CHAPTER IV.

MAGNETIC INFLUENCES.

"Behold he prayeth."

"Pray, pray!" repeated Eugene; "what is prayer? Is it to hold communion with a higher being? To be raised above the mists of this murky earth? If so, how glad I should be to pray!" and involuntarily he exclaimed: "O mighty Being, who rulest all, if indeed thou wiliest to communicate with man, instruct me how to approach thee; my mind is dark and sad. Oh! teach me truth." Eugene Godfrey was sincere; he wished for truth; but educated in scornful intellectual supremacy, educated to tolerate religion as a means of keeping in order the lower classes, it was difficult for him to comprehend how "faith" could exist otherwise than as a beautiful poetic fancy, to be classed with the imagery of the Iliad or the Odyssey.

The real, the sentient, had been his study, and till the horrors of the French Revolution turned his mind to consider how man could influence man by higher motives than merely getting "good things for one's self," he had been satisfied to leave these themes unthought of. But now they were forced upon him. Events unprecedented in the annals of the world bade him lay aside physical science and tun to study mental and moral influences. He had heard enough in the little town to which he belonged to feel sure that the multitude must be cared for, most be looked to. He saw his father uneasy at every commotion, lest the English aristocracy should likewise be sent on their travels. He saw Alfred Brookbank hating his own brother, because that brother stood between him and a property; and his sister--his fearless sister, accomplished, beautiful, the very epitome of a refined lady--he dared not think of her! Oh! for a motive to raise these groveling aims! Oh! for purity, heroism, good. But for the vision of Euphrasie, all would have been darkness then. Such were Eugene's thoughts as he bent his steps to his chambers and sat down in his easy chair to indulge in this absorbing reverie.

How long he sat he scarcely knew, but at length he became conscious that he was not alone. He had forgotten to "sport his oak" (as closing the outer door was called by the students) in token that he wished to be alone, and Frederic Morley had entered, and, perceiving him so engrossed, had quietly seated himself without speaking, till Eugene gave signs of life.

"Ah, Morley, is that you? how long have you been there?"

"I scarcely know, Mr. Eugene; I have been watching your absent thoughts. You were so still, I might have supposed you magnetized, but I suppose the great wizard would not take so great a liberty with you."

"What wizard?" asked Eugene.

"Have you not heard, then? There is a man here who can throw a person into a trance, and make him reveal all kinds of secrets," answered Frederic.

"Pshaw!" said Eugene.

"Nay," answered Frederic, "I will tell you what I saw. I was at Mrs. Moreton's yesterday evening, singing duets with Isabel, and young Moreton came in with a tall, dark-haired, mustachioed, whiskered fellow, with eyes {49} like lighted coals, they were so large and piercing. Where Moreton picked him up, I could not find out, but he was evidently fascinated with him. He introduced him laughingly to his mother as a great wizard, and they interrupted the music to hear him talk. He was grandiloquent enough, told tales of spirits and influences that haunt me still; but more than this, he insisted that mind can influence mind irrespective of matter; that the old tales of magic were true, and the deeds wrought by men of wondrous power, who had found the key to nature's nighty secrets--only nature with him does not mean inert matter as we mean by it, but matter and intelligences who act upon matter. The universe, he says, is peopled by wondrous forms, and these forms can be communicated with by a privileged soul. Oh, he is a mighty man!" and Frederic shuddered.

"And you have no more sense than to believe such a cock-and-bull story as that? Fie, Morley, I am ashamed of you!"

"But let me tell you what I saw with my own eyes. He first threw Isabel into a trance, from which neither Mrs. Morley, nor her brother, nor i could awaken her. Then when Mrs. Morley grew frightened, he assured her there was no danger, that she was only bewitched by his art, and that he would make her talk as he pleased. Then he put her brother's hand in hers, and bade him think of the walk he had taken that afternoon, of the people he had met and spoken to; he did so, and the wizard bade the girl speak, and she recounted the events of the walk from his leaving college to his meeting with the wizard, and their entering the room in which we were--all, as her brother declared, correctly. The wizard then disenchanted her, and she slowly roused herself, pale and listless, but quite unconscious of what had passed."

"I have heard of animal magnetism before, quietly responded Eugene.

"Have you? But do you know its power? It is absolutely frightful. He lifted my arm before I knew what he was about, passed his hand two or three times above and below it, and there it remained fixed horizontally from the shoulder, without my having power to move it up or down. Young Moreton tried to put it down for me, but he could not; and there I stood fixed till it pleased the wizard to unloose the spell he had cast around me."

"Yours was not an agreeable position, truly," said Eugene, "but he did not hurt you; you are safe and sound now."

"Yes, but the most wonderful is yet to come. Little Helen Moreton came into the room to bid her mamma good-night. Seeing the stranger, she was shy, and went to the window-curtains to hide. Mrs. Moreton called her, but she looked out for a minute, seemed to take a greater dislike to the stranger than before, and hid again. Mrs. Moreton was annoyed, and the wizard said: 'Do you want her, madam? If so, I will bring her to you.' But Mrs. Moreton replied, 'Oh no! if you go near her she will shriek and cry; she is so shy.' 'Nay,' said the man, 'I will stand here, and here she shall come without a shriek, and lie down at my feet.' What he did we could not find out, for he seemed perfectly still. The window-curtain unfolded, and apparently against her will the child came forward. She caught at a chair, as if determined to resist the influence, but that seemed to urge her forward; she let it go, and then grasped the table with both hands, as if determined to resist. She pouted, she frowned, she strove to keep her place, but keep it she could not. Step by step she came and laid herself quietly down at the wizard's feet. Mrs. Moreton almost shrieked, but the child lay as if she dared not leave until the magician gave permission."

"Well, and what do you infer from all this?" asked Eugene.

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"I hardly know; I am terrified; what if it is true, as this man says, that weak minds must obey the strong; that resistance is useless? I should not like to become the slave of a spirit such as his."

"You believe him to be a wicked man?"

"I do, yet I know not why; I should not like to meet him when unprotected."

"Why, Morley, you astonish me; I could not conceive you so weak. These fears are unworthy a noble mind."

"But what are we to do if such theories be true?"

"They are not true--at least not in the way you state them. There are protecting, counteracting influences for the weakest. I cannot explain all this to-night; but all history, all experience go to prove that the 'race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong' --that bad power is often overcome by weak means. I will repeat to you a piece of advice I received myself to-day, and which I intend to take. It is one you must often have received, for your father intends you for the church. Pray, Morley, to the highest of all intelligences, to the greatest of all powers. The strongest will then be invoked to your aid."

"_Pray?_ Are you serious, Mr. Eugene?"

"I am serious; why doubt it?"

"An advice so contrary to the spirit of the age! why, it is the last to be expected."

"Perhaps so; but listen: That mind is not matter, your experience proves, as does that of most people. What mind is, perhaps we do not know; but that mind acts upon mind, irrespective of space and obstacles, we feel. Listen! you know my family; a family less superstitious scarcely exists. We are too much wedded to cause and effect lightly to believe. My grandfather was as little credulous as my father. Now hear what happened to him. He had a brother to whom he was fondly attached, and by whom he was as fondly loved. Their correspondence was constant. That brother went to India, as an officer. One night about twelve o'clock, as my grandfather was going to sleep, having sat up later than usual, the curtains at the foot of the bed were with drawn, and his brother, pale, but in full regimentals, appeared and said, 'Good-by, Frank.' My grandfather related the circumstance at breakfast next morning, and noted it down in writing, being confident that he was not asleep. After due time the Indian mail arrived, giving an account of the brother's death on the field of battle at the exact hour and day specified. Ere his spirit winged its flight, we know not whither, it had communicated with the being it loved best on earth."

Frederic turned pale. "What do you infer from this?" he asked.

"Simply this," returned Eugene; "that 'there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' and this influence of mind on mind is one of them. If the Supreme Ruler have made a law that man, to be assisted by him, must pray to him, must put himself in communication with him, who are we that we should refuse the means? If you fear the evil spirit in a man, try if there be no good spirit capable of protecting you. The universal testimony of mankind is in favor of supernatural agencies. We should ponder well ere we throw from us such aid."

Frederic smiled, and rose to take his leave. Advice so different from what he had expected was scarcely likely to be well received. He had no answer ready, so he left the narrow-minded religionist to his own crude fancies.

And Eugene closed the oaken door, and returned, and for the first time of his life knelt down to beseech light from the Author of light--light to guide him through these wearisome shoals of doubt and darkness--light to show him something more than how to render matter subservient to animal comfort--light to enlighten the {51} inward feeling. Good and evil, what are they? Mind and matter--which is the true reality? What are we to live for--the animal life, or the spiritual? And is the purely spiritual distinct from the purely intellectual as well as from the animal? Is there a soul, the functions of which are different, distinct, from those of the body, and to the knowledge of which mere intellect cannot arrive? What is nature? What is revelation? How do they act upon each other? What is the office, what the aim of each? Revolving these themes, it was deep in the night ere the young man sought his couch.

