider than he thinks. Oh! how right you are, dear Kate. “All our actions ought to preach the Gospel.” Was present at a funeral yesterday evening—a young girl of fifteen. I thought of the beautiful verses by Brizeux on the death of Louise. What a picture!—the poor and lowly funeral train amid the magnificence of Nature, who gave to the youthful dead that which was not afforded her by men. I seem still to behold the scene. The place, also, is suitable. I am in presence of God’s fair creation; a thousand birds are singing around me. Oh! these nests, these poor little nests, chef-d’oeuvres of love. They showed me lately a goldfinch’s nest suspended as if by miracle at the extremity of a branch at an immense height. Ce nid, ce doux mystÈre, C’est l’amour d’une mÈre, Enfants, n’y touchez pas! [123] Children have an innate inclination for destruction. There are very few who think of the mother of the nestlings when they take possession of the nests; and the poet has reason to say to them: Ne pouvant rien crÉer, il ne faut rien dÉtruire, Enfants, n’y touchez pas! [124] May the angel of mercy spread his wing over the cradles and the nests, and may he protect you also, my beloved, and all of us with you! June 30, 1868. The retreat and the singing take up all my time, dear Kate, but I want to tell you that Lucy has come back to us, pale and weak, and recommends herself to your prayers. Gaston was asking for me down there. There is something so sad in this deep mourning; but Lucy looks above this earth. Edouard’s voice was wanting to our choir; it will be complete after to-morrow. Three poor children, clothed by your Georgina, will accompany our chosen ones. The saint of the sea-coast arrives to-morrow. She will be lodged near to me. I wish she could be there always! Why cannot one gather together in one same place those whom one loves? Kate dearest, RenÉ and all Brittany are for you. July 2, 1868. Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, Domine! O Kate! what a day. And the vigil—the pious tears, the pardons, the benedictions, the watching of the arms in the chapel—how sweet it was! This morning Berthe asked me to be the mother of Madeleine. The sweet child was clad in her virginal robes in my room. She was touched, but not afraid. When ready to go down, she asked my blessing. Oh! it is I rather who would have wished for hers. Then the Mass, the hymns, the exhortations; then, as in a dream, these fair apparitions prostrate before the altar, and God within our souls. What happiness for one day to contain! The saintly chÂtelaine was there, absorbed in God. The day has gone by like a flash of lightning. It is now eleven o’clock, and I say with you the Te Deum. One of our neighbors was telling me this evening of a lady whose little daughter, pious as an angel, shed tears, the evening of her First Communion, for regret that the day was at an end. This circumstance inspired the happy mother to write a charming poem, which ended something as follows: Peu de jours dans la vie offrent assez de charmes Pour qu’on pleure le soir en les voyant finir! [125] Marcella wept in the chapel. Happy mother; beloved children; blessed house; incomparable day! The saint is really a saint. Hear this: “Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament visits me every morning; I know not how it is that I do not die of love. God has allowed me everywhere to meet with souls who understand mine, and who have loved me!” Good-night, my sister. I whispered to my daughter: My own sweet child, O soul all pure and fair! Pray, pray with me where holy feet have trod, And let thy sinless pleading on the air Mount like a perfume upwards to thy God! For the poor mother who her son doth weep A last farewell in tears that rain like blood, Let thy prayer, angel, mount the starry steep— Mount like a perfume upwards to thy God! For the poor orphan, who in dire distress Alone by fireless hearth hath famished stood, Oh! let thy prayer, with sister’s tenderness, Like a sweet perfume mount towards thy God! For the poor sinner who from God would flee, Who dies and turns him from the saving Rood, Oh! let thy prayer rise upward pleadingly— Like a sweet perfume mount towards thy God! For all the weary souls who weep and wail To the sweet Virgin raise thy voice aloud; Let thy clear tones for those who die and fail Like saving perfume rise towards thy God! I used to say this at Venice to the pretty little Rutti, the little American girl; do you remember her? Oh! how well she used to pray, this little dove from the New World. Dear, I should like to cross the ocean to have a nearer view of that unknown land which attracts me so much, with its freedom, its immense spaces, its splendid vegetation, and its beautiful sun! But, nevertheless, it is not Ireland, my country, and the land of memories! God keep you! July 6, 1868. Dear Kate, in two days we start for my dear green Erin, to the great joy of Marcella, who is an enthusiast about O’Connell. Margaret feels a thrill, she tells me, at the sound of a carriage. It is high time to make acquaintance with the handsome baby. RenÉ has left me to accompany the saint, whom I would fain have taken with us. She smiled sadly in answer to my proposal: “The aged tree that grows in lonely places cannot thus be rooted up.” The Annales OrlÉanaises speak of nothing but deaths: the AbbÉ Debeauvais, CurÉ of St. Thomas d’Aquin, has just died at Mgr. Dupanloup’s; Madame de Bannand; the AbbÉ Rocher, almoner of the prisons, etc., etc. Prince Michael of Servia has been assassinated: it is almost ancient history. I must see to my packages; so good-by for the present, until we are with la belle Anglaise. July 19, 1868. It is from England, and from Margaret’s magnificent residence, that I now think of you, dear Kate. A quick passage, splendid weather, everybody well and strong, including baby Gaston. Lord William was waiting for us on the pier; we were soon in the carriage, and next day in the arms of Margaret, who cannot fÊte us enough. The children have already become used to English ways, to this people of many footmen, to this pomp and splendor, and to the beauties of the Isle of Saints. Margaret is in the full bloom of her happiness; her child is superb, and resembles her. Dear, dear Kate, how much I enjoy being here! What emotion I felt on setting foot on this soil, Breton also, but different from the other! I wept much, and feel ready to weep again. What is wanting to me? You, you, and the best beloved of mothers! But you are both of you with God—my mother in the heaven of heavens, and you in the heaven upon earth! Laus Deo, nevertheless, and for ever. Marcella understood the inward grief I felt, and delicately offered me her friendly consolations. We shall soon see Isa. I shall undertake the pilgrimage of friendship with RenÉ, in which all the family will join us: Mme. de T—— has so arranged it, you can imagine with what thought. Meanwhile, we are enjoying Margaret’s splendid hospitality. Her mother-in-law pleases me. These few lines are only to say good-day. July 24, 1868. Adrien has brought here the numbers of the magazine containing the articles on “Notre Dame de Lourdes,” by Henri Lasserre. We want to persuade our dear English friends to make this pilgrimage with us in November. We have just come from London. How many things to see and to show! This morning, our dear convent of ——. I was very happy and delighted; I love so much to meet friends again, and especially these convent meetings—there is something so heavenly about them. Under these black veils it seems as if nothing changes. When a child I used to wonder because nuns did not seem to me to grow older. Ici viennent mourir les derniers bruits du monde: Nautonniers sans rivage, abordez, c’est le port. [126] This life of union with God, and devotion to souls, has within it something divine. We know not how great is the calm and serenity resulting from the lofty choice of these hearts. To belong to God in the religious life is heaven begun. Doubtless there, as elsewhere, there are sufferings, trials, and crosses; the separation from all those most dear to one, the crushing of nature, the complete and absolute separation from everything which can charm in this world, to give one’s self exclusively to God, in prayer and love, is a beautiful thing, but no one, I think, can say that it is free from pain. Assuredly the exchange of terrestrial affections for those which are imperishable cannot be regarded as a loss, and yet what tears there are in this last farewell of the religious, who while living consents to die to all her affections! Dear Kate, we spoke of you. How they love us in this peaceful place of refuge! Oui, c’est un de ces lieux, oÙ notre coeur sent vivre Quelque chose des cieux qui flotte et qui l’enivre; Un de ces lieux qu’enfant j’aimais et je rÊvais, Dont la beautÉ sereine, inÉpuisable, intime, Verse À l’Âme un oubli sÉrieux et sublime De tout ce que la terre et l’homme ont de mauvais! [127] 16th.—Prayed much for France. “Since this morning,” my mother said to me, “I have continually before my eyes the scaffold and the pale and noble countenance of Marie Antoinette.” Poor saintly queen! what a life and what a martyr’s death. After the first days of enchantment which followed her arrival in France, what a long succession of troubles! This Dauphine of fifteen years old was so exquisitely beautiful that the MarÉchal de Brissac could say to her, in his chivalrous language: “Madame, you have there before your eyes two hundred thousand men enamored of your person”; and a few years later the people cried, “Death to the Austrian!” Never had woman such a destiny. The Greeks could not imagine a great soul in a body that had no beauty, nor beauty of person without a noble soul. Marie Antoinette would have been their idol, their goddess. O holy martyrs of the Temple! pray for France. The magazine contains a story still more interesting than Fabiola, if that is possible: Virginia; or, Rome under Nero. 19th.—Feast of St. Vincent de Paul, this man of miracles, this humble and great saint, whose memory will live as long as the world, who founded admirable works, who created the Sister of Charity—this marvel, whom even the impious admire, whom the poor and needy, the aged, the infirm, the wounded, call “sister”; whom one finds tending abandoned children; at the asylum, the hospital, on the field of battle, and in the prison. O charity! Letter from Sister Louise, who is, it seems to me, drawing near to her Eternity. She tells me that labor has worn out her strength, that she cannot write any more, and sends me two very beautiful little pictures, which have a sacredness in my eyes as the gift of a dying person. Is Heaven so soon about to claim this sweet cloister-flower? Kate, darling, you see that I cannot lose my favorite habit of confiding to you my thoughts. Oh! why are you not here, admiring Margaret, resplendent with youth, freshness, and joy? She is going to write to you, to ask news of ZoË, etc. God keep you, my beloved sister! July 29, 1868. Have I said anything to you about Margaret’s park? of her conservatory, worthy of Italy, and where Marcella would like always to remain? of her birds? of all the fairy-land which she knows so well how to make us enjoy? Lucy’s mourning prevents our hosts from issuing many invitations; but how much I prefer our home-party as it is! Long excursions among the mountains. Many projects for next year. Margaret desires that a friendly compact should be agreed to, which would be a continual interchange of visits: Brittany, England, Ireland, Orleans, and HyÈres would by turns receive our Penates. O dreams of youth, O balmy days, which never will return! stay with us long. Yesterday Lord B——, who had heard of my arrival, hastened to come and see us. “What! so soon grown up, Miss Georgina?” he exclaimed, to the exceeding amusement of Alix. To-morrow we start for Ireland, for my own home, where everything is in readiness for our arrival. What a sorrowful happiness! Gertrude lets me look through her manuscript books; the following lines which I found there you will read with as much admiration as myself: “This morning HÉlÈne asked to speak with me, and this day and hour I shall ever remember. The beloved child of my soul, of my thoughts, and of my heart desires to become a daughter of St. Teresa; she wishes to go, and speedily. I shall, then, see her no more but at long intervals and behind a threatening grating; another mother will give her her love, other hands than mine will guide her towards God. But she will be thine, O Lord! and, while yet young, I have felt too much the sorrows of this world not to be happy at seeing thee give to her the better part. Her avowals, her innocent confidence, her purity of soul and intention—all these appeared to me so peaceful that I also experienced an ineffable sense of inward peace. Go, then, since God calls thee, sweet angel of this home, in which thou wilt leave so great a void—go; father and mother will not refuse thee to God, and our prayers and blessings will follow thee!” After these heavenly thoughts, dear Kate, I leave you. August 6, 1868. I have received your letter, dear sister, joy of my soul, and to-day must not pass away without my writing to you. O deliciosa! I behold Ireland again, my country, my universe, the first place in my heart, where I have loved my mother and you. O these memories!