TO BE CONTINUED.

ORIGINAL.

INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH.

Our age is more sentimental than intellectual, more philanthropic than Christian, more material than spiritual. It may and no doubt does cherish and seek to realize, with such wisdom as it has, many humane and just sentiments, but it retains less Christian thought than it pretends, and has hardly any conception of catholic principles. It studies chiefly phenomena, physical or psychical, and as these are all individual, particular, manifold, variable, and transitory, it fails to recognize any reality that is universal, invariable, and permanent, superior to the vicissitudes of time and place, always and everywhere one and the same. It is so intent on the sensible that it denies or forgets the spiritual, and so engrossed with the creature that it loses sight of the creator.

Indeed, there are not wanting men in this nineteenth century who deny that there is any creator at all, or that anything has been made, and maintain that all has been produced by self-development or growth. These men, who pass for the great scientific lights of the age, tell us that all things are in a continual process of self-formation, which they call by the general name of progress; and so taken up are they with their doctrine of progress, that they gravely assert that God himself, if God there be, is progressive, perfectible, ever proceeding from the imperfect towards the perfect, and seeking by unremitting action to perfect, fill out, or complete his own being. They seem not to be aware that if the perfect does not already really exist, or is wanting, there is and can be no progress; for progress is motion towards the perfect, and, if the perfect does not exist there can be no motion towards it, and in the nature of the case the motion can be only towards nothing, and therefore, as St. Thomas has well demonstrated, in proving the impossibility of progress without end, no motion at all. Nor do they seem any more to be aware that the imperfect, the incomplete, is not and cannot be self-active, or capable of acting in and from itself alone, and therefore has not the power in itself alone to develop and complete itself, or perfect its own being. Creatures may be and are progressive, because they live, and move, and have their being in their Creator, and are aided and sustained by him whose being is eternally complete who is in himself infinitely perfect. They forget also the important fact {52} that where there is nothing universal, there can be nothing particular, that where there is nothing invariable there can be nothing variable, that where there is nothing permanent there can be nothing transitory, and that where there is no real being there can be no phenomena, any more than there can be creation without a creator, action without an actor, appearance without anything that appears, or a sign that signifies nothing.

Now the age, regarded in its dominant tendency, neglects or denies this universal, invariable, persistent, real, or spiritual order, and its highest and most catholic principles are mere classifications or generalizations of visible phenomena, and therefore abstractions, without reality, without life or efficiency. It understands not that throughout the universe the visible is symbolical of the invisible, and that to the prepared mind there is an invisible but living reality signified by the observable phenomena of nature, as in the Christian economy an invisible grace is signified by the visible sacramental sign. All nature is in some sense sacramental, but the age takes it only as an empty sign signifying nothing. Hence the embarrassment of the Christian theologian in addressing it; the symbols he uses and must use have for it no meaning. He deals and must deal with an order of thought of which it has little or no conception. He is as one speaking to a man who has no hearing, or exhibiting colors to a man who has no sight, He speaks of the transcendental to those who recognize nothing above the sensible--of the spiritual to men who are of the earth earthy, and have lost the faculty of rising above the material, and piercing beyond the visible. The age has fallen, even intellectually, far below the Christian order of thought, and is apparently unable to rise even in conception to the great catholic principles in accordance with which the universe is created, sustained, and governed.

Nobody in his senses denies that man is progressive, or that modern society has made marvellous progress in the material order, in the application of science to the productive arts. I am no _laudator temporis acti_; I understand and appreciate the advantages of the present, and do not doubt that steam navigation railroads, and lightning telegraphs, which bid defiance to the winds and waves, and as it were annihilate space and time, will one day be made to subserve higher than mere material interests; but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that in many and very important respects, the modern world has deteriorated instead of improving, and been more successful in losing than in gaining. The modern nations commonly regarded, at least by themselves, as the more advanced nations, have fallen in moral and religious thought below the ancient Greeks and Romans. They may have more sound dogmas, but they have less conception of principles, of the invisible or spiritual order, excepting always the followers of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, whose absurd materialism is revived with hardly any disguise by the most approved thinkers of our own age. The Gentiles generally held catholic principles, but misapprehended and misapplied them, and thus fell into gross idolatry and degrading and besotting superstition; but the moderns while retaining many Catholic dogmas have lost the meaning of the word principle. The Catholic can detect, no doubt, phases of truth in all the doctrines of those outside the church, but the Christianity they profess has no universal, immutable, and imperishable principle, and degenerates in practice into a blind and fierce fanaticism, a watery sentimentality, a baseless humanitarianism, or a collection of unrelated and unmeaning dogmas, which are retained only because they are never examined, and which can impart no light to the understanding, infuse no life into the hearty and impose no restraint on the appetites and passions.

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Having fallen below the conception of a order above the visible and phenomenal, and sunk to complete Sadduceeism, which believes in neither angel nor spirit, the age makes war on the church because she asserts such order, and remains fast anchored in it; because she is immovable and invariable, or as her enemies say, stationary, unprogressive, and therefore hostile to progress. She has, it is said, the insolence to attempt to teach and govern men and nations, instead of gracefully submitting to their views and wishes, and bestowing her blessing on their exertions for the liberty and progress of society. The age denies her to be the church of God, because she fails to prove herself to be the church of man, holding simply from a human authorities. It denies her divine origin, constitution, and authority, because she is stable, cannot be carried away by every wind of doctrine, does not yield to every popular impulse, and from time to time resists individuals, civil rulers, the people even, and opposes their favorite theories, plans, and measures, whenever she finds them at war with her mission and her law. It applauds her, indeed, to the echo, when she appears to be on the side of what happens to be popular, but condemns her without mercy when she opposes popular error, popular folly, popular injustice, and asserts the unpopular truth, defends the unpopular cause, or uses her power and influence in behalf of neglected justice, and please with her divine eloquence for the poor, the wronged, the downtrodden. Yet this is precisely what she should do, if the church of God, and what it would be contrary to her nature and office on that supposition not to do.

The age concedes nothing to the unseen and eternal. In its view religion itself is human, and ought to be subject to man, and determinable by society, dictated by the people, who in the modern mind usurp the place of God. It should not govern, but be governed, and governed from below, not from above; or rather, in its subversion of old ideas, it holds that being governed from below is being governed from above. It forgets that religion, objectively considered, is, if anything, the revelation and assertion of the divine order, or the universal and eternal law of God, the introduction and maintenance in the practical affairs of men and nations of the divine element, without which there would and could be nothing in human society invariable, permanent, or stable--persistent, independent, supreme, or authoritative. The church is simply the divine constitution and organ of religion in society, and must, like religion itself, be universal, invariable, independent, supreme, and authoritative for all men and nations. Man does not originate the church. She does not depend on man, or hold from him either individually or collectively; for she is instituted to govern him, to administer for him the universal and eternal law, and to direct and assist him in conducting himself in the way of his duty, to his supreme good, which she could not do if she held from and depended on him.

The point here insisted on, and which is so far removed from the thought of this age, is, that this order transcending the phenomenal and the whole material or sensible universe, and which in the strictly philosophical language of Scripture is called "the Law of the Lord," is eminently real, not imaginary, not factitious, not an abstraction, not a classification or generalization of particulars, nor something that depends for its reality on human belief or disbelief. Religion which asserts this divine order, this transcendental order, is objectively "the Law of the Lord," which, proceeding from the eternal reason and will of God, is the principle and reason of things. The church, as the divinely constituted organ of that law, is not an arbitrary institution, is not an accident, is not an afterthought, is not a superinduction upon the original plan of the Creator, but enters integrally into that plan, and is therefore founded in the {54} principle, the reason, and the constitution of things, and is that in reference to which all things are created, sustained, and governed, and hence our Lord is called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

But this our age does not conceive. For it the divine, the invariable, the universal, and the eternal are simply abstractions or generalizations, not real being. Its only conception of immensity, is space unlimited--of eternity, is time without end--of the infinite, the undefined, and of the universal, totality or sum total. _Catholic_, in its understanding, means accepting or ranking together as equally respectable the doctrines, opinions, views, and sentiments of all sects and denominations. Christian, Jewish, Mahometan, and Pagan. He, in the sense of modern philosophers, has a catholic disposition who respects all convictions, and has no decided conviction of his own. Catholicity is held to be something made up by the addition of particulars. The age does not understand that there is no catholicity without unity, and therefore that catholicity is not predicable of the material order, since nothing material or visible is or can be strictly one and universal. The church is catholic, not because as a visible body she is universal and includes all men and nations in her communion; she was as strictly catholic when her visible communion was restricted to the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles as she is now, or would be if all the members of the race were recipients of her sacraments. She is catholic because she is the organ of the whole spiritual order, truth, or reality, and that order in its own intrinsic nature is one and universal. All truth is catholic, because all truth is one and invariable; all the dogmas of the church are catholic, because universal principles, always and everywhere true. The law of the Lord is catholic, because universally, always and every where law, equally law for all men and nations in every age of the world, on earth and is heaven, in time and eternity. The church is catholic, because she holds under this law, and because God promulgates and administers it through her, because he lives and reigns in her, and hence she is called his kingdom, the kingdom of God on earth, a kingdom fulfilled and completed in heaven. It is this order of ideas that the age loses sight of and is so generally disposed to deny. Yet without it there were no visible order, and nothing would or could exist.

The principal, reason, nature, or constitution of things is in this order, and men must conform to it or live no true, no real life. They who recede from it advance towards nothing, and, as far as possible, become nothing. The church is independent, superior to all human control, and persistent, unaltered, and unalterable through all the vicissitudes of time and place, because the order in which she is founded is independent and persistent. She cannot be moved or harmed, because she rests on the principle, truth, and constitution of things, and is founded neither on the individual man, the state, nor the people, but on God himself, the Rock of Ages, against which anything created must rage and beat in vain. "On this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The church is therefore, by her own divine constitution, by the very principle and law of her existence, indefectible. No weapon forged against her shall prosper. The wicked may conspire for her destruction, but in vain, because they conspire to destroy reality, and all reality is always invincible and indestructible. They cannot efface or overthrow her, because she is founded in the truth and reality of things, or what is the same thing, in the unalterable reason and will of God, in whom all creatures have their principle--live, move, and have their being.

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They who oppose the church in the name of humanity or human progress, cannot succeed, because she is indivisible, and they would utterly defeat themselves if they could. They would deprive the human race of the law of God, which makes wise the simple and strengthens the weak, and deprive men and nations of the truth and reality of things, the very principle of all life, and of the very means and conditions of all progress. Man no doubt is progressive, but not in and by himself alone. Archimedes demanded a _pou sto_, a whereon to rest his fulcrum outside the earth, in order to move it, and there is no conceivable way by which a man can raise himself by a lever supported on himself. How is it that our philosophers fail to see the universal application of the laws which they themselves assert? All progress is by assimilation, by accretion, as that hierophant of progress, Pierre Leroux, has amply demonstrated, and if there is no reality outside of man or above him, what is there for him to assimilate, and how is he to become more than at any given time he already is? Swift ridiculed the philosophers of Laputa, who labored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, but even more ridiculous are they who pretend that something may be assimilated from nothing, or that a thing can in and of itself make itself more than it is. Where there is nothing above man with which he does or may commune, there is for him no possibility of progress, and men and nations can never advance beyond what they are. This is so in the nature of things, and it is only what is implied in the maxim, _Ex nihilo nihil fit_.

An institution, no matter by what sacred name called, founded by savages, embodying only what they are, and worked by them, would have no power to elevate them above their savage state, and could only serve to perpetuate their savagery. The age speaks of the applications of science to the productive arts, of the marvels of the steam-engine, steamboats, the locomotive, and the magnetic telegraph, and boasts that it renders mind omnipotent over matter. Vain boast, poor philosophy. We have in those things gained no triumph over matter, no control over the forces of nature, which are as independent of our reason and will as ever they were, as the first steamboat explosion will suffice to convince the most skeptical. We have subjected none of the forces of nature; we have only learned in some few instances to construct our machinery so as to be propelled by them, as did the first man who built a mill, constructed a boat, or spread his sails to catch the breeze. We alter not, we control not by our machinery the forces of nature, and all the advantage we have obtained is in conforming to them, and in suffering them, according to their own laws, or laws which we have not imposed on them, to operate for us. The principle is universal, catholic, and as true in the moral or spiritual as in the mechanical or physical world.

Man does not create, generate, or control the great moral and spiritual forces on which he depends to propel his moral and spiritual machinery. They exist and operate independently alike of his reason and his will, and the advantages he derives from them are obtained by his placing himself within the sphere of their influence, or, to be strictly correct, by interposing voluntarily no obstacle to their inflowing, for they are always present and operative unless resisted. Withdraw him from their influence, or induce him obstinately to resist them, which he may do, for he is a free moral agent, and he can make no more progress than a sailing ship at sea in a dead calm. These forces are divine, are embodied in the church as her living and constitutive force--are in one sense the church herself, and hence men and nations separated from her communion and influence are thrown back on nature alone, and necessarily cease to be progressive. We may war against this as much as we please, but we cannot alter it, for the principle on which it rests is a universal and indestructible law.

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Individuals and nations separated by schism or heresy from the visible communion of the church do not become at once absolutely and in all respects unprogressive, for they are carried on for a time by the momentum she baa given them, and besides, they are not, as she continues to exist, absolutely beyond or outside of the sphere of her influence, though indirect and reflected. But from the moment of the separation their progress begins to slacken, their spiritual life becomes sickly and attenuated, and gradually they lose all that they had received from the church, and lapse into helpless and unassisted nature. This, which is demonstrable _à priori_, is proved by the experience of those nations that separated from the church in the sixteenth century. These nations at first retained a large portion of their old Catholic culture, and many of the habits acquired under the discipline and training of the church. But they have been gradually losing them ever since, and the more advanced portions of them have got pretty clear of them, and thrown off, as they express it, the last rag of Popery. Indeed this is their boast.

In throwing off the authority of the church, they came in religious matters under the authority of the state, or the temporal sovereign or ruler--a purely human authority, without competency in spirituals--and thus lost at once their entire religious freedom, or liberty of conscience. In Catholic nations the civil authority has always, or almost always, been prone to encroach on the authority of the church, and to attempt to control her external discipline or ecclesiastical administration; but, in the nations that were carried away by the so-called reformation, the civil authority assumed in every instance complete control over the national church, and prescribed its constitution, its creed, its liturgy, and its discipline. This for them completely humanized religion, and made it a department of state. It is true these nations professed to recognize the Bible as containing a divine revelation, and to be governed by it; and this would have been something, even much, had they not remitted its interpretation to the civil magistrate, the king, the parliament, the public judgment of the people, or the private judgment of the individual, which made its meeting, as practically received, vary from nation to nation, and even from individual to individual.

This sacrificed, in principle, the sovereignty of God and the entire spiritual order, departed to a fearful distance from the truth and reality of things, and if it retained some of the precepts of the Christian law, it retained them as precepts not of the law of God but as precepts of the law of man, enjoined, explained, and applied by a purely human authority. In process of time, the authority of the state in religious matters was found to be usurped, tyrannical, and oppressive, and the thinking part of the separated nations asserted the right of private judgment, or of each believer to interpret the Holy Scriptures for himself. Having gone thus far, they went still farther, and assert for everyone the right to judge for himself not only of the meaning, but of the inspiration, authenticity, and authority of the Scriptures, though the civil government in none of these nations, except the United States, not in existence at the time of the separation, has disavowed its authority in spirituals. Practically, the doctrine that each individual judges for himself is now generally adopted.

The authority of the Scriptures has followed the authority of the church, and is practically, when not theoretically, rejected. It was perhaps asserted by the reformers at first for the purpose of presenting some authority not precisely human, which no Catholic would deny, as offset against that of the church, rather than from any deep reverence for it, or profound conviction of it« reality. But, be this as it may, it counts for little now. The authors of Essays and Reviews, and the Anglican bishop of Natal, take hardly less liberty with the {57} Scriptures than Luther and Calvin did with the church. The more advanced thinkers, if thinkers they are, of the age go further still, and maintain not only that a man may be a very religious man, and a true follower of Jesus Christ, without accepting either the authority of the church or that of the Bible, but without even believing either in the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Schleiermacher, the great Berlin preacher, went thus far in his Discourses on Religion, addressed to the Cultivated among its Despisers; and equally far, if not farther, in the same direction, go the rising school or sect called Positivists. Religion is reduced to a spontaneous development--perhaps I should say, to a secretion of human nature, implying no reality above or distinguishable from human nature itself.

It is not pretended that all persons in these nations have as yet reached this result; but as there is a certain logic in error as well as in truth, all are tending and must tend to it. What is called progress of religious ideas or religious enlightenment is not held to consist in any accession to our stock of known truth, in penetrating farther into the world of reality, and attaining a firmer grasp of its principles, nor in a better understanding of our moral relations and the duties growing out of them, but in simply casting off or getting rid of so-called Popery--of everything that has been retained in the nations, and the sects into which they divide and subdivide, furnished by the Catholic Church in which the reformers had been reared, and in reducing men and nations to the nakedness and feebleness of nature. The more advanced portion are already seen sporting _in puris naturalibus_, heedless alike of shame and winter's cold. The others are following more or less rapidly in the same direction; for there is no halting-place between Catholicity and naked naturalism, and men must either ascend to the one or descend to the other. But those who choose to descend can find no resting-place even in naturalism, for nature, severed from Catholicity, is severed from its principle, is severed from God, from the reality and truth of things, and is therefore unreal, nothing, Hence the descent is endless. Falsehood has no bottom, is unreal, purely negative, and can furnish no standing. Men can stand only on the true, the real, and that is Catholicity, the order represented in society by the church. Those who forsake the church, Catholicity, God, forsake therefore the real order, have nothing to stand on, and in the nature of the case can only drop into what the Scripture calls "the bottomless pit."