—the past and present uniting their happiness, their harmonies, and their sweetness. The house is the same as ever—a bit of heaven fallen upon the earth! Prayed on our dear tombs. The rose-trees flourish which you planted there. The good Reginald does everything as well as possible, as he always does. But oh! to live here without you, to see your room—a reliquary which no one enters without me, and where I have put together whatever belonged to you. Dear, dear Kate, you say well that God has given me other sisters—sisters loving and beloved, but who cannot replace my Kate. All the village came out to meet us. There were no songs—there were tears: the Irish understand one another. Poor martyr-country! I am seized with a longing desire to stay here to console these poor people. Our dogs were wild with delight, like that of Ulysses. Dear friend and sister, do not be uneasy; that which surmounts all else in my heart is peace, and peace founded on hope, as on a foundation of gold. God will deliver Ireland! He will give us back our forests and our hills, and we shall no more return to the condition of the proscribed. Do you remember the last book we read together, in the great drawing-room on the venerated spot where we used to see our mother? This book is still on a side-table, marked at the last page. It is Rosa Ferrucci, the charming Italian, who so loved Milton. Nothing is changed; the wide meadows, the splendid landscape, the sunsets behind the giants of the park, the gold-dust gleaming through the foliage, the decline of day which we used so to admire together—I have seen it again in its fantastic magnificence—all is there, even to the smallest tufts of ivy: but the absent and the dead! “And they also are present,” RenÉ assures me. “They wish you to be courageous and truly Christian. Death does not separate souls.” A fraternal letter from Karl. “My heart feels all the impressions of yours in Ireland. I pray God that he may shed happiness upon your path, and I join in all your memories.” Isa, Lizzy, Mme. D——, and all our friends must come in turn, and all together. Isa is with me, pale as a marble Madonna, with a heavenly expression in her eyes. Her mother almost adores her, and clings to her in order to live. Mme. D—— fainted away on seeing me. Lizzy has recovered her gayety and petulance, and would fain enliven Isa. Where have I read some words of a Breton who, in speaking of a young girl called to the religious life, says, “Her heart is like a desert”? Such is Isa, athirst for God, in love with the ideal, a soul wounded with the thorny briers of life. Margaret takes in several French newspapers. We are reading in the Ouvrier, Les Faucheurs de la Mort—the “Mowers of Death”—a historical drama of unhappy Poland. It is heartrending. Poland and Ireland, the two martyrs, understand each other. Will not God raise them up a liberator? Darling Kate, what benedictions are showered upon you in return for your liberalities! What touching questions are put to me! O these good people! how I love them. For the first time I am mistress of the house. RenÉ calms my scruples, and tells me that he is proud of me. O the evening prayers in our own tongue! Yesterday I thought I saw you in your old place, and nearly cried out. Send me your good angel, O best-beloved of sisters! Send him to me in the land of O’Connell— “First flower of the earth, first gem of the sea.” Dear Kate, I am going to enclose in my letter some beautiful lines by Marie Jenna, the sweet poetess who delights me so much. This poetry is almost Irish to my heart: Le Retour. Oui, je te reconnais, domaine de mon pÈre, Vieux chÂteau, champs fleuris, murs tapissÉs de lierre, OÙ de mes jeunes ans s’abrita le bonheur; Votre image a partout suivi le voyageur.… Vous souvient-il aussi des quatre tÊtes blondes Qui si joyeusement formaient de folles rondes? De nos rires bruyants, de nos Éclats de voix, Nous faisions retentir les Échos des grands bois, Sans craindre d’offenser leur majestÉ sereine, Et plus insouciants que l’oiseau de la plaine. Mais, ainsi qu’un parfum goutte À goutte ÉpanchÉ, Le bonheur s’est tari dans mon sein dessÉchÉ. De ces bois, chaque ÉtÉ rajeunit la couronne, La mienne est pour toujours flÉtrie au vent d’automne; Au murmure des vents dans leurs rameaux touffus, Au concert gracieux de leurs nids suspendus. Au doux bruit du ruisseau qui borda leur enceinte, Aujourd’hui je n’ai rien À mÊler qu’une plainte: Je ne ris plus.… Puis sous le marronnier voici le banc de pierre OÙ, pour nous voir de loin, s’asseyait notre mÈre. Oh! comme elle Était belle et comme nous l’aimions! Oh! comme son regard avait de chauds rayons! J’Étais le plus petit: souvent lorsque mes frÈres Gravissaient en courant les coteaux de bruyÈres, Bien las, traÎnant des fleurs et des branches de houx, Je revenais poser mon front sur ses genoux. Alors en doux accents vibrait sa voix chÉrie, Et dans mon sein d’enfant tombait la rÊverie. Et maintenant traÎnant mes pas irrÉsolus, Parmi les chers dÉbris de mes bonheurs perdus, Et les pieds tout meurtris des cailloux de la route, Je me retourne encor, je m’arrÊte et j’Écoute: Je n’entends plus.… Et ce vieux monument, c’est toi, ma pauvre Église, A l’ombre d’un sapin cachant ta pierre grise. J’ai saluÉ de loin le sommet de ta croix Qui scintille au soleil et domine les bois. Ici, je m’en souviens, j’eus de bien belles heures, Qui me faisaient rÊver des celestes demeures; Je contemplais, ravi, les sÉraphins ailÉs, Les gothiques vitraux, les lustres ÉloignÉs. J’entendais À la fois la priÈre du prÊtre, Et les petits oiseaux jasant À la fenÊtre, Les cantiques de l’orgue et des enfants de choeur, Et l’ineffable voix qui parlait dans mon coeur.… Oh! que Dieu soit bÉni! que les mains de l’enfance Au pied de son autel, sainte arche d’alliance, Des fleurs de nos sentiers rÉpandent le trÉsor! Qu’on brÛle devant lui l’encens des urnes d’or! Que tout vive et tressaille et chante en sa prÉsence! Le bonheur en fuyant m’a laissÉ l’espÉrance: Translation of the foregoing. Yes, domain of my father, well I know thee again— Old chÂteau, flowery fields, walls tapestried with ivy, Which sheltered the happiness of my youthful years; Everywhere your image has followed the wanderer.… Also, remember ye the four flaxen headed children Who danced so joyously their merry rounds? Our noisy laughter and our cries and shouts Made the wide woods re-echo; nor did we fear Thus to offend their majesty serene. More careless we than wild birds of the plain; But like a perfume poured out drop by drop, So happiness is dried up in my breast. Each summer, of these woods renews the crown, The autumn winds for ay have withered mine. With the breeze murmuring in their tangled boughs, With the sweet warblings from their hanging nests, With the soft ripple of their engirdling stream, Now can I mingle nothing but a moan: I laugh no more. See the stone bench beneath the chestnut shade, Where mother sat, and watched us from afar. How beautiful she was, and how we loved her! And what warm rays beamed on us from her eyes! I was the youngest; often, when my brothers Climbed up and ran upon the heathy banks, I, wearily dragging my flowers and holly boughs, Would go and lean my head against her knees, And hear the gentle accents of her voice, While on my childish heart a reverie fell. Now I return again, I stop and listen; But hear no more.… And this old building—it is thou, poor church, Hiding thy gray stones ’neath the pine-tree’s shade. The summit of thy cross I hailed from far, In sunshine gleaming, rising o’er the wood. Here, I remember, happy hours I spent, Which made me dream of heavenly abodes; I gazed, admiring, at the cherubim, The Gothic windows, candelabra high. I heard, together with the prayer of the priest, The little birds about the windows chirping, The organ, and the children of the choir, And the ineffable voice within my heart.… Blessed be God! Ever may childhood’s hands, Before his altar, the sacred Ark of the Covenant, Scatter the treasure of our way-side flowers! May incense burn in golden urns before him! May all things live, sing, gladden in his Presence! Happiness, fleeing, still has left me hope: And still I pray.… I have wept over every line, dear sister; but as for me, I laugh still, alas! Oh! what a treasure of memories hoarded within my soul of those fair years which your love made so sweet. Would you like to have one of my relics, dearest? Souvenir d’Enfance. C’Était dans un bois, À l’ombre des chÊnes Et de nos sept ans, fiÈres toutes trois, N’ayant pas encor ni chagrin ni peines, Nous remplissions l’air du bruit de nos voix. Nous chantions toujours, cherchant l’Églantine, La fraise sauvage et le joyeux nid, Jouant follement sur la mousse fine, Et dans ces Ébats la nuit nous surprit. Tremblantes de peur, dans la forÊt sombre, Et pleurant tout bas, craignant de mourir, Quand autour de nous s’Épaississait l’ombre, Nous ne songions plus À nous rÉjouir. Dieu! quelle terreur! Tout faisait silence. Sur le vert gazon tombait par instants Un rameau jauni, pour nous chute immense! Ah! quelle Épouvante et quels grands tourments! Mais un cri lointain, le cri de nos mÈres, Un appel du coeur parvint jusqu’À nous; Nous vÎmes lÀ-bas briller des lumiÈres. Oh! que ce moment pour toutes fut doux! Quels tendres baisers, quels aimÉs sourires CalmÈrent soudain nos folles terreurs! AprÈs les sanglots nous eÛmes les rires, Et de nos rÉcits tremblÈrent nos soeurs. Seigneur, que toujours, À l’heure d’alarmes, Quand gronde l’orage, un ange gardien, Une mÈre tendre arrÊte nos larmes, Et pour nous guider nous donne la main! [129] What memories, dear sister! I had lost my way with Lizzy and Isa. My mother was living then! How pale and trembling she was when I fell into her arms! And you—you, my Kate! August 12, 1868. You have comforted me, dear sister. This place pleases me: everybody likes it. Saw yesterday Karl’s family, as well as that of Ellen; the day before yesterday, the W——’s. Fanny is going to marry a German with a great name, a fervent Catholic, in love with England, where he intends to remain. Our evenings are delightful. I had promised Margaret not to read PÈre Lacordaire, by the PÈre Chocarne, without her. It is admirably fine. The introduction is the definition of the priest such as is given by the great orator of Notre Dame himself: “Strong as the diamond, tenderer than a mother.” There are a thousand things in this book which make my heart beat: “O paternal home! where, from our earliest years, we breathed in with the light the love of all holy things, in vain we grow old: we return to you with a heart ever young; and were it not Eternity which calls us, in separating us far from you, we should be inconsolable at seeing your shadow daily lengthen and your sun grow pale!” “There are wants for which this earth is sterile.” What a spring there is of faith and love in words like these: “Riches are neither gold nor silver, nor ships which bring back from the ends of the earth all precious things, nor steam, nor railways, nor all that the genius of men can extract from the bosom of nature; one thing alone is riches—that is love. From God to man, from earth to heaven, love alone unites and fills all things. It is their beginning, their middle, and their end. He who loves knows; he who loves lives; he who loves sacrifices himself; he who loves is content; and one drop of love, put in the balance with the universe, would carry it away as the tempest would carry away a straw.” The PÈre Lacordaire speaks admirably of cloisters: “August palaces have been built, and magnificent tombs raised on the earth; dwelling-places well-nigh divine have been made for God: but the wisdom and the heart of man have never gone further than in the creation of the monastery.” The first disciple and brother of PÈre Lacordaire, the saintly young Hippolyte RÉquÉdat (whose soul was so pure that when, at twenty years of age, he threw himself at the feet of a priest, owning that he had never, since his First Communion, been to confession, having nothing of which to accuse himself, unless that he wished much evil to all the enemies of France) used every day to say to the Blessed Virgin: “Obtain for me the grace to ascertain my vocation—to learn the way in which I could do the greatest possible amount of good, lead back the greatest number of souls to the church, and be most chaste, humble, charitable, active, and patient.” He died of consumption at the age of twenty-two, and his death made a deep wound in the heart of the PÈre Lacordaire. “RÉquÉdat was a soul as impassioned in its self-devotion as others are in selfishness. To love was his life, but to love to give rather than to receive; to give himself always, and to the greatest number possible—this was his dream, his longing, his martyrdom. Devoted to an ardent pursuit of that which is good, tyrannized over by this noble love, he had not time to see any evil.” A friend of his was Piel, an eminent architect, who joined him to become also a son of St. Dominic—“A lofty soul, an heroic heart, incapable of a divided affection, and from the first moment aspiring after the highest perfection, admirably formed to be a great orator as well as a saint, of whom his friends used to say that his language reminded them of the style of Pascal.” With the PÈre Lacordaire was also Hernsheim, a converted Jew, a frank, intelligent, and profound mind, from whence issued from time to time thoughts which had a peculiar charm about them, mingled with a sweet and penetrating unction. The PÈre Besson, an artist like Piel, and the Fra Angelico of France, was also of the number; and, lastly, the PÈre Jandel, now general of the order. Mme. Swetchine was like the good genius of PÈre Lacordaire: “Who does not know this, now?” asks the PÈre Chocarne. “Who has not read the life and works of this woman, whom death has crowned with a glory all the more pure and radiant because she had so carefully concealed it during her life? Who does not know this Russian with a heart so French, this convert to the Catholic faith, so gentle towards beliefs and opinions differing from hers, the masculine understanding in the woman’s heart, the spirit of Joseph de Maistre in the soul of FÉnelon, the charity, so delicate and tender, of this woman who said of herself: ‘I would no more be made known to the children of men but by these words: She who believes; she who prays; she who loves’!” This is beautiful. Can you picture to yourself the impression made upon us while Adrien is reading this aloud? Every one is breathless; the twins and Anna, their eyes wide open, their hands joined, seem to devour this eloquence. The soul of the orator of Notre Dame has passed into that of his son in Jesus Christ. All is magnificent, and makes one deeply regret that the grand figure which appeared among us with the double aureole of sanctity and genius so soon disappeared from the world. A great and wonderful history is this, too little really known! Have we not heard the most absurd fables told in reference to PÈre Lacordaire? I want your prayers, dear Kate, for a grand project: we wish to bring Isa’s mother to agree to live with her sister. Lizzy would be the daughter of the two, and the Lord’s dear chosen one would go to “the place of repose which she has chosen.” It will be difficult to manage, but I have a presentiment of victory. Good-by, dear Kate, for the present. August 20, 1868. O Temps! suspends ton vol, et vous, Heures propices, Suspendez votre cours; Laissez-nous savourer les rapides dÉlices Des plus beaux de nos jours. [130] We have been singing this while floating on the lake. Picciola proposes to take up her abode for a year at Aunt Georgina’s. I have installed her as dame and mistress of my little school. What joy! Isa’s mother is beginning to understand. I have been getting so many prayers for this! She yesterday said, after having listened very calmly to what I had to say: “Dear Georgina, I feel that God inspires you; but only think how I have been broken down, and what need I have of Isa!” Poor mother! O these vocations!—a terrible secret which rends so many souls. “Let the dead bury their dead!” I need all my faith in the Gospel to admit that these words were said by our merciful Saviour. St. Bernard, the saint of Mary, the honey of Mary, will succeed in gaining this material heart, which hesitates before the greatness of the sacrifice. We have finished our splendid reading. This evening we shall take Klopstock. We all find that nothing equals this intellectual pleasure of interchanging our impressions while reading together. We separate at eleven. I am taking some views, being desirous of transporting my part of Ireland into France. Margaret has written to Mistress Annah to offer her the post of governess to the charming baby. We expect her answer to-day. The baptism took place on the 15th. It was splendid. Have seen Sarah, whose son has been ill—always amiable, with a tinge of melancholy, caught, no doubt, by the side of the cradle. My duties are so multiplied that I should be quite unequal to them without RenÉ. What a pleasure it is to do for others what they have done for me! Send me always your good angel, my best beloved. August 26, 1868. What a fÊte for my mother, the evening of the 24th! All the echoes resounded with it. In two days hence we are to go to Fanny’s marriage, which takes place in Dublin. Great preparations; but Anna is unwell, and this spoils our joy. Marcella has suffered so much that she trembles at the least shock. Lucy will remain here with our Italians; we cannot return for a week. But the great piece of news I have to tell you is this: Isa enters the convent of —— on the 8th of October. I have obtained this exchange. Carmel alarmed the poor mother too much; and, besides, the health of our friend is too much shaken to be able to support the austerities of St. Teresa. The two families of the D—— will go with us to Dublin, and we shall accompany Isa. What a Te Deum we ought to sing! The timid child had never owned to her mother the ardor which consumed her; the death of George—the nephew so passionately loved, sole heir of so noble a name, and betrothed to Isa from childhood—appeared to Mme. D—— the death of everything, and she lived “extinguished.” Oh! how I rejoice at this success. Margaret and Isa, both once so sad, and now with their hearts in an eternal spring! Let us bless God together, dear Kate! Do you recollect Mgr. Dupanloup’s words: “One breathes, in this land of Ireland, I know not what perfume of virtue which one finds not elsewhere.” August 31, 1868. RenÉ is writing to you. We know that Anna is well, and we are enjoying the worldlinesses of Dublin. Fanny was touching under her veil. Your dear name, my beloved Kate, was mentioned, I know not how often. O kind Ireland! If I had to tell you all the graceful things that were said to me, I should fill my paper. How pleasant it is to be loved! Fanny did not weep on seeing me; she and her mother are unequalled in their serenity; consolation has been sent them from on high. A vision is spoken of. I did not like to ask any questions, but it is certain that something extraordinary has occurred. O dear Kate! how fair is life. I was saying so yesterday to RenÉ while we were looking at the stars; for the night was splendid. Do you know what he answered? “Heaven is fairer; earth is but its echo, its far-off image, its imperfect sketch; and it is death which opens heaven to us.” Words like these from the lips of RenÉ make me shudder. Oh! to die with him would be sweet, but not to live without him. PÈre Lacordaire said: “Death is man’s fairest moment. He finds assembled there all the virtues he has practised, all the strength and peace he has been storing up, all the memories, the cherished images and sweet regrets of life, together with the fair prospect of the sight of God. If we had a lively faith, we should be very strong to meet death.” Fanny starts to-morrow for France, Switzerland, and Germany—a long journey; we remain at present, so as in some measure to fill up the void a little. Why are you not here to witness our reunion? Oh! how strong is the love of one’s country. I am inebriated with my native air; we sing our old ballads; we turn over with Adrien the history of the past. Ask of our good God that this may last a long time, dear Kate! Erin mavourneen! Erin go bragh! September 6, 1868. Mistress Annah is come, dear sister. I wept with all my heart on embracing her. Dear old mistress Annah! how wrinkled and thin she has become; always upright and stiff as an Englishwoman, and her memory enriched with Italian stories which will charm baby’s childhood. Margaret has chosen for the beautiful innocent the name of Emmanuel—a blessed name, which well bespeaks the happiness of our friend. Lord William made royal largesses to the poor in the name of the new-born heir. Twelve orphans will be provided for at the expense of Emmanuel. Mistress Annah is longing to see and hear you. Margaret promises her this happiness for next spring. You may be sure that no fatigue will be imposed on the dear old lady. The pension given her by Lord William made her independent; but our belle Anglaise feared the isolation of old age for her devoted heart, and it will be a happiness to both to watch the growth of baby. A messenger has just arrived. Te Deum, dear Kate!—a little daughter is born to Lizzy. Everybody is delighted; they have sent for us; I am going with RenÉ. 7th September.—In an hour the baptism, so that Isa may be present; then she says farewell to her family, and we take her away. The angel fallen from heaven is to be called Isa. Marcella, Adrien, and Gertrude have joined us. Joy and grief meet at this moment. You will be astonished at the sudden departure of our Isa; but Lizzy wishes it thus, hoping that the poor mother will let herself be interested by the festivities and the visitors. The last number of the magazine has caused me a sensation. In it is an account of the beautiful scene on the Pincio, in October, 1864, “at the hour when the sun, sinking towards the sea of Ostia, lights with a golden gleam the cross which surmounts the dome of St. Peter.” Do you remember, dear Kate, the Pope appearing in the midst of the crowd, which bent before him with so much reverence, and the long shouts of Viva Pio Nono which saluted his departure? O Rome, Rome, my other country, the eternal country of those who believe, hope, and love—Rome of St. Peter and of Pius IX.—I salute thy image and thy memory! Dear sister, Lizzy requests your prayers. She is well, radiant, and full of gratitude to God. Her good husband is in transports, and the little one so pretty under her gauzy curtains. She has not cried yet, so we think she will resemble Isa, her godmother. Do you not like this prognostic? Let us both pray, dear Kate! Adrien has again read us the two fair contemporary pages about Ireland—Mgr. Dupanloup at St. Roch, and Mgr. Mermillod at St. Clotilde. O these words!—“The first powers of our time, the two most illustrious and rich, are a Prince despoiled and a people in rags—Pius IX., who extends to you his royal hand, and Ireland, who asks you for bread!”
The relation of language to thought as a theme of discussion has busied the pens of philosophical writers from very early times, and the later aspects of the controversy do not promise a speedy agreement of views. Whatever new light, therefore, recent discoveries in science may shed on this much-vexed question ought to be welcomed as helping to increase of knowledge concerning a matter which cannot escape the serious consideration of the teachers of philology. At present Messrs. Max MÜller and Whitney most strongly incline to opposite views; and before coming to the subject of aphasia as affecting the question, it may be well to take a cursory view of the field of controversy. The old or scholastic belief is that language was in the first instance divinely communicated, and this opinion its upholders strove to maintain by a variety of reasons. Authority and tradition were chief among these, though they did not by any means neglect philological and ethnological considerations. In France the Vicomte de Bonald undertook the support of this view on the same line as that now held by Max MÜller—viz., that it is impossible to have a purely intellectual conception without a corresponding word or series of words to represent it; whence, according to him, it follows that the word must have accompanied the thought, and, man being unable to originate the one without the other, both must have been originally communicated. Max MÜller says: “As a matter of fact, we never meet with articulate sounds, except as wedded to determinate ideas: nor do we ever, I believe, meet with determinate ideas, except as bodied forth in articulate sounds.” He strongly insists on the correctness of this view, and argues it at length. Professor Whitney takes direct issue with him, and maintains that there is the widest separation between language and thought. According to him, language can be said to be of divine origin only in so far as man was created with the capacity for its formation just as he was created capable of making clothes for himself, and of wearing them. Such being the state of the question, we will proceed to consider that abnormal condition of the nervous system which has been denominated aphasia, and afterwards indicate our opinion as to which view the facts established by it go to sustain. Aphasia, defined by Dr. Hammond as a diseased condition of the brain, was not understood till quite recently. It is an affection of that organ by which the idea of language or of its expression is impaired. It is not mere paralysis of the vocal chords, nor of the muscles of articulation, nor the result of hysteria—which conditions are denominated aphonia, or voicelessness—but depends on a lesion or injury wrought in that portion of the brain which presides over the memory of words and their co-ordination in speech. The loss of the memory of words is styled amnesic aphasia, the other ataxic aphasia—two Greek derivatives which explain very clearly the two separate conditions. A single typical case will exhibit the usual manner of the approach of this trouble, its development and termination. An English banker, a resident of Paris, recently went out in his carriage well as usual, and on his return, as he was stepping to the sidewalk, fell heavily forward, but did not lose consciousness. His whole right side was paralyzed, and, on attempting to speak, he could not articulate a word; he barely succeeded in uttering a few unintelligible sounds. During twelve days the paralysis continued, but after that gradually subsided, till in the course of a few months he was able to move about. Strange to say, however, the power of speech did not return, and for eight months he could no more than articulate a few words incoherently. Nothing in the case of this gentleman openly indicated an impairment of the intellect; for he could neither read nor write in consequence of his paralyzed condition. There was undoubted loss of the memory of words, since his vocabulary was limited to two or three; and there was likewise ataxic aphasia, since his words were jumbled unmeaningly together. The recorded cases of this disease are very numerous, many of them differing in their individual features, but all exhibiting a greater or less degree of both forms mentioned. The case just cited will suffice to enable the reader to understand the interest felt by psychologists and physiologists alike to ascertain whether, by the discovery of a uniform and constantly-recurring lesion in a certain portion of the brain, the seat of language in that organ might be determined. Dr. Gall, with the view of completing his system of phrenology, referred speech-function to that part of the brain lying on the supra-orbital plate behind the eye. Spurzheim, Combe, and others of the phrenological school held the same view. But this was a mere conjecture on their part, and it was not till minute anatomy had already localized several other important functions that a fair promise was held out that the brain-organ of speech might be likewise located. Experiments without number were made by Bouillaud, Cruveilhier, Velpeau, Andral, Broca, and Dax in France; Hughlings, Jackson, Sanders, Moxon, Ogle, Bateman, and Bastian in England; Von Benedict and Braunwart in Germany; Flint, Wilbur, Seguin, Fisher, and Hammond in America—all tending to confirm the localization of the function, though not agreeing as to the exact spot. The mode of procedure usually consisted in making a post-mortem