We hear much of the ignorance, superstition, and even of idolatry of Catholics, nothing of which is true; but this much is certain, that those who abandon the church, and succeed in humanizing religion, making it hold from man and subject to his control, do as really worship gods of their fashioning as did the old worshippers of gods made of wood and stone, because their religion is really only what they make it, and fall into as gross an idolatry and into as besotted and besotting a superstition as can be found among any heathen people, ancient or modern.

It is easy therefore to understand why the church sets her face so resolutely against modern reformers, liberals, revolutionists, in a word, the whole so-called movement party, professing to labor for the diffusion of intelligence and the promotion of science, liberty, and human progress. It is not science, liberty, or progress that she opposes, but false theories substituted for science, and the wrong and destructive means and methods of promoting liberty and progress adopted and insisted on by liberals and revolutionists. There is only one right way of effecting the progress they profess to have at heart, and that is by conforming to truth and reality, for falsehood is impotent, and nothing can be gained by it. She opposes the movement party, not as a movement party, not as a party of light, liberty, {58} and progress, but as a party moving in the wrong direction, putting forth unscientific theories, theories which amuse the imagination without enlightening the understanding, which if they dazzle it is only to blind with their false glitter, which embraced as truth to-day, must be rejected as falsehood to-morrow, and which in fact tend only to destroy liberty, and render all real progress impossible. As the party, collectively or individually, neither is nor pretends to be infallible, the church, at the worst, is as likely to be right as they are, and the considerations presented prove that she is right, and that they are wrong. There is no science but in knowing the truth, that which really is or exists, and there is no real progress, individual or social, with nature alone, because nature alone has no existence, and can exist and become more than it is only by the gracious, the supernatural assistance of God, in whom all things live, move, and have their being.

A great clamor has been raised by the whole movement party throughout the world against the encyclical of the Holy Father, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864, and even some Catholics, not fully aware of the sense and reach of the opinions censured, were at first partially disturbed by it; but the Holy Father has given in it only a proof of his pastoral vigilance, the fidelity of the church to her divine mission, and the continuous presence in her and supernatural assistance of the Holy Ghost. The errors condemned are all aimed at the reality and invariability, universality and persistency, of truth, the reality of things, the supremacy of the spiritual order, and the independence and authority of the divine law, at real science, and the means and conditions of both liberty and progress. In it we see the great value of the independence of the church,--of a church holding from God instead of holding from man. If the church had been human or under human control she would never have condemned those errors, because nearly all of them are popular, and hailed as truth by the age. Man condemns only what man dislikes, and the popular judgment condemns only what is unpopular. It is only the divine that judges according to truth, and without being influenced by the spirit of the age, or by what is popular or unpopular. If the church had been human, she would have been carried away by those errors, and proved herself the enemy instead of the friend, the protector, and the benefactor of society.

These remarks on the divine character and independence of the church are not inappropriate to the present times, and may serve to calm, comfort, and console Catholics amidst the national convulsions and changes which, without the reflections they suggest, might deeply afflict the Catholic heart. The successes of Italy and Prussia in the recent unjustifiable war against Austria, and the humiliation of the Austrian empire, the last of the great powers on which the church could rely for the protection of her material interests, have apparently given over the temporal government of this world to her enemies. There is at this moment not a single great power in the world that is officially Catholic, or that officially recognizes the Catholic Church as the church of God. The majority of Frenchmen are or profess to be Catholics, but the French state professes no religion, and if it pays a salary to the Catholic clergy, Protestant ministers, and Jewish rabbis, it is not as ministers of religion, but as servants of the state. The Russian state is schismatic, and officially anti-papal; the British state, as a state, is Protestant, and officially hostile to the church; Italy follows France; and Prussia, which at the moment means Germany, is officially Protestant and anti-Catholic; and so are Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Belgium and our own great Republic profess officially no religion, but give freedom and protection to all religions not held to be _contra bonos mores_. Spain and Portugal, no longer great powers, and {59} most of the Central and South American states, officially profess the Catholic faith, but they count for next to nothing in the array of nations. Hellas and the Principalities, like Russia, are schismatic, and the rest of the world, including the greater part of Asia and all of Africa, is Mahometan or pagan, and of course hostile to the church.

I have not enumerated Austria, for what is to be her fate no one can now say; but as a portion of her population belong to the Greek schismatic church, and a larger portion still are Protestants, the most that can be expected of her is that she will, in regard to religion, assume the attitude of France and Italy. There is then really no power on which the church can now rely for the support of her external and material interests. I will not say that the triumph of Prussia is the triumph of Protestantism, for that would not be true; but it is, at least for the moment, the success of the party that denounced the papal encyclical, and would seem to be a complete victory, perhaps a final victory, over that system of mixed civil and ecclesiastical government which grew up on the downfall of the Roman empire and the conversion of the barbarian nations that seated themselves on its ruins. It is the total and final destruction of the Christian empire founded, with the aid of the Pope and bishops, by Charlemagne and his nobles, and not unlikely will end in the complete severance of all official union of church and state--alike the official union between the state and the heretical and schismatic churches, and between the state and the Catholic Church; so that throughout the civilized world the people will be politically free to be of any religion they choose, and the state of no religion.

This result is already reached in nearly all the nations hitherto called Catholic nations, but not in the officially Protestant and schismatic nations; and for a long time to come the anti-Catholic or anti-papal religions, schismatical, heretical, Mahometan, and pagan religions, will be retained as official or state religions, with more or less of civil tolerance for Catholics. For the moment, the anti-papal party appears to be victorious, and no doubt believes that it is all over with the Catholic Church. That party had persuaded itself that the church, as a ruling body, was of imperial origin--that the papal power had been created by the edicts of Roman emperors, and that it depends entirely on the civil authority for its continuance. Hence they concluded that, if the church could be deprived of all civil support, it must fall. They said, the church depends on the papacy, and the papacy depends on the empire; hence, detach the empire--that is, the civil power--from the papacy, and the whole fabric tumbles at once into complete ruin. It is not improbable that, to confound them, to bring to naught the wisdom of the wise, and to take the crafty in their own craftiness, Providence has suffered them to succeed. He has permitted them to detach the empire, that they may see their error.

The successful party have reckoned without their host. They have reasoned from false premises, and come necessarily to false conclusions. The church is, undoubtedly, essentially papal as well as episcopal, and the destruction of the papacy would certainly be her destruction as the visible church; but it is false to assume that the papacy was created by imperial edicts and depends on the empire, for it is an indisputable historical fact that it existed prior to any imperial edict in its favor, and while the empire was as yet officially pagan, and hostile to the church. Hence it does not follow that detaching the empire from the papacy will prove its destruction. The church was as papal in its constitution when the whole force of the empire was turned against it, when it sought refuge in the catacombs, as it is now, or was in the time of Gregory VII. or Innocent III., and is as papal in this country, where it has no civil {60} support or recognition, as in Spain, or the Papal States themselves. The very principal, idea, and nature of the church, as we have set them forth in asserting the independence and supremacy of the spiritual order, of which she is the organ, contradict in the moat positive manner the dependency of the papacy on the empire.

The church as a visible body has, no doubt, temporal relations, and therefore temporal interests susceptible of being affected by the changes which take place in states and empires, and it is not impossible, nor improbable, that the recent changes in Europe may more or less deeply affect those interests. The papacy has itself so judged, and has resisted them with all the means placed at its disposal. These changes, if carried out, if completed, will affect in a very serious manner the relations of the papacy with temporal sovereigns, or, to use the consecrated term, with the empire, and many of its regulations and provisions for the administration of ecclesiastical affairs will certainly need to be changed or modified, and much inconvenience during the transition to the new state of things will no doubt be experienced. All changes from an old established order, though in themselves changes for the better, are for a time attended with many inconveniences. The Israelite's escaping from Egyptian bondage had to suffer weariness, hunger, and thirst in the wilderness before reaching the promised land. But whatever temporal changes or inconveniences of this sort the church in her external relations may have to endure, they are accidental, and by no means involve her destruction, or impair her power or integrity as the church of God, or divinely instituted organ of the spiritual order.