examination of those who during life had suffered from aphasia; and though it was an extremely difficult matter to bring all the cases under a uniform standard, enough was discovered to assign the function in question to the left anterior lobe of the brain. We do not pretend to regard the question as settled; for no less authorities than Hammond in our own country, and Prof. Ferrier in England, seem to consider both hemispheres of the brain as equally concerned. Still, it is significant that out of 545 cases examined by different authorities, 514 favor the left anterior lobe of the brain, while but 31 are opposed to such a conclusion. Assuming, then, as amply demonstrated that some portion of the anterior convolutions of the brain is the seat of the faculty of speech, the question arises, Can that part of the brain which is concerned in the process of ideation continue to perform its functions—i.e., originate true ideas of which the mind is conscious—without the memory of the words which usually represent those ideas or the power to co-ordinate them? It is evident that, no matter how the question may be met, we possess in the discoveries to which aphasia has led a most important contribution to the controversy concerning the relation of language to thought; for if it can be shown that the mental faculties are unimpaired during the existence of the aphasic condition, the conclusion would go to favor Prof. Whitney’s view that thought is independent of speech; whereas if it can be shown that during the same condition the mental powers are very much debilitated or frequently suspended, we find an unexpected support given to Max MÜller’s opinion that without language there can be no thought. We would state in advance that the portion of the cerebral substance which is concerned in the production of thought—or, as neurologists have it, is the centre of ideation—entirely differs from that which is the reputed seat of the faculty of speech; so that the question may read: Does the centre of ideation continue to operate while the speech-centres are in a diseased condition? Aphasic individuals usually retain all the appearances of intelligence: their eyes are full of expression; their manner of dealing with surrounding objects is quite the same as if they were in possession of all their faculties; when asked to point out material objects, they unhesitatingly do so—in a word, to the extent that objects are their own language their intellect remains unimpaired. But they exhibit a remarkable deficiency in the power of co-ordination, since this is a pure relation not symbolized by anything material. Material objects possess in their outlines and sensible qualities enough to discriminate and individualize them; and hence, through perception, they reach the centres of ideation, and are as readily understood by the aphasic as though their names were fully known. This is made manifest in their writing when, as occurs only in a few cases, the aphasic retain the power of using the pen. Thus we read in Trousseau of the case of an aphasic named Henri GuÉnier, who could not write the word “yes,” though capable of uttering it in an automatic way without seeming in the least to understand its meaning. Yet he could write his own name, though nothing else, evidently for the reason that the t? ??? was the object of most frequent recurrence to his mind, and that which consequently he could most readily apprehend through its sensible characteristics, and could thereby connect with his own name; whereas “yes,” as the symbol of affirmation, found no counterpart in the sensible order. The same author relates the case of a man who, so far as he could make himself intelligible, boasted of retaining his intellective and memorative powers unimpaired, and yet, on being put to the test, he could not construct the shortest sentence coherently. When a spoon was held before him, and he was asked what it was, he gave no answer; when asked if it was a fork he made a sign of denial, but when asked if it were a spoon he at once replied in the affirmative. It must be remembered that in all these cases the power of utterance, so far as it is a muscular process, remained unimpaired, but there was true amnesic aphasia—i.e., the recollection of the words was lost. There are some cases of partial aphasia which possess an interest quite peculiar, since its victims frequently regain the entire power of speech, and are able to relate the results of their experience. A celebrated professor in France spent a vacation-day reading Lamartine’s literary conversations, when towards evening he was attacked with partial aphasia. Fearing lest he was threatened with paralysis, he moved his arms and walked up and down the room, in doing which he experienced no difficulty; but when he resumed his reading, he found it scarcely possible to understand a sentence. The individual words were intelligible enough, but he could not follow out the sequence of the thoughts. Of course during the attack he could not utter a word, though able partially to comprehend what was said to him, as he afterwards declared. Here indeed is a most instructive instance of impaired intellect, occurring as it did in a man whose brain was usually in a very active state, and whose mind was highly cultivated. Does it not strongly confirm the belief that, even while the organic instrument of thought was unimpaired, its functions were temporarily suspended? Another case is that of a man of good literary attainments, who pretended that he could still understand what he read, but who could not discover the mistake when the book was presented to him reversed. There can be no doubt, then, that aphasia unerringly points to a most intimate dependence between language and thought, and that, as Max MÜller says, without language there can be no thought. But why is it that in regard to objects possessing sensible qualities aphasic individuals exhibit no impairment of intellectual power? We will answer, Because with regard to such objects these are their own language, and the functions of the perceptive and ideational centres are as active in their regard as though the faculty of speech were intact. A tree is known by its branches and leaves to the deaf mute as well as it is by its name to those possessing all their faculties. Whatever circumscribes and differentiates an object of thought is its language. For, after all, is not language conventional and arbitrary, the outer symbol of a subjective phenomenon? The symbol may be of any sort whatsoever, but the thought cannot be known without a symbol of some sort. Now, the qualities of sensible objects, in so far as they serve to circumscribe the objects and to discriminate them from all others, become their language. This is rendered more evident when we reflect that Locke’s theory, according to which sensible objects are but an aggregate of sensible qualities, is generally rejected, and the opinion admitted that under these qualities there resides a true substance impervious to the senses and known to us only as inference from the former. Therefore the sensible qualities are the symbol of the substance identified with it; of course in so far these are but the substance modified in such or such a manner. This is why aphasics find no trouble in forming ideas of material things, though they may forget their names. But why is aphasia ataxic—that is, incapable of co-ordinating words? Because co-ordination expresses the relation between the objects co-ordinated, and relation is not represented, and cannot be represented, by anything in the sensible order. They belong to the purely intellectual order, and the only symbol that existed by which they were known being lost, there remains no longer any means of circumscribing and differentiating them. Paul and Peter may be well known to the aphasic—Paul as such, and Peter as such—because the sensible qualities of both render them recognizable; and not only that, but the different qualities pertaining to both enable him clearly to distinguish the one from the other. But if he is told that Peter is taller than Paul, he understands nothing. And why? Because the proposition implies the relation of comparison, in which there is nothing sensible. Indeed, he perceives Peter to be tall and Paul to be diminutive, but he does not perform the intellectual process called judgment, which is interpreted in the proposition, Peter is taller than Paul. In like manner, when there is question of purely intellectual conceptions which can be symbolized by nothing sensible except names, the aphasic are incapable of reaching them. Virtue, power, and malice are meaningless sounds in their ears, and equally unintelligible is what these words represent. The reason is because the symbols by which these ideas were conveyed to the mind are lost, and there is nothing left by which virtue can be known or discriminated from power and malice. Whatever circumscribes and differentiates a thought is its language, and this can be done only by a symbol. Now, if we consult our own consciousness, we will find that it is impossible for us to conceive of what is purely intellectual—i.e., possessing no sensible traits—if we lose sight of the word which represents it. Affirmation and negation are of this sort, and it is entirely impossible to disconnect the idea of either from some word or series of words. The idea, indeed, is not the spoken word, but is painted by it as it were on the canvas of the mind, and hence was called by Aristotle the word of the mind. All this is attested in the case of aphasics. The language-mechanism of the brain is disarranged; there is forgetfulness of words, accompanied by inability to arrange them in proper order so as to be remembered; the ideational centre remains intact, but is inoperative with regard to such thoughts as have their sole symbol in words. It is true that some aphasic individuals retain for a time certain impressions which belong to the purely intellectual order; but this can be accounted for only by supposing that the brain centres of ideation are endowed with certain registering powers capable of retaining impressions for a short while after their active operation is suspended. But when the disease is of long continuance those impressions gradually fade, and the patient is reduced to the condition of an untaught deaf mute. He has lost the formulÆ of thought, and therefore cannot think. Trousseau says: “A great thinker, as well as a great mathematician, cannot devote himself to transcendental speculations unless he uses formulÆ and a thousand material accessories which aid his mind, relieve his memory, and impart greater strength to thought by giving it greater precision.” But where the sole “material accessory,” as Trousseau calls it, is absent, how can a person think? We use the word in a higher sense; for children incapable of speech, and animals, exercise a certain amount of thought in respect to surrounding objects; but thinking, in the sense of reasoning, abstracting, and comparing, outlies their capacity, just as it does that of aphasic individuals. “Without language,” says Schelling, “it is impossible to conceive philosophical, nay, even any human, consciousness; and hence the foundations of language could not have been laid consciously. Nevertheless, the more we analyze language, the more clearly we see that it surpasses in depth the most conscious workings of the mind.” And Hegel says: “It is in names that we think.” This exactly explains what occurs in the case of aphasics. The principles of science, the sequence of ideas, the links of an argument, are not understood by them; for they are, as children and animals, capable merely of receiving the impressions which material objects make on their sensory organs. It is true that a few aphasics have been known to be expert chess-players; and though this is as hard to account for as the apparent feats of reasoning accomplished by animals of the lower order, still we would no more rank expertness at such a game among the higher attributes of reason than we would the sagacity of a dog or of an elephant. This point is well touched upon by Trousseau, who says: “I believe that the same thing obtains in metaphysics as in geometry. In the latter case a man may vaguely conceive space and infinity without any precision or measure; but if he wishes to think of the properties of space, and more particularly of the special properties of the figures which bound space—as, say, conic sections—it is impossible that his mind does not immediately see the curves proper to a parabola, a hyperbola, and an ellipse. In metaphysics, on the other hand, I believe that a man cannot think of the special properties of beauty, justice, and truth, for instance, without immediately giving a material form, as it were, to his thoughts, by using concrete examples, and without associating words together—words which represent concrete ideas, and which then stand in the same relation to particular metaphysical ideas as figures do to determinate geometric ideas.” The same may be said of universal ideas. These are, subjectively viewed, mere concepts of the mind; objectively they have a foundation in the object. Now, that object is present to the aphasic, and he recognizes it by its sensible properties; but when there is question of viewing one or two properties as possessed in common by a number of objects, he finds himself unequal to the task. In a word, he cannot generalize, and this is one of the highest acts of reason. We would insist upon the distinction between words representing purely material objects and those which interpret to us supersensible thoughts; for not a few physiologists have fallen into error by not observing this distinction. Thus Prof. Ferrier, of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, says: “In aphasia, consequent as it usually is on disease of the left hemisphere, the memory of words is not lost, nor is the person incapable of appreciating the meaning of words uttered in his hearing.” From this it is evident that the learned professor neglected to note the distinction alluded to; and because an aphasic did not fail to appreciate the meaning of certain words representing material things, therefore he concluded in a general way that he did not fail to appreciate the meaning of words. Indeed, we have nowhere noted the distinction, and it is curious that, in all the cases recorded of the clinical history of this disease, physicians have invariably propounded to their patients as test-words such words as fork, spoon, pen, boots, and all such as pertain to the material order of things. Prof. Whitney certainly did not take note of these facts when he asserted the entire independence between language and thought. He regards man as capable of conceiving new thoughts apart from all representative symbols, and then finding for them a vocal expression. This, as we have seen, is in direct antagonism with the data of aphasia. The chief flaw in Prof. Whitney’s reasoning is that he starts from false premises when he limits language to mere spoken or articulate sounds. He seems to ignore the question when he says: “In all our investigations of language we find nothing which should lead us to surmise that an intellectual apprehension could ever, by an internal process, become transmuted into an articulated sound or complex of sounds.” The implied premise in this sentence is erroneous, since it is entirely possible that it be associated with some other symbol, borrowed from a material source, which is its language, its expression, and makes it something entirely distinct from the intellectual apprehension. Indeed, here lies the secret of metaphorical language, and of its extensive use among those tribes of men whose philosophical vocabulary is limited.
Chicago, October 14.
Jean Ingelow is now over fifty years of age. For some time past she has devoted herself chiefly to graceful prose, in which her pure and playful imagination seems to have found sufficient vent. She can never be removed from the company of the poets, however, notwithstanding her apparent purpose of withdrawal, so far as we may surmise a possible design by her neglect of versification. That she has demonstrated her possession of genuine poetic feeling cannot be denied. The volume before us is sufficient proof of this. Whenever she has permitted herself to be simple, lucid, and natural, her verses’ not only please—they charm. She is one of the minor poets sincerely beloved—not in so great a degree as Adelaide Procter, or Christina Rossetti, because she is not equally successful in expressing the universal sentiments of the heart, and because she wanders from the unambitious poetry of natural feeling into the tricky and artificial, whither the multitude will not voluntarily follow. She is not always in one mood, as Adelaide Procter is; and her joy, when sincere, and not fictitious and artful, is sometimes exceedingly attractive and—what is its truest test—becomes infectious, pervading the reader’s mind and carrying the emotions away into its own atmosphere. We never smile at Adelaide Procter’s joy. Her smiles are sadder than her tears. She smiles like a dying saint, whose pallid features proclaim that the effort is inspired by something higher and more mysterious than the pleasure of the world. It is as Shakspere says: “Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, as if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit, that could be moved to smile at anything.” Jean Ingelow possesses enough perception of real humor to throw, here and there, winsome flashes of merriment over very sombre pictures, especially in genre scenes like that depicted in “The Supper at the Mill.” Indeed, it may be safe to say that if she unloosed the flimsy chains of artificiality in which she has bound her muse, that very affected maid would prove frolicsome and mischievous; but her mistress prefers a decorousness of behavior which, by this time, must have dulled her own sense of the ludicrous, while supplying additional keenness in that direction to her critics, and furnishing new and irresistible models for hilarious parody, as we shall see. It is impossible to read through a volume of her poems without coming to this conclusion: that she has a poetic stock-in-trade. Let us make an inventory of it. First, there are the birds; secondly, certain flowers and grasses; thirdly, a set of stereotypes composed of peculiar comminglings of sea, sky, ships, and stars. This poetic stock is, as it were, all duly classified and labelled, and the whole is arranged with scientific calculation as to drafts, at intervals, upon the several departments. Matthew Arnold,[132] modestly defending his own attempts toward translating Homer into English hexameter, hopes to make it clear that he at least follows “a right method,” and that, if he fail, it is “from weakness of execution, not from original vice of design.” Jean Ingelow is guilty, we think, of “original vice of design.” “Weakness of execution” is infallibly certain to follow. In selecting her poetic stock—which is, in itself, vice of design—she deepens the folly by being persistently fantastical. It is not enough to choose birds, grasses, and particular flowers—these are an integral part of all descriptive poetry; but, in order to make them her especial poetic stock, she calls them by a curious and grotesque nomenclature, whose terms were undoubtedly devised with an ultimate view toward picturesque artificial composition. Her birds are not the sweet-syllabled singers of classic song; she eschews the nightingale and lark for jackdaws, wagtails, grouse, coot, rail, cushat, and mews. Her grasses and flowers are less grotesque and better adapted to sentimentalism in style: marigolds, foxglove, heather, daffodils—very fond is she of daffodils—orchis, bluebells, golden-broom, vetches, anemone, clover—her muse is very often in clover—ling, marybuds, cowslips, and cuckoo-pint. The bee appears with industrious frequency; his colors and his business are alike serviceable in a kind of composition both picturesque and fantastic, He is as full of available verbal suggestion as of honey. The ships are invariably bowing to each other, to the land, or to the port. The figure is a good one, and true, but its recurrence soon renders it tiresome and exposes the dryness of the poet’s fancy. And after all Shakspere has been beforehand with her. In the Merchant of Venice Antonio is told that his mind is tossing on the ocean, where his argosies with portly sail, like signiors and rich burghers of the flood, “Do overpeer the petty traffickers, That curt’sy to them, do them reverence, As they fly by them with their woven wings.” The sea—which has supplied all the poets, from Homer down, with noble and beautiful images, lofty, grand, awful, terrible, or simply lovely,—the sea to Jean Ingelow is as a sleek servant who comes in to fill up a gap in the discourse or provide a necessary digression in the narrative. “A Sea Song” contains nothing of the sea except “salt sea foam” repeated. Her sea, stars, sun, and moon are all domestic. They perform no higher functions than the pipes of parsley or “the green ribbon” that “pranks the down.” Her sun either “stoops” or is “level”; her moon “droops”; the sea is usually “level,” and when disturbed, never awakens any sense of the sublime. Nothing more than her apparent imbecility in poetic treatment of the sea is wanting to dispose of the hope that Jean Ingelow can ever become a better poet than she appeared to be in her first volume. Mrs. Browning, in one of her earlier efforts, “The Seraphim,” makes Ador and Zerah speak of “the glass sea-shore.” But we do not remember noting a recurrence of the expression throughout her tens of thousands of lines. Mrs. Browning seems to have been conscious that she was unequal to an adequate depicting of marine grandeur, and she rarely attempts it, except in an instant’s lofty sweep remindful of Homer—as if she caught a single breath of his inspiration, and pressed it into her verse. She had more imagination than Jean Ingelow; Jean has the readier fancy. Mrs. Browning’s conceptions of the awe and beauty of the sea were far above her power of description, whose efforts are often turgid and swell into bombast; so she does not attempt, except in modest discretion, to write of the sea at all. Miss Ingelow, on the contrary, discovers the ocean only at her feet, or through the limited vision of a pretty opera-glass. Thus it becomes a mere commonplace in her stanzas; she is frivolous where Mrs. Browning would have been turgid had she not been cautious. The sea, indeed, has wrecked most of the poets who did not hug the shore. Only the few greatest of the number have been able, like Jason, to tempt its unknown breadth, and fewer still return from Colchis without a Medea to torment them. The sea will always be the final touchstone of poetic genius. Of recent poets, Tennyson has been most ambitious and most successful; but his best ocean views may be seen from along the shores of the Æneid. The little ’scapes which are strictly his own are artificial and under-done; his pigment is only the residuum of lapis-lazuli—ultramarine ashes. Jean Ingelow’s “vice of design” is very sadly shown, too, in her vocabulary. She wanders about in dusty, unused dictionaries, searching out odd, obsolete, obscure, and ambiguous words. Because a term is confessedly obsolete is no sound reason why it should not be revived; but there is no justification for inserting it in a text where it must play the unbecoming part of a conspicuous intruder who can make no satisfactory excuse for his presence in uncongenial company. Where the silenced lexicons do not afford the desired material, she is not loath to make new combinations, and we are harassed by “bewrayed,” “amerce,” “ancientry,” “thrid,” “scorpe,” “eygre,” “chine,” “brattling,” etc. The best illustration of the artificiality and affectation of her style is found in one of her most pleasing and most popular poems, and it would be deservedly much more popular were these blemishes of etymology and simperings of rhetoric removed. We quote stanzas enough of “Divided” to exhibit her individuality both of thought and diction: “An empty sky, a world of heather, Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom; We two among them, wading together, Shaking out honey, treading perfume. * * * * * “Flusheth the rise with her purple favor, Groweth the cleft with her golden ring, ’Twixt the two brown butterflies waver, Lightly settle, and sleepily swing. * * * * * “Hey the green ribbon! We kneeled beside it, We parted the grasses, dewy and sheen; Drop over drop there filtered and slided A tiny bright beck that trickled between. “Tinkle, tinkle, sweetly it sung to us, Light was our talk as of faËry bells,— FaËry wedding bells faintly rung to us Down in their fortunate parallels.” The “beck” grows into a widening stream and divides them. “A shady freshness, chafers whirring, A little piping of leaf-hid birds; A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring, A cloud to the eastward snowy as curds. * * * * * “Stately prows are rising and bowing (Shouts of mariners winnow the air), And level sands for banks endowing The tiny green ribbon that shows so fair.” In the last two verses Miss Ingelow, unconsciously forgetting her previous straining after literal effects, writes these true thoughts, which are the most finely poetical in the entire poem: “And yet I know past all doubting, truly— A knowledge greater than grief can dim, I know, as he loved, he will love me duly, Yea better, e’en better than I loved him. “And as I walk by the vast, calm river, The awful river so dread to see. I say, ‘Thy breadth and thy depth for ever Are bridged by his thoughts that cross to me.’” Only artificial poems can be well parodied, and the parody holds the mirror up to the artifices, so that even the author must make confession. The cleverest burlesques which have reached the public of late, reproducing in an exaggerated form the faults of the modern affected school of poetry, are those of C. S. Calverley.