There is no question that the party that regards itself as having triumphed in the success of Italy and Prussia is bitterly hostile not only to what it calls the papal politics, but to the Catholic Church herself, and will not be satisfied with simply detaching the empire from her support, but will insist on its using all its power and influence against her. That party, indeed, demands religious liberty, but religious liberty, in its sense of the term, is full freedom for all religions except the Catholic, the only true, religion. Error, they hold, is harmless when reason is free, but truth they instinctively feel is dangerous to their views and wishes, and must for their safety be bound hand and foot. But suppose the worst; suppose the civil power becomes actively hostile to the church, prohibits by law the profession and practice of the Catholic religion, punishes Catholics with fines and imprisonment, fire and sword, the dungeon and the stake, the church will be no worse off than she was under the pagan emperors, hardly worse off than she was under even the Arians. The empire under the Jew and the Gentile exerted its utmost fury against her, and exerted it in vain. It found her irrepressible. The more she was opposed and persecuted, the more she flourished, and the blood of the martyrs fattened the soil for a rich growth of Catholics. Individuals and nations may be, as they have been, detached from her communion, and many souls for whom Christ died perish everlastingly, which is a fearful loss to them, and society may suffer the gains acquired to civilization during eighteen centuries to be lost, and moral and intellectual darkness gather anew for a time over the land, once enlightened by the Sun of righteousness, for God governs men as free moral agents, not as machines or slaves; but the church will survive her persecutors, and reconquer the empire for God and his Christ. Is she not founded on the Rock of Ages, and is it not said by him who is truth itself, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her?

It would be impossible to subject the church to a severer ordeal than she has time and again passed through, and it is not likely that her children will be exposed to greater trials than {61} those to which they were subjected in the fifth and sixth centuries by the subversion of the Roman empire by the pagan and Arian barbarians, or to suffer heavier calamities than were inflicted on them by the so-called reformation in the sixteenth century. The Protestants of today cannot be fiercer, more intolerant or fanatical than they were in the age of Luther and Calvin; and the infidels of to-day cannot be more envenomed against the church, or more bloodthirsty and brutal, than were the infidels in the French revolution; and all these the church has survived.

The well-being of society, its orderly, peaceful, and continuous progress, requires, as the Holy See has constantly maintained, the co-operation and harmonious action of the church and the empire or republic, but the church has seldom found the empire ready and willing to co-operate with her, and the record of the struggles between her and it fills more than a brief chapter in ecclesiastical and civil history. In point of fact, the church has usually found herself embarrassed and oppressed by officially Catholic states, and most of the popular prejudices that still exist against her owe their origin neither to her doctrines nor to her practices, but to the action of secular governments officially Catholic. In the last century, her bitterest enemies were the sovereigns of officially Catholic states; the most generous friends of the Holy See were states officially heretical or schismatic, as Russia, Great Britain, Sweden, and Prussia. Austria is humiliated and suffering now for being in the way of the anti-papal aggression, and every generous-hearted man sympathizes with her noble-minded and well-disposed if not able emperor, and it is no time to speak of her past shortcomings; but this much may be said, she has seldom been a generous supporter of the Holy See, and sometimes has been its oppressor.

Governments, like individuals, seldom profit by any experience but their own; yet experience has proved, over and over again, that governments the most powerful cannot, however determined on doing so, extirpate Catholicity by force from their dominions. Pagan Rome, once the haughty mistress of the world, tried it, made the profession of the Christian faith punishable with death, and death in the most frightful and excruciating forms, but failed. England, with all her power, with all her Protestant zeal, aided by her intense national prejudices, though she emulated the cruelties of the Caesars and even surpassed the Caesars in her craft and treachery, has never been able to extinguish the Catholic faith and love of the Irish people, the great majority of whom have never ceased to adhere to the Catholic religion. The church thrives under persecution, for to suffer for Christ's sake is a signal honor, and martyrdom is a crown of glory. The government can reach no farther than to the bodies and goods of Catholics, and he who counts it an honor to suffer, a crown to die, for his faith, fears nothing that can be done to those, and is mightier than king or kaiser, parliament or congress. The Christians, as Lactantius well says, conquered the world not by slaying but by being slain. Woe to him who slays the Catholic for his religion, but immortal honor and glory to him who is slain! Men are so constituted that they rarely love that which costs them nothing, no sacrifice. It is having suffered for our native land that hallows it in our affections, and the more we suffer for the church, the more and the more tenderly do we love her. St. Hilary accuses the Arian Constantius of being a worse enemy to the church then Nero, Decius, or Diocletian, for he seduced her prelates by favors, instead of enabling them to acquire glory in openly dying for the faith.

The civil power can never uproot Catholicity by slaying Catholics, or robbing the church of her temporalities. Impoverish the church as you will, you cannot make her poorer than she was {62} in our Lord himself, who had not where to lay his head, nor than she was in the twelve apostles when they went forth from that "upper room" in Jerusalem to conquer the world. She has never depended upon the goods of this world as the means of accomplishing her mission, and her possessions have often been an embarrassment, and exposed her to the envy, cupidity, and rapacity of secular princes. If deprived by the revolution of the temporalities of her churches, and left destitute, so to apeak, of house or home, she can still offer up "the clean oblation," as she has often done, in private houses, barns, groves, catacombs, caverns in the earth, or clefts in the rocks.

The church has frequently been deprived of her temporal possessions and of all temporal power, but the poor have suffered by it more than she. She is really stronger in France today than she was in the age of Louis XIV., and French society is, upon the whole, less corrupt than in the time of Francis I. Religion revives in Spain in proportion as the church losers her wealth. There are no countries where the church has been poorer than in Ireland and the United Slates, and none where her prosperity has been greater. Let matters, then, take the worst turn possible, Catholics have little to fear, the church nothing to apprehend, except the injury her enemies are sure to do themselves, which cannot fail to afflict her loving heart.

Yet, whatever may be the extent of the changes effected or going on in the states and empires of Europe, I apprehend no severe or prolonged persecution of Catholics. The church in this world is and always will be the church militant, because she is not of this world, and acts on principles not only above but opposed to those on which kings and kaisers and the men of this world act. She therefore necessarily comes in conflict with them, and could render them no service if she did not. Conflicts there will be, annoyances and vexations must be expected; but in all the European states as well as our own, if we except Sweden and Denmark, there is too large a Catholic population to be either massacred, exiled, or deprived of the rights of person and property common to all citizens or subjects. The British government has been forced to concede Catholic emancipation, and all appearances indicate that she will be forced ere long to place Catholics in all respects on a footing of perfect equality with Protestants before the state. Prussia, should she, as is possible, absorb all Germany, will have nearly as many Catholic as Protestant subjects, and though she may insist on remaining officially Protestant and anti-Catholic, she will find it necessary to her own peace and security to allow her Catholic subjects to enjoy liberty of religion and equal civil rights. The mass of the Italian people are Catholic, and will remain Catholics; and these are not times when even absolute, much less constitutional, sovereigns can afford to is the it's and convictions of any considerable portion of their people.

The anti-papal party may prove strong enough to deprive the Holy Father of his temporal sovereignty and make Rome the capital of the new kingdom of Italy; that is undoubtedly laid down in the programme, and is only a natural, a logical result of Napoleon's campaign of 1859 against Austria and Napoleon holds that the logic of events must be submitted to. He said in 1859 that there were two questions to be settled, the Italian question and the Roman question. As the former has been settled by expelling the Austrians from Italy, so the latter is likely to be settled by the deprivation of the Pope as temporal sovereign--the plan of settlement being evidently to secure to the anti-papal party all it demands. Austria humiliated cannot interpose in behalf of the temporal sovereignty, and is reported to have abandoned it; Napoleon will not do it, unless compelled, for he has been the determined but politic enemy of that sovereignty ever {63} since, with his elder brother, he engaged in a conspiracy, in 1831, to destroy the papal government; and Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, all anti-Catholic states, will abandon the papal throne to the logic of events. Under the providence of God, it depends on the Italian people whether the Holy Father shall retain his temporal sovereignty or not, and what they will do nobody can say. They are capable of doing anything hostile to the Pope one moment, and next falling on their knees before him, and, with tears in their eyes, begging his absolution.

But beyond the rights of the Supreme Pontiff as sovereign of the Roman state, I cannot apprehend any serious attacks on the papacy; or after the first fury has passed, even on ecclesiastical property. Much hostility for a time will be displayed, no doubt, against the monastic orders, and where they have any property remaining in their possession. It, not unlikely, will be confiscated, and the right of the church to be a proprietor legally denied or not recognized, yet property dedicated to religious uses still will be passably secure under the general law protecting citizens and their rights of property, to make gifts _inter vivos_, and testamenary bequests. The law will gradually become throughout Europe what it is with us. The civil law in the United States knows nothing of the canons of the Church establishing religious orders, or of the vows taken by the religious; it takes no cognizance of the church herself, it recognizes in her no proprietary rights, and gives her no standing in the courts, and yet nowhere is ecclesiastical property better protected or more secure, and nowhere are religious orders more free in person or more secure in property. This proceeds from the right of property secured to the citizens, and the right of the church, and of religious orders, not as proprietors, but, if I may so speak, as recipiendaries, or their right to receive enjoy eleemosynary gifts, grants, and bequests in whatever form made, which the courts protect according to the will of the donors or testators. There may be great inconveniences resulting from the inevitable changes taking place, great wrong is pretty sure to be done. The church has a valid right to be a proprietor, and it is a great crime and a great sin to rob her of any of her possessions; but she can carry on, and in most countries long has carried on, her mission without the law recognizing any proprietary rights.