[133] The merit of his rhymed farces—which is precisely what he makes of his models—is nowhere more happily illustrated than in the following, which needs no introduction. It is entitled “Lovers, and a Reflection”: “In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter (And heaven it knoweth what that may mean; Meaning, however, is no great matter), Where woods are a-tremble, with rifts atween; “Through God’s own heather we wonned together, I and my Willie (O love, my love!); I need hardly remark it was glorious weather, And flitterbats wavered alow, above; “Boats were curtsying, rising, bowing (Boats in that climate are so polite), And sands were a ribbon of green endowing, And O the sun-dazzle on bark and bight! “Through the rare red heather we danced together (O love, my Willie!), and smelt for flowers; I must mention again it was gorgeous weather— Rhymes are so scarce in this world of ours:— “By rises that flushed with their purple favors, Thro’ becks that brattled o’er grasses sheen, We walked or waded, we two young shavers, Thanking our stars we were both so green. “We journeyed in parallels, I and Willie— In fortunate parallels! Butterflies, Hid in weltering shadows of daffodilly Or marjoram, kept making peacock eyes; * * * * * “And Willie ’gan sing (O, his notes were fluty; Wafts fluttered them out to the white winged sea)— Something made up of rhymes that have done much duty, Rhymes (better to put it) of ‘ancientry’; * * * * * “Oh! if billows and pillows and hours and flowers, And all the brave rhymes of an elder day, Could be furled together this genial weather, And carted, or carried, on wafts away, Nor ever again trotted out—ay me! How much fewer volumes of verse there’d be!” Miss Ingelow’s most pretentious poem, next to “Divided,” is the “Letter L.” It has all her characteristic faults, intensified by a curious jog-trot metre: “We sat on grassy slopes that meet With sudden dip the level strand; The trees hung overhead—our feet Were on the sand. * * * * * “And let alighting jackdaws fleet Adown it open-winged, and pass Till they could touch with outstretched feet The warmÈd grass.” And so on. Calverley has a little versification entitled “Changed.” Mark how ingeniously adroit he is in getting the jog-trot: “I know not why my soul is racked Why I ne’er smile as was my wont; I only know that, as a fact, I don’t. “I used to roam o’er glen and glade, Buoyant and blithe as other folk: And not unfrequently I made A joke. * * * * * “I cannot sing the old songs now! It is not that I deem them low; ’Tis that I can’t remember how They go.” Calverley’s exhilarating volume, by the way, is not all parody; many of its numbers are original expressions of as pure fun, capitally expressed, as mirth ever conceived or art wove into verse. Jean Ingelow is not altogether artificial. Occasionally she writes a terse truth: “One striking with a pickaxe thinks the shock Shall move the seat of God”; or falls into a simple, unaffected strain: “Far better in its place the lowliest bird Should sing aright to Him the lowliest song, Than that a seraph strayed should take the word And sing His glory wrong.” Hers is that oft-quoted couplet: “Is there never a chink in the world above Where they listen for words from below?” “The Carpenter,” relating the touching story of his wife’s death to “The Scholar,” says with happy directness: “’Tis sometimes natural to be glad; And no man can be always sad, Unless he wills to have it so.” “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” is widely popularized by lyceum readers, who find its energy well fitted for semi-dramatic recitation; and certain divisions of the “Songs of Seven,” notably “Love” and “Giving in Marriage,” possess lyrical richness. The thought of Jean Ingelow’s poems is always clean-of-heart; she eschews—generally—psychological tendencies, and, although far from lucid, her longer flights of speculation are merely curious, obscure, and fanciful rather than vicious or misleading. Indeed, according to her measure of grace, she is abjectly devout, worshipping with Eastern blindness a Deity of whose attributes she conceives only one—Love; and, in the humble resignation of a sightless child, she casts herself into the arms of her notion of what that Love is, and rests there, content to seek no knowledge outside herself. But even within these sacred limits her disposition to artificiality in expression unconsciously enters, to mar, with incongruous ornament, the limpid thought: “For, O my God! thy creatures are so frail, Thy bountiful creation is so fair, That, drawn before us, like the Temple veil, It hides the Holy Place from thought and care, Giving man’s eyes instead its sweeping fold. Rich as with cherub wings and apples wrought of gold. “Purple and blue and scarlet—shimmering bells And rare pomegranates on its broidered rim, Glorious with chain and fretwork that the smell Of incense shakes to music dreamy and dim, Till on a day comes loss, that God makes gain, And death and darkness rend the veil in twain.” Literal criticism of Jean Ingelow is, however, abashed and almost silenced by the essence of her verse, which, in its chastity and beauty, is above the touch of cavil. She is one of our few contemporaneous poets who can look upon the face of her own work without a blush. Apparently past the zenith of her productive talent, she may look gratefully back upon her modest and constant rise, and say: “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast.” She need not avert her gaze from any line, and plead that the public forgets it was hers and a woman’s. Wanting the genius of poetry, her inspiration has been only that of intense poetic feeling wrought out by the canons of verse; but, although only one of many in this respect, the work itself is far above the average of its class. “Many fervent souls Strike rhyme on rhyme who would strike steel on steel, If steel had offered, in a restless heat Of doing something. Many tender souls Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread, As children cowslips—the more pains they take, The work more withers … … Alas! near all the birds Will sing at dawn, and yet we do not take The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.” While the popular magazines and the newspapers are daily lowering the standard of taste, and degrading and corrupting the sources of literary enjoyment as well as of personal honor and actual virtue, the regret is irresistible that a pleasing versifier like Jean Ingelow should not contribute more to a total of general reading into which what is known as “popular poetry” so largely enters.
Terra Incognita; or, The Convents of the United Kingdom. By John Nicholas Murphy. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) An unknown land indeed is this that Mr. Murphy traverses—unknown, it is to be feared, not only to his “Protestant fellow-subjects of Great Britain and Ireland, for whose information it has been written” and to whom it is dedicated by the author, but also to too many of his Catholic fellow subjects, as well as to Catholics generally. The book is, in brief, a history of the growth and spread of the religious Orders in Great Britain and Ireland, the greater portion of it being devoted to their work and increase since a removal of the penal statutes enabled them to return in safety to the United Kingdom. The interest of the narrative is simply absorbing. The work accomplished by the Orders in face of a multitude of difficulties and dangers seems little short of the miraculous. They crept back singly or in little groups from France and Belgium, whence the first French Revolution drove them out. Thither they had flown for refuge when the greater revolution of the sixteenth century banished them and their faith from what had been a land of saints. Units gathered units, brothers brothers, sisters sisters, Congregations other Congregations, Orders affiliated Orders, and within less than a century we behold the consecrated yet desecrated soil of England and Ireland dotted with religious houses, asylums, schools, colleges, where the old faith is taught and practised. Those who are in search of the heroic, the sensational, the pathetic, the marvellous, should read this book. Their appetite will be satisfied with a healthy food. It is the old story over and over again of what can be accomplished by those who are really inflamed with a love of God and their neighbor. No one can rise from the story of St. Vincent de Paul or Nano Nagle without a moistening of the eye and a better feeling in his heart. Mr. Murphy’s book was published some years ago, and the extracts from secular and Protestant journals in Great Britain and Ireland show how truly he met a popular want at a time when men like Mr. Newdegate were bent on satisfying their own morbid curiosity and insane hatred of Catholicity by forcing themselves on the peaceful communities of Catholic ladies. If we have any Newdegates among us, they would do well to take up Mr. Murphy’s volume, and see for themselves how these “dark and cloistered women” spend their lives. The present volume is a new and improved edition. As the author tells us in the preface, “The statistics of convents have been largely amplified and brought down to the present day. Several chapters have been re-written, and eleven new chapters have been introduced.” The Catholic’s Latin Instructor in the Principal Church Offices and Devotions. For the use of choirs, convents, and mission schools, and for self-teaching. By the Rev. E. Caswall, of the Oratory. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) Father Caswall has done the Catholic laity a great service by this Instructor. As he truly observes in his preface, “A knowledge of Latin is not needed for Catholic worship.… Nevertheless, to those whose education admits of it an acquaintance with those portions of the Latin Liturgy which are in most frequent public use must ever be a legitimate and worthy object of interest.” Accordingly, he has put himself to the very considerable trouble of preparing a manual, which, although an experiment, will be found, we have no doubt, all that is needed for enabling the laity of either sex, who have an English education, to make themselves familiar with the language of the church’s liturgy. It deals with grammar as little as possible, he says, yet there will be found in Part II. more grammar than his words may lead us to suppose. Moreover, there are ample directions given, at every turn, for the right use of the book. The work is primarily designed, as the title-page indicates, for choirs and mission-schools. With regard to choirs, it is superfluous to observe how much better and more pleasing to God is an intelligent than a non-intelligent singing of the Latin. With regard to schools, especially those where elementary instruction in secular Latin is given, “Catholics will enjoy,” says our author, “in the living character of the language as used in the church offices, a great and singular advantage.” And further, “What better food for the mind can we offer to our children,” he asks, “than the simple translation from Latin into English—after a method easy alike to girls or boys—of what they constantly hear and often join in singing in church?” Then, as to the adult laity, there is “a large class of persons who, while provided with missals and prayer-books abounding in Latin text and side-by-side translations, yet, from want of a very little practical insight, fail to derive from these manuals the advantage intended. Others there are, devout persons of either sex, who might greatly profit by the occasional use of Latin prayers, but are restrained (and ladies especially) by an idea that in order to this they must first have a complete knowledge of Latin. Such a bugbear—for it is little else—will, let us hope, quickly yield to a steady practice of the present exercises.” The work consists of two Parts: “Part I. containing Benediction, the choir portions of Mass, the Serving at Mass, and various Latin prayers in ordinary use; Part II. comprising additional portions of the Mass, Requiem Mass, Litany of the Saints, Vespers, Compline, and other offices and devotions, with a short Grammar and Vocabulary.” The only stricture we have to make regards the pronunciation of A. The author says: “A, when fully sounded, is to be pronounced as a in far. Examples: Pater, Parter; laudamus, laudarmus; ora, orar.” This is a very strange mistake. Had he heard, as we have, “Gloriar rin in excelsis,” “Benedictar res,” “super omniar rest,” etc., he would never have directed that “a should be pronounced as a in far.” We are aware that the English r is fainter than the Irish or American. Still, should not h be substituted for r in the above? Pahter, laudahmus, orah are the exact sounds. With this very small exception, then, we can only speak of Father Caswall’s manual with unqualified praise, and hope it may obtain the wide circulation it deserves. Ecclesiastical Discourses delivered on Special Occasions. By Bishop Ullathorne. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) “These discourses,” says their distinguished author in his preface, “are called ecclesiastical because they were either addressed to ecclesiastics or treat on ecclesiastical subjects. They form a volume embracing certain points of pastoral theology—a subject on which we have very little that is Catholic in our language, if we except the excellent little book by Canon Oakeley.” They will therefore be specially valuable to our clergy, while, at the same time, the bishop “trusts there is much in them which may offer solid instruction to thoughtful Catholic laymen.” One of the most important, and the one to which we particularly invite the attention of our readers, both clerical and lay, is that on mixed marriages, “delivered on occasion of the Fourth Diocesan Synod of Birmingham.” Bishop Ullathorne is not afraid to speak plainly on this subject. Indeed, his language is startling but leaves no room for question of its truth. He speaks, too, from an extensive experience of the evils resulting from mixed marriages. Here is a passage (the italics are our own), p. 89: “It would be as unjust as ungenerous not to admit that there are Protestants who loyally keep the promises they have made in marriage with Catholics, and who truly respect the faith and religious exercises of their Catholic spouse, and fulfil their pledges respecting the education of their children. But prudence looks to what generally happens, and not to the exceptional cases. And wisdom never runs any serious risks in matters of the soul. The individuals, and even the families, that have fallen from the church through mixed marriages, amount to numbers incredible to those who have not examined the question thoroughly; and the number of Catholics bound at this moment in mixed marriages, who live in a hard and bitter conflict for the exercise of their religion, for that of their children, and in certain cases for the soundness of their moral life, could they, with all the facts, be known, would deter any thoughtful Catholic from contracting a mixed marriage.” The bishop has extended this discourse in order to give the early discipline of the church on the matter. He further makes his argument impregnable by citations from popes and councils. Moreover, he concludes the instruction “with an admirable passage from the synodal address published by the hierarchy of Australia”; and the condition of Catholics in Australia, as regards the ordinary excuses for mixed marriages, bears striking resemblance, be it remembered, to their position here. Every-day Topics: A Book of Briefs. By J. G. Holland. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1876. To one person at least, and to one only, this volume of Topics is likely to be of lasting interest. That person is the author. The Topics are short articles on a variety of subjects which have appeared from month to month in Scribner’s magazine. They are of about the average length of an ordinary newspaper article, and of about equal depth. They lack the newspaper liveliness, however, and the English is in great part of that slipshod style that is mistaken by so many nowadays for an evidence of careless strength. “Familiarly didactic” is the character that Dr. Holland in his preface seems to claim for this and others of his books, and the very phrase stamps the man. The book is tiresome, prosy, and fussy. Any one of the articles is too long for its purpose; what, then, must a volume of them be? Dr. Holland is apparently a Christian or nothing. He is for ever prating about “the church” and attacking “the world.” It is to be feared that his Christianity is of a very vague character. His zeal is unfortunately without knowledge. He is constantly making grave mistakes with the most solemn confidence in his own infallibility, and thunders away on every kind of subject with a “trenchant ignorance” that would be amusing did it not touch such grave matters. Dr. Holland may have the best intentions in the world, but he would do well to weigh his words a little before undertaking to champion “the church.” What particular “church” is he for ever defending? The Christian Church, he would doubtless reply. But which is the Christian Church? This is a question that Dr. Holland is quite capable of undertaking to decide in a future “Topic,” and he would do not only his own readers but the world at large infinite service by making this matter clear once for all. We are quite justified in putting this question to Dr. Holland; for everybody knows what a Catholic means when he speaks of “the church.” But in Dr. Holland’s “church” it is doubtful whether Catholics are allowed a place. At least, we should judge so from the manner in which he treats of them whenever their name occurs in the Topics. Linked Lives. By Lady Gertrude Douglas. New York: Benziger Brothers. 1876. The English Catholic journals greeted this story with such an unusual flourish of trumpets that we were led to expect something extraordinary in the way of novel-writing. It is extraordinary in no sense. It is not even extraordinarily bad. It is eminently dull, altogether commonplace, and only saved from utter insipidity by here and there an indication of real power. Of course it relies for its main interest on the good old English Catholic story-theme—conversion. To relieve the monotony of this subject, probably, the author sprinkled the narrative with dashes of what is meant for sensation. She takes us to the dens of thieves, to the reformatory, the prison, the court of justice. Such scenes may be rendered exciting—by a Dickens or a Victor Hugo. We are very happy to see that Lady Gertrude Douglas is not at all at home among them. All this portion of the book reads pretty much like an ordinary police report, and all the desire in the world on the reader’s part cannot invest Katie McKay or any of her companions with even a touch of the interest that Dickens threw around Nancy Sykes. Such themes should not be touched at all unless they can be made elevating. It takes a very experienced, strong, yet tender hand to bare the ulcers and foul sores of society. The process is a most delicate one. If well done, it excites pity, remorse, sorrow, indignation, that such things can be among Christian peoples; if ill done, it is revolting and only excites disgust. Great pains have been bestowed on the delineation of the character of Mabel Forrester, and not without success. Indeed, she and her brother Guy, who is killed off too early, are almost the only interesting persons in the volume. By the way, what a lugubrious story it is! Everybody is constantly down at the mouth. Poor Guy is killed at a yacht-race, which he has just won. Katie McKay throws herself into the sea with her babe, which has been chloroformed (!) by Katie’s sister; and we could almost wish that Katie had been left in the sea. She is dragged out, however, to receive two years’ imprisonment. The rascal whom she married dies in prison. Her sister dies in her bed, but with a strong intimation that she is likely to be consigned to the lower regions. There are several other deaths of minor consequence; and finally, after being induced to accompany Mabel on a voyage to Australia, to assist at her wedding with her elderly lover, Hugh Fortescue—who, of course, is in the last stage of consumption at the time—the vessel takes fire and Mabel perishes. Equally of course, Hugh, as soon as he receives the news, dies also, “aged fifty-three,” as the tombstone erected to his memory in Australia informs us. Surely, after all this, we may say with Macbeth that we have “supped full of horrors,” and, like him also, we feel none the better for them. A great fault with the book, too, is that the fate of every one is foreshadowed early in the story, and the recurrence of such remarks as “But we must not anticipate,” “But of that anon,” is peculiarly exasperating when the whole murder is out in the very sentence that occasions such a remark. The convert-making is far too labored, and there is too much of it. We should not have been at the unpleasing pains to write of this book as we have done, did we not see signs in it of a really good Catholic story-writer, who is likely to be spoiled for any future work worthy of the name by the injudicious praise which has been lavished on this, which we take to be her first book. The lady can describe natural scenery well, can touch a tender chord with true pathos, can display strength at times. She only needs more interest of plot, and to avoid scenes and characters of which she knows little or nothing. All the plot in the present volume consists of the slowly-dragged-out conversion of Mabel to Catholicity—which religion clashes with the creed of the elderly and by no means pleasant parson to whom she is affianced—and the consequent breaking off of the match. Finally he also is converted, and the dÉnoÛment is as given above. To tag five hundred and twenty-five pages of a story on a plot of such very slender device is rather overweighting it. The French scenes are the best in the book, and even they are needlessly marred by what the author doubtless considers a beauty—the supposed literal translation of the French characters’ speech into English, which is a barbarism. The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for the United States, for the Year of Our Lord 1877. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877. The season would scarcely be itself without this admirable little annual. It is always bright, instructive, and amusing, and the number for the present year shows no falling off in these qualities. The first portion of the Almanac contains the usual calendars, astronomical and ecclesiastical, with the information respecting Catholic feasts and fasts necessary for the coming year. Among the biographical sketches, that of Dr. Brownson claims the first place. It is illustrated by an admirably-executed portrait. There are excellent portraits also of Bishop Verot, Archbishop Connolly of Halifax, N. S., Very Rev. Dr. Moriarty, O.S.A., Rev. Francis Piquet, Pius VII., Vittoria Colonna, all accompanied by brief but interesting sketches. There are, as usual, pictures of old Catholic landmarks in this country, Ireland, and other lands, with pleasing descriptions. Among these, that of St. Joseph’s Church, in Philadelphia, is especially interesting. In addition to the complete and very valuable list of the popes, which was published for the first time last year, and is wisely retained in the present number, there is a complete catalogue of the kings of Ireland, from the Firbholg conquest down to the landing of Henry II. of England. To this is appended some valuable historical remarks. Indeed, there is not a page of this Almanac that can be called dull, and its cheapness happily places it within easy reach of every reader. We only wish that such cheapness and real excellence could be oftener combined in Catholic books. The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas More. By Agnes M. Stewart, authoress of Margaret Roper, etc. 8vo, pp. 365. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. The lot of Sir Thomas More was cast in troublous times. He lived amid storms that wrecked many a noble life, and yet no man ever bore throughout a serener soul or a happier and gayer disposition. His character is a study of the most healthful sort; for it exhibits the rare picture of a man who deemed the sacrifice of power, wealth, place, friends, and life itself, to principle and conscience, too ordinary a duty to excite surprise. On whatever side we view the man, the hero comes to light. He lived in an atmosphere of his own creation, and whoever came within its influence left it a better and wiser mortal. He was, in the best sense of the word, a Christian philosopher and statesman. He would jest with Erasmus in antique phrase as though he had but returned from the portico, while a hair-shirt nettled his skin and his soul communed in frequent ejaculation with its Creator. As a letter-writer he will ever hold a foremost rank because of his sense, humor, wit, and grace of expression. Even the careless construction of some of his letters possesses a charm; for there you see the man disclosing himself without reserve—careful, indeed, that the picture be a true one, but indifferent as to the setting. What could be more delightful than his letters to his children while these were under the care of a tutor at home and he was engrossed by the weighty concerns of office? He flies to the pen as a refuge from distracting thoughts, and pours out his soul to his little ones with a sweet abandon; he is sportive and grave by turns and veils deep philosophy and wise counsels beneath the garb of a fresh and mirthful phraseology. He evidently believed with Horace: “Quamquam ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat?” “And how can you want matter of writing to me, who am delighted to hear either of your studies or your play, whom you may then exceedingly please when, having nothing to write of, you write as largely as you can of that nothing, than which nothing is more easy for you to do, especially being women, and therefore prattlers by nature, amongst whom a great story riseth out of nothing.” He then advises them to be careless in nothing, but to bestow conscientious pains on all their performances. The homelife of Sir Thomas affords us the best glimpse of the true character of this great man, and lends a new and sad significance to the scene which occurred between his heart-broken daughter and himself, as he tottered, haggard and emaciated, to the block. He loved his home as the pupil of his eye, and sighed for it when duty called him away. With even such a shrew as his second wife he contrived to make his a model household, where refinement, piety, and cheerfulness ever reigned. Smart retort and repartee, brilliant things and witty sayings, were the salt which lent savor to many a pious reflection and devout allusion while the family shared their daily meals. Thus did Sir Thomas, by being a devout Catholic and a lover of learning, convert a possible home of bickering and discontent into one which nurtured peace, contentment, happiness, and hope. Unless we pause to study Sir Thomas More in his home at Chelsea, we will fail to discern the peerless knight, the virtuous man, the lover of religion, the sententious philosopher (all which he was), amid the grime and lustful air of Henry’s court, “Where the individual withers, and the world is more and more.” Next to Sir Thomas as father, friend, and husband, the reader loves to view him in his exalted capacity of chancellor. From him indeed, the title has acquired its synonymous meaning with unblemished integrity and purity immaculate; for throughout his whole political career he never recognized friend or foe as such; he treated all alike with unswerving impartiality. And in pursuing this course he obtained the reward which he especially desired: the testimony of a good conscience. He felt that, though “there are innumerable hopes to innumerable men, he is happy who is happy day by day”; and this is just the sort of happiness which is born of a good conscience. His decisions bore the mark of his sterling sense and unyielding will, and though many exceptions had been taken to his renderings by those whose interests he countered, not a single reversal could be obtained, while others degraded their high offices and stooped to pander to the lustful instincts of the king. More studied to grace the chancellor’s gown by the practice of every virtue pertaining to the dignity of his position, and shone forth more brilliantly by contrast with the pliant tools of Henry. “Velut inter ignes Luna minores.” The speech which he delivered on the occasion of his investiture will ever remain a model of dignity and modesty. While deprecating the praise bestowed on him by the Duke of Norfolk, he failed not to express his just appreciation of the high and important trust to which he had been called, and this in language so fitting and graceful that his admirers likened him to Cicero. Miss Stewart, who but a short time ago gave to the world a charming novelette with the title of the Chancellor and his Daughter, addressed herself to the task of compiling these memoirs with laudable enthusiasm, such, indeed, as no one acquainted with the subject could fail to experience. Here is a hero-worship of the right sort, growing out of the virtues and learning of her idol, and so far not to be reckoned with Macaulay’s stupid admiration of William III. or Carlyle’s still more fatuous veneration for Frederick of Prussia. She has earned a new title to the esteem in which she is held in England. The book contains an admirable autotype fac-simile of the celebrated picture of the meeting between the chancellor and his daughter. The Science of the Spiritual Life. By Father Francis Neumayr, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) This is a poor translation of an excellent little book on ascetical theology. Francis Neumayr was born in Munich in 1697. Early in life he entered the Society of Jesus, and, having finished his studies, taught theology with great success during a number of years. He was then sent to fill the pulpit of the Cathedral of Augsburg, and during the ten years in which he held this position acquired an extraordinary reputation as an orator. He did not, however, confine himself to preaching, but wrote on various subjects relating to the religious controversies of his age. His writings were very popular in Germany, and some of them made their way throughout Catholic Europe. The Science of the Spiritual Life, which is one of his most widely-known works, is a compendium of what has been called the “science of the saints.” It is written with good judgment and a thorough knowledge of the subject, in a style which is concise without being obscure. There is nothing in it which the simplest cannot readily understand, and yet there is everything that the most learned could desire. Missale Romanum ex Decreto Sacros. Concilii Tridentini restitutum, S. Pii V. Pontificis Maximi jussu editum, Clementis VIII. et Urbani VIII. auctoritate recognitum. Editio Ratisbonensis X. hujus forma altera missis novissimis aucta. Cum textu et cantu a Sacrorum Rituum Congregatione adprobato. 