Present appearances indicate that the church throughout the world will be thrown back, as she was in the beginning, on her internal resources as a spiritual kingdom; that she will cease to be the official church any nation--at least for a time, if not for ever; and that she will not henceforth govern or protect her children as civil life communities, states, or empires through their civil rulers, but simply as Catholics, individual members of her communion, through her own spiritual ministry, her bishops and prelates alone, without any official relation with the state. She can then exercise her full spiritual authority over her own members, as the independent kingdom of God on earth, free from all entangling alliances with the shifting policies of nations.

It is not assumed that the changes recent events have produced, or are producing, were desirable, are not evil, or are not brought about by evil passions, and from motives which every lover of truth and right does and must condemn; all that is argued is, that the church can survive them, and with less detriment to her material interests than her enemies have contemplated. Nothing that has taken place is defended, or defensible; but who can say that God in his gracious providence will not overrule all to the glory of his church and the good of them that love him? Who knows but he has given the victory to his enemies for the very purpose of confounding them, and showing them how vain are all their strivings against him and the order he has established? That is very victory, seemingly so {64} adverse and so afflicting to the Catholic heart, may prove to be the means of emancipating the church from her thraldom to the secular powers officially Catholic, but really anti-Catholic in spirit, and of preparing the way for her to labor more effectually than ever for the advancement of truth, the progress of civilization, and the salvation of souls! It is the prerogative of God to overrule evil for good, and the church, though immovable in her foundation, inflexible in her principles, and unchanging in her doctrines, has a wonderful capacity of adapting herself to all stages of civilization, and to all the changes in states and empires that may take place; she is confined within no national boundaries, and wedded to no particular form of civil government--she can subsist and carry on her work under Russian autocracy or American democracy, with the untutored savage and the most highly cultivated European, and is equally at her ease with the high and the low, the learned and the unlearned, the rich and the poor, the bond and the free. The events which, to all human judgment, seem adverse often turn out to be altogether in our favor. "All those things are against me," said the patriarch Jacob, when required to send his son Benjamin down to Egypt, and yet the event proved that they were all for him. When the Jews with wicked hands took our Lord and slew him, crucified him between two thieves, they, no doubt, thought that they had succeeded, and that it was all over with him and his work; but what they did was a means to the end he sought, for it was only in dying that he could accomplish the work he came to do.

The detachment of the empire from the church, which has been effected for purposes hostile to her, and with the hope of causing her destruction, perhaps will prove to her enemies that she does not rest on the state, that the state is far more in need of her than she of it, and show in a clear and unmistakable light her independence of all civil support, her inexhaustible internal resources, her supernatural energy and divine persistence. The empire detached from her and abandoning her to herself, or turning its force against her, will cease to incumber her with its official help, will no longer stand as an opaque substance between her and the people, intercepting her light, and preventing them from beholding her in her spiritual beauty and splendor. The change will allay much political hostility, remove most of the political prejudices against her, and permit the hearts of the people to turn once more towards her as their true mother and best friend. It may in fact tend to revive faith, and prepare the nations to reunite under her divine banner. Be this as it may, every Catholic knows that she is in herself independent of all the revolutions of states and empires, of all the changes of this world, and feels sure that she is imperishable, and that in some way the victories of her enemies will turn out to be their defeat, and the occasion of new triumphs for her.

{65}

From The Month

THE MYSTERY OF THE THATCHED HOUSE.

It was a clean, bright, wholesome, thoroughly lovable house. The first time I saw it, I fell in love with it, and wanted to live in it at once. It fascinated me. When I crossed its threshold, I felt as if I had opened a book whose perusal promised enchantment. I felt a passionate longing to have been born here, to have been expected by the brown old watchful walls for years before it had been my turn to exist in the world. I felt despoiled of my rights; because there was here a hoard of wealth which I might not touch, placed just beyond the reach of my hand. I was tantilized; because the secrets of a sweetly odorous past hung about the shady corners, and the sunny window-frames, and the grotesque hearth-places; and their breath was no more to me than the scent of dried rose-leaves.

It was my fault that we bought the Thatched House. We wanted a country home; and, hearing that this was for sale, we drove many miles one showery April morning to view the place, and judge if it might suit our need. Aunt Featherstone objected to it from the first, and often boasted of her own sagacity in doing so, after the Thatched House had proved itself an incubus--a dreadful Old Man of the Mountains, not to be shaken from our necks. I once was bold enough to tell her that temper, and not sagacity, was the cause of her dislike that April morning. We drove in an open phaeton, and Aunt Featherstone got some drops of rain on her new silk dress. Consequently she was out of humor with everything, and vehemently pronounced her veto upon the purchase of the Thatched House.

I was a spoiled girl, however; and I thought it hard that I might not have my own way in this matter as in everything else. As we drove along a lonely road, across a wild, open country, I had worshipped the broken, gold-edged rain-clouds, and the hills, with their waving lines of light and their soft trailing shadows. I had caught the shower in my face, and laughed; and dried my limp curls with my pocket-handkerchief. I was disposed to love everything I saw, and clapped my hands when we stopped before the sad-looking old gates, with their mossy brick pillars, and their iron arms folded across, as if mournfully forbidding inquiry into some long hushed-up and forgotten mystery. When we swept along the silent avenue my heart leaped up in greeting to the grand old trees, that rose towering freshly at every curve, spreading their masses of green foliage right and left, and flinging showers of diamond drops to the ground whenever the breeze lifted the tresses of a drowsy bough, or a bird poised its slender weight upon a twig, and then shot off sudden into the blue.

Aunt Featherstone exclaimed against the house the very moment we came in sight of it. It was not the sort of thing we wanted at all, she said. It had not got a modern porch, and it was all nooks and angles on the outside. The lower windows were too long and narrow, and the upper ones too small, and pointing up above the eaves in that old-fashioned, inconvenient manner. To crown its {66} absurdities, the roof was thatched. No, no, Aunt Featherstone said, it was necessary for such old houses to exist for the sake of pictures and romances; but as for people of common sense going to live in them, that was out of the question.

I left her still outside with her eyeglass levelled at the chimneys, and darted into the house to explore. An old woman preceded me with a jingling bunch of keys, unlocking all the doors, throwing open the shutters and letting the long levels of sunshine fall over the uncarpeted floors. It was all delicious, I thought; the long dining-room with its tall windows opening like doors upon the broad gravel, the circular drawing-room with its stained-glass roofing, the double flights of winding stairs, the roomy passages, the numerous chambers of all shapes and sizes opening one out of another, and chasing each other from end to end of the house; and above all, the charming old rustic balcony, running round the waist of the building like a belt, and carrying one, almost quick as a bird could fly, from one of those dear old pointed windows under the eaves down amongst the flower-beds below.

I said to myself in my own wilful way, "This Thatched House must be my home!" and then I set about coaxing Aunt Featherstone into my way of thinking. It was not at all against her will that she completed the purchase at last. Afterwards, however, she liked to think it was so.

In May it was all settled. The house was filled with painters and paper-hangers, and all through the long summer months they kept on making a mess within the walls, and forbidding us to enter and enjoy the place in the full glorious luxuriance of its summer beauty. At last, on driving there one bright evening, I found to my joy that the workmen had decamped, leaving the Thatched House clean and fresh and gay, ready for the reception of us, and our good's and chattels. I sprang in through one of the open dining-room windows, and began waltzing round the floor from sheer delight. Pausing at last for breath, I saw that the old woman who took care of the place, she who had on my first visit opened the shutters for me and jingled her keys, had entered the room while I danced, and was standing watching me from the doorway with a queer expression on her wrinkled face.

"Ah, ha! Nelly," I cried triumphantly, "what do you think of the old house now?"

Nelly shook her gray head, and shot me a weird look out of her small black eyes. Then she folded her arms slowly, and gazed all round the room musingly, while she said:

"Ay, Miss Lucy! wealth can do a deal, but there's things it can't do. All that the band of man may do to make this place wholesome to live in has been done. Dance and see now, pretty lady--now, while you have the heart and courage. The day'll come when you'd as soon think of sleepin' all night on a tombstone as of standin' on this floor alone after sunset."

"Good gracious, Nelly!" I cried, "what do you mean? Is it possible that there is anything--have you heard or seen--"

"I have heard and seen plenty," was Nelly's curt reply.

Just then, a van arriving with the first instalment of our household goods, the old woman vanished; and not another word could I wring that evening from her puckered lips. Her words haunted me, and I went home with my mirth considerably sobered; and dreamed all night of wandering up and down that long dining-room in the dark, and seeing dimly horrible faces grinning at me from the walls. This was only the first shadow of the trouble that came upon us in the Thatched House.

It came by degrees in nods and whispers, and stories told in lowered tones by the fireside at night. The servants got possession of a rumor, and the rumor reached me. I shuddered in silence, and contrived for the {67} first few months to keep it a jealous secret from my unsuspecting aunt. For the house was ours, and Aunt Featherstone was timorous; and the rumor, very horrible, was this--the Thatched House was haunted.

Haunted, it was said, by a footstep, which every night, at a certain hour, went down the principal corridor, distinctly audible as it passed the doors, descended the staircase, traversed the hall, and ceased suddenly at the dining-room door. It was a heavy, unshod foot, and walked rather slowly. All the servants could describe it minutely, though none could avow that they had positively heard it. New editions of this story were constantly coming out, and found immediate circulation. To each of these was added some fresh harrowing sequel, illustrative of the manners and customs of a certain shadowy inhabitant, who was said to have occupied the Thatched House all through the dark days of its past emptiness and desolation, and who resented fiercely the unwelcome advent of us flesh-and-blood intruders. The tradition of this lonely shade was as follows: The builder and first owner of the Thatched House was an elderly man, wealthy, wicked, and feared. He had married a gentle young wife, whose heart had been broken before she consented to give him her hand. He was cruel to her, using her harshly, and leaving her solitary in the lonely house for long winter weeks and months together, till she went mad with brooding over her sorrows, and died a maniac. Goaded with remorse, he had shut up the house and fled the country. Since then different people had fancied the beautiful, romantic old dwelling, and made an attempt to live in it; but they said that the sorrowful lady would not yield up her right to any new-comer. It had been her habit, when alive, to steal down stairs at night, when she could not sleep for weeping, and to walk up and down the dining-room, wringing her hands, till the morning dawned; and now, though her coffin was nailed, and her grave green, and though her tears ought to have been long since blown from her eyes like rain on the wind, still the unhappy spirit would not quit the scene of her former wretchedness, but paced the passage, and trod the stairs, and traversed the hall night after night, as of old. At the dining-room door the step was said to pause; and up and down the dreary chamber a wailing ghost was believed to flit, wringing her hands, till the morning dawned.

It was not till the summer had departed that I learned this story.

As long as the sun shone, and the roses bloomed, and the nightingales sang about the windows till midnight, I tried hard to shut my ears to the memory of old Nelly's hint, and took good care not to mention it to my aunt. If the servants looked mysterious, I would not see them; if they whispered together, it was nothing to me. There was so short a time for the stars to shine between the slow darkening of the blue sky at night and the early quickening of flowers and birds and rosy beams at dawn, that there was literally no space for the accommodation of ghosts. So long as the summer lasted, the Thatched House was a dwelling of sunshine and sweet odors and bright fancies for me. It was different, however, when a wintry sky closed in around us, when solitary leaves dangled upon shivering boughs, and when the winds began to shudder at the windows all through the long dark nights. Then I took fear to my heart, and wished that I had never seen the Thatched House.

Then it was that my ears became gradually open to the dreadful murmurs that were rife in the house; then it was that I learned the story of the weeping lady, and of her footstep on the stairs. Of course I would not believe, though the thumping of my heart, if I chanced to cross a landing, even by twilight, belied the courage of which I boasted. I forbade the servants to hint at such folly as the existence of ghosts, and warned them {68} at their peril not to let a whisper of the kind disturb my aunt. On the latter point I believe they did their best to obey me.

Aunt Featherstone was a dear old, cross, good-natured, crotchety, kind-hearted lady, who was always needing to be coaxed. She considered herself an exceedingly strong-minded person, whereas she was in reality one of the most nervous women I have ever known. I verily believe that, if she had known that story of the footstep, she would have made up her mind to hear it distinctly every night, and would have been found some morning stone-dead in her bed with fear. Therefore, as long as it was possible, I kept the dreadful secret from her ears. This was in reality, however, a much shorter space of time than I had imagined it to be.

About the middle of November Aunt Featherstone noticed that I was beginning to look very pale, to lose my appetite, and to start and tremble at the most commonplace sounds. The truth was that the long nights of terror which passed over my head, in my pretty sleeping-room off the ghost's corridor, were wearing out my health and spirits, and threatening to throw me into a fever; and yet neither sight nor sound of the supernatural had ever disturbed my rest--none worth recording, that is; for of course, in my paroxysms of wakeful fear, I fancied a thousand horrible revelations. Night after night I lay in agony, with my ears distended for the sound of the footstep. Morning after morning I awakened, weary and jaded, after a short, unsatisfying sleep, and resolved that I would confess to my aunt, and implore her to fly from the place at once. But, when seated at the breakfast-table, my heart invariably failed me. I accounted, by the mention of a headache, for my pale cheeks, and kept my secret.

Some weeks passed, and then I in my turn began to observe that Aunt Featherstone had grown exceedingly dull in spirits. "Can any one have told her the secret of the House?" was the question I quickly asked myself. But the servants denied having broken their promise; and I had reason to think that there had been of late much less gossip on the subject than formerly. I was afraid to risk questioning the dear old lady, and so I could only hope and surmise. But I was dull, and Aunt Featherstone was dull, and the Thatched House was dreary. Things went on in this way for some time, and at last a dreadful night arrived. I had been for a long walk during the day; and had gone to bed rather earlier than usual, and fallen asleep quickly. For about two hours I slept, and then I was roused suddenly by a slight sound, like the creaking of a board, just outside my door. With the instinct of fear I started up, and listened intently. A watery moon was shining into my room, revealing the pretty blue-and-white furniture, the pale statuette and the various little dainty ornaments with which I had been pleased to surround myself in this my chosen sanctuary. I sat up shuddering and listened. I pressed my hands tightly over my heart, to try and keep its throbbing from killing me; for distinctly, in the merciless stillness of the winter night, I heard the tread of a stealthy footstep on the passage outside my room. Along the corridor it crept, down the staircase it went, and was lost in the hall below.

I shall never forget the anguish of fear in which I passed the remainder of that wretched night. While cowering into my pillow, I made up my mind to leave the Thatched House as soon as the morning broke, and never to enter it again. I had heard people whose hair had grown gray a single night, of grief or terror. When I glanced in the looking-glass at dawn, I almost expected to see a white head upon my own shoulders.

During the next day I, as usual, failed of courage to speak to my aunt. I desired one of the maids to sleep on the couch in my room, keeping this {69} arrangement a secret. The following night I felt some little comfort from the presence of a second person near me; but the girl soon fell asleep. Lying awake in fearful expectation, I was visited by a repetition of the previous night's horror. I heard the footstep a second time.

I suffered secretly in this way for about a week. I had become so pale and nervous, that I was only like a shadow of my former self. Time hung wretchedly upon my hands. I only prized the day inasmuch as it was a respite from the night; the appearance of twilight coming on at evening, invariably threw me into an ague-fit of shivering. I trembled at a shadow; I screamed at a sudden noise. My aunt groaned over me, and sent for the doctor.

I said to him, "Doctor, I am only a little moped. I have got a bright idea for curing myself. You must prescribe me a schoolfellow."

Hereupon Aunt Featherstone began to ride off on her old hobby about the loneliness, the unhealthiness and total objectionableness of the Thatched House, bewailing her own weakness in having allowed herself to be forced into buying it. She never mentioned the word "haunted," though I afterward knew that at the very time, and for some weeks previously, she had been in full possession of the story of the nightly footstep. The doctor recommended me a complete change of scene; but instead of taking advantage of this, I asked for a companion at the Thatched House.

The prescription I had begged for was written in the shape of a note to Ada Rivers, imploring her to come to me at once. "Do come now," I wrote; "I have a mystery for you to explore. I will tell you about it when we meet." Having said so much, I knew that I should not be disappointed.

Ada Rivers was a tall, robust girl, with the whitest teeth, the purest complexion, and the clearest laugh I have ever met with in the world. To be near her made one fed healthier both in body and mind. She was one of those lively, fearless people who love to meet a morbid horror face to face, and put it to rout. When I wrote to her, "Do come, for I am sick," I was pretty sure she would obey the summons; but when I added, "I have a mystery for you to explore," I was convinced of her compliance beyond the possibility of a doubt.