1876. RatisbonÆ, Neo Eboraci, et Cincinnatii: Sumptibus, chartis, et typis Frederici Pustet, S. Sedis Apost. et Sacr. Rituum Congreg. typographi. This beautiful and finely-printed Missal fully sustains the reputation that Mr. Pustet has already gained for his liturgical books. The paper on which it is printed is of the finest quality, and the type by far the best we have yet seen. Special praise is due to the printing of the notation in the prefaces and other musical portions of the work, which is singularly distinct and clear. The Missal is adorned with many fine and artistic pictures, and all the introits are embellished with finely executed initial letters. The proof-sheets have all been read by the Sacred Congregation and approved. Margaret Roper; or, The Chancellor and his Daughter. By Agnes Stewart, Authoress of Florence O’Neill, The Foster-Sisters, etc. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1876. This little book will amply repay perusal. The heroine, Margaret Roper, the favorite daughter of Sir Thomas More, was the model of a noble Christian woman, worthy in every way of her gifted and heroic father. Sir Thomas More was, in the truest and broadest sense of the words, a grand character, a peerless Christian knight without fear and without reproach, true to his honest convictions, to his friends, true to the faith for which he died with the calm heroism of the early martyrs. His murder—to borrow the language of one of his biographers—was one of the blackest crimes ever perpetrated in England under the form of law. Time has only increased the admiration which his grand virtues extorted from his bitterest enemies, and the most bigoted Protestants venerate his name more than that of Cranmer or Cromwell, the unprincipled tools of the heartless tyrant, Henry VIII., who deluged England with innocent blood. His letters to his daughter, skilfully interwoven into the narrative, form a very interesting feature of the volume before us. The character of the greatest of English chancellors is sketched by the authoress with historical fidelity, and the picture of his celebrated daughter is drawn with equal devotion to historic truth. A Preparation for Death. Done out of French. Chicago: W. F. Squire. 1876. This is an excellent little book, quite cheap, and well adapted for the sick room. It was originally “done out of French” by a writer in Dublin and has been reprinted in this country by the present publisher. It consists of short prayers, exhortations, and reflections on the Passion of Our Lord. The imprimatur of Bishop Foley is attached. Another work, though larger, which is peculiarly adapted for spiritual reading during the month of the Holy Souls is the Life of St. Catherine of Genoa, published by the Catholic Publication Society. This is not only a beautiful and interesting life of one of those great women who adorn the history of the Church in all ages, but contains in addition St. Catherine’s treatise on Purgatory, which together with her spiritual dialogues, as is said in the introduction, “St. Francis of Sales, that great master in spiritual life, was accustomed to read twice a year.” And “Frederick Schlegel, who was the first to translate St. Catherine’s dialogues into German, regarded them as seldom, if ever, equalled in beauty of style; and such has been the effect of the example of Christian perfection in our saint, that even the American Tract Society could not resist its attraction, and published a short sketch of her life among its tracts, with the title of her name by marriage, Catherine Adorno.” The words of the saints are always golden. One can never repeat them too often or ponder on them too long. Songs in the Night, and Other Poems. By the author of Christian Schools and Scholars. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. Songs with a meaning are these, and full of sweet melody. The singer evidently feels. The feelings are deep, the thought deep also, and steeped in the purest well of religion. The versification is as varied as it is happy; and, indeed, for both thought and expression throughout this small volume we have nothing but praise. The title owes its meaning to the fact that “several of the poems were originally suggested by passages in the Spiritual Canticles of St. John of the Cross, whose use of the word night, in a mystic sense, is too well known to need explanation.” The opening poem, “The Fountain of the Night; or, the Canticle of the Soul rejoicing to know God by Faith,” gives a good idea of the tone and excellence of the volume: There is a Fount whence endless waters flow; There zephyrs play and fairest flowerets blow. Full well that crystal Fountain do I know, Though of the night. I know the verdant hills that gird it round; Its source I know not, for no thought can sound The Spring whence all things first their being found In the dark night. I know no earthly beauty to compare With that mysterious Fount, so calm and fair; All things in heaven and earth are pictured there, Though of the night. The tide wells forth in many a flowing river, Yet is the Fountain-head exhausted never; Onward it flows, for ever and for ever, On through the night. No cloud obscures, no passing shadows rest Upon that Fountain’s clear, unruffled breast, Itself the very source of light confessed, Though of the night. Forth from this spring a sparkling Torrent flows; Who shall the secret of its birth disclose? And yet I know the source from whence it rose, Though of the night. I see from both a mighty River run, Yet dare not say when first its course begun; For Fountain, Torrent, River—all are one, Though of the night. I know that all are ours—all hidden lie In form of Bread, hid from the curious eye To give us life. O love! O mystery Of deepest night! And the Life seeks all living things to fill, To quench our thirst with water from the rill, To feed, to guide us, though in darkness still, As of the night. And ever of that Fount I long to drink, And ever of that living Bread I think, And linger by that flowing River’s brink Through the long night. The First Christmas for Our Dear Little Ones. By Miss Rosa Mulholland. New York and Cincinnati: Fr. Pustet. This beautiful book will be welcomed by the little ones, for whom it is intended, because, from the cover all the way through, it is bright and attractive, and each picture is a pleasant surprise. All the characters of the holy tale are made life-like and familiar, and the children may feel themselves at home with the white-winged angels, the eager shepherds, the stately Magi, and those nearer and dearer ones who attended the Blessed Infant’s earliest years. By parents this book should be welcomed, because anything that illustrates home-lessons and makes them charming is a valuable friend in the household, and because it provides an acceptable gift which will bring home to children’s hearts the true meaning of the holiday season. The verses are appropriate and not too difficult for the little ones to enjoy. Lectures on Scholastic Philosophy. By Father John Cornoldi, S.J. Part I. Logic. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. Quite a number of persons have recently undertaken the laudable but difficult task of preparing elementary works on philosophy. Cornoldi’s Lectures or Lessons in Philosophy are to be speedily published entire, in an English translation, making two small volumes of from 300 to 350 pages each. A large part of the work is devoted to Rational Physics. The Logic, just now issued, contains the simplest and most necessary part of pure and applied logic in a brochure of less than one hundred pages. It seems to be made as simple and intelligible to beginners as the nature of the subject permits. It is a defect, however, in the translation, that Latin terms are sometimes used without the least necessity, and Latin quotations are left untranslated. We hope this defect will be supplied in a second edition. An Essay contributing to a Philosophy of Literature. By B. A. M. Second revised edition. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. 1876. The first edition of this solid and genial essay was noticed in The Catholic World. We are happy to see that its merit has received a general recognition which must be gratifying to the author. It is a book which grows upon one the more carefully it is perused, and we have now an even higher esteem of its originality, sound learning, discriminating judgment and taste than we had when we first commended it as a work of genuine and rare excellence. The Voice of Jesus Suffering, to the Mind and Heart of Christians, etc. By a Passionist Missionary Priest. New York: P. O’Shea, 37 Barclay Street. Another excellent book on our Lord’s Passion; but it differs from the generality of such works in making our Lord himself relate the history of his sufferings first, and then helping the auditor to “Practical Reflections.” This is an admirable plan, in that it enables the reader to bring the divine Object of his thoughts so much more really before his imagination. This, together with the character of the “Practical Reflections,” will be found, we are sure, to make meditation easy to those who have hitherto given it up as requiring too great an effort. And if the pious author shall have done no more than succeed in thus facilitating devotion to the Passion, he will not have labored in vain. The Sermon on the Mount. (To the end of the Lord’s Prayer.) By Henry James Coleridge, of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. This is the third division of Father Coleridge’s treatise on the Public Life of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are glad to learn that the reception of the preceding volume on the Beatitudes has “encouraged him to attempt a somewhat fuller treatment of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount than he had originally thought of.” Those who have read the volume on the Beatitudes need no insurance from us that they will find in this new work an abundance of beautiful lessons, and particularly some we much need at the present time. The nine chapters on the Lord’s Prayer (chapters xv.-xxiii.) will furnish the devout with many helps to meditation on the clauses of this summary of prayer. The Life of the Very Reverend Mother Madeleine Louise Sophie Barat, Foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. By M. l’AbbÉ Baunard. Translated by Lady Georgiana Fullerton. Roehampton: 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) The original French edition of this admirable work has already been noticed at length in The Catholic World. The English edition is brought out in two handsome volumes, and the distinguished name of the translator furnishes every guarantee for a faithful and excellent rendering of the original. So great has been the demand for the work that a large order was exhausted almost immediately on its arrival in this country. The Devotion of the Holy Rosary. By Michael MÜller, C.S.S.R. New York: Benziger Brothers. Father MÜller is a tireless writer. His works are for the most part addressed to those who are too often forgotten by Catholic writers—the ordinary classes. He who provides the people with books of devotion which they will read, and not put on the shelf, does a great and good work. Under a modest appearance Father MÜller’s books conceal much learning and knowledge, the fruit evidently of very extensive reading, while the whole is pervaded with a spirit of piety and zeal. The present volume is devoted to an explanation of that most popular of devotions—the rosary. Those who care to satisfy themselves as to what the rosary is, what it is intended for, what it has done in the service of the church and for the salvation of souls, will find in this volume much to interest and instruct them, as well as to increase their fervor. The concluding chapter treats of the “Devotion of the Scapular.” Short Sermons preached in the Chapel of St. Mary’s College, Oscott. Collected and edited by the President. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.) These sermons will be found very serviceable to our clergy, who are often sorely pressed for time to prepare their discourses. One instruction such as these is better than ten ordinary sermons of twice or thrice its length. Lay persons also will benefit greatly by making their spiritual reading from this volume. The subjects are wisely selected. There are twenty-seven in all, with two funeral sermons in an appendix.
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