It wanted just one fortnight of Christmas Day when Ada arrived at the Thatched House. For some little time beforehand, I had busied myself so pleasantly in making preparations, that I had almost forgotten the weeping lady, and had not heard the footstep for two nights. And when, on the first evening of her arrival, Ada stepped into the haunted dining-room in her trim flowing robe of crimson cashmere, with her dark hair bound closely round her comely head, and her bright eyes clear with that frank unwavering light of theirs, I felt as if her wholesome presence had banished dread at once, and that ghosts could surely never harbor in the same house with her free step and genial laugh.

"What is the matter with you?" said Ada, putting her hands on my shoulders, and looking in my face. "You look like a changeling, you little white thing! When shall I get leave to explore your mystery?"

"To-night," I whispered, and, looking round me quickly, shuddered. We were standing on the hearth before the blazing fire, on the very spot where that awful footstep would pass and repass through the long, dark, unhappy hours after our lights had been extinguished, and our heads, laid upon our pillows.

Ada laughed at me and called me a little goose; but I could see that she was wild with curiosity, and eager for bedtime to arrive. I had arranged that we should both occupy my room, in order that, if there was anything to be heard, Ada might hear it. "And now what is all this that I have to learn?" said she, after our door had been fastened for the night, and we sat looking at one another with our dressing-gowns upon our shoulders.

{70}

As I had expected, a long ringing laugh greeted the recital of my doleful tale. "My dear Lucy!" cried Ada, "my poor sick little moped Lucy, you surely don't mean to say that you believe in such vulgar things as ghosts?"

"But I cannot help it," I said. "I have heard the footstep no less than seven times, and the proof of it is that I am ill. If you were to sleep alone in this room every night for a month, you would get sick too."

"Not a bit of it!" said Ada, stoutly; and she sprang up and walked about the chamber, "To think of getting discontented with this pretty room, this exquisite little nest! No, I engage to sleep here every night for a month--alone, if you please--and at the end of that time, I shall not only be still in perfect health, my unromantic self, but I promise to have cured you, you little, absurd, imaginative thing! And now let us get to bed without another word on the subject. 'Talking it over,' in cases of this kind, always does a vast amount of mischief."

Ada always meant what she said. In half an hour we were both in bed, without a further word being spoken on the matter. So strengthened and reassured was I by her strong, happy presence that, wearied out by the excitement of the day, I was quickly fast asleep. It was early next morning when I wakened again, and the red, frosty sun was rising above the trees. When I opened my eyes, the first object they met was Ada, sitting in the window, with her forehead against the pane, and her hands locked in her lap. She was very pale, and her brows were knit in perplexed thought. I had never seen her look so strangely before.

A swift thought struck me. I started up, and cried, "O Ada! forgive me for going to sleep so soon. _I know you have heard it_."

She unknit her brows, rose from her seat, and came and sat down on the bed beside me. "I cannot deny it." she said gravely; "_I have heard it._ Now tell me, Lucy, does your aunt know anything of all this?"

"I am not sure," I said; "I cannot be, because I am afraid to ask her. rather think that she has heard some of the stories, and is anxiously trying to hide them from me, little thinking of what I have suffered here. She has been very dull lately, and repines constantly about the purchase of the house."

"Well," said Ada, "we must tell her nothing till we have sifted this matter to the bottom."

"Why, what are you going to do?" I asked, beginning to tremble.

"Nothing very dreadful, little coward!" she said, laughing; "only to follow the ghost if it passes our door to-night; I want to see what stuff it is made of. If it be a genuine spirit, it is time the Thatched House were vacated for its more complete accommodation. If it be flesh and blood, it is time the trick were found out."

I gazed at Ada with feelings of mingled reverence and admiration. It was in vain that I tried to dissuade her from her wild purpose. She bade me hold my tongue, get up and dress and think no more about ghosts till bedtime. I tried to be obedient; and all that day we kept strict silence on the dreadful subject, while our tongues and hands and (seemingly) our heads were kept busily occupied in helping to carry out Aunt Featherstone's thousand-and-one pleasant arrangements for the coming Christmas festivities.

During the morning, it happened that I often caught Ada with her eyes fixed keenly on Aunt Featherstone's face, especially when once or twice the dear old lady sighed profoundly, and the shadow of an unaccountable cloud settled down upon her troubled brows. Ada pondered deeply in the interval of our conversation, though her merry comment and apt suggestion were always ready as usual when occasion seemed to call for them. {71} I noticed also that she made excuses to explore rooms and passages, and found means to observe and exchange words with the servants. Ada's bright eyes were unusually wide open that day. For me, I hung about her like a mute, and dreaded the coming of the night.

Bedtime arrived too quickly; and when we were shut in together in our room, I implored Ada earnestly to give up the wild idea she had spoken of in the morning, and to lock fast the door, and let us try to go to sleep. Such praying, however, was useless. Ada had resolved upon a certain thing to do, and this being the case, Ada was the girl to do it.

We said our prayers, we set the door ajar, we extinguished our light, and we went to bed. An hour we lay awake, and heard nothing to alarm us. Another silent hour went past, and still the sleeping house was undisturbed. I had begun to hope that the night was going to pass by without accident, and had just commenced to doze a little and to wander into a confused dream, when a sudden squeezing of my hand, which lay in Ada's, startled me quickly into consciousness.

I opened my eyes; Ada was sitting erect in the bed, with her face set forward, listening, and her eyes fastened on the door. Half smothered with fear, I raised myself upon my elbow and listened too. Yes, O horror! there it was--the soft, heavy, unshod footstep going down the corridor outside the door. It paused at the top of the staircase, and began slowly descending to the bottom. "Ada!" I whispered, with a gasp. Her hand was damp with fear, and my face was drenched in a cold dew. "In God's name!" she sighed, with a long-drawn breath; and then she crept softly from the bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and went swiftly away out of the already open door.

What I suffered in the next few minutes I could never describe, if I spent the remainder of my life in endeavoring to do so. I remember an interval of stupid horror; while leaning on my elbow in the bed, I gazed with a fearful, fascinated stare at the half-open door beside me. Then, through the silence of the night there came a cry.

It seemed to come struggling up through the flooring from the dining-room underneath. It sounded wild, suppressed, smothered, and was quickly hushed away into stillness again; but a horrible stillness, broken by fitful, confused murmurs. Unable to endure the suspense any longer, I sprang out of bed, rushed down the stairs, and found myself standing in the gray darkness of the winter's night, with rattling teeth, at the door of the haunted dining-room.

"Ada! Ada!" I sobbed out, in my shivering terror, and thrust my hand against the heavy panel. The door opened with me, I staggered in, and saw----a stout white figure sitting bolt upright in an arm-chair, and Ada standing quivering in convulsions of laughter by its side. I fell forward on the floor; but before I fainted quite, I heard a merry voice ringing through the darkness,

"O Lucy! your Aunt Featherstone is the ghost!"

When I recovered my senses, I was lying in bed, with Ada and my aunt both watching by my side. The poor dear old lady had so brooded over the ghost-stories of the house, and so unselfishly denied herself the relief of talking them over with me, that, pressing heavily on her thoughts, they had unsettled her mind in sleep. Constantly ruminating on the terror of that ghostly walk, she had unconsciously risen night after night, and most cleverly accomplished it herself. Comparing dates, I found that she had learned the story of the spirit only a few days before the night on which I had first been terrified by the footstep.

The news of Aunt Featherstone's escapade flew quickly through the house. It caused so many laughs, that the genuine ghosts soon fell into ill repute. The legend of the weeping lady's rambles became divested of its dignity, and grew therefore to be quite harmless. Ada and I laughed over our adventure every night during the rest of her stay, and entered upon our Christmas festivities with right goodwill. I have never forgotten to be grateful to Ada for that good service which she rendered me; and as for Aunt Featherstone, I must own that she never again said one word in disparagement of the Thatched House.

{72}

From the German.

THE RESURRECTION.

Rise? Yes, with the myriads of the just, After short sleep, my dust! Life of immortal fire Thine from the Almighty Sire! Alleluia!

Sown, to upspring, O joy! in richer bloom, The Lord of harvest's tomb Gives forth his sheaves within---- Us, even us, who died in him! Alleluia!

O victory! O dayspring's kindling ray! God's everlasting day! In the grave's solemn night. Slumbering, soon shall thy light Wake me to sight.

As if of visionary dream the end---- With Jesus to ascend Through joy's celestial door---- Pilgrims of earth no more---- Our sorrows o'er.

My Saviour, to the Holiest leading on; That we may at the throne, In sanctuary free. Worship eternally! Alleluia!

F. W. P.

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Original

AUBREY DE VERE. [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: Search after Proserpine, and other Poems. London, 1843.

Poems. by Aubrey de Vere. London, 1855.

The Sisters, Inisfail, and other Poems. London, 1861

May Carols. New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1866.]

Out of the greater breadth and catholicity, so to speak, of our present literary taste, it results that one class of poets is arising among as which has been very rare before our day: those in whom the soul is the predominant force--men who care nothing for popularity, and barely enough for recognition by their peers to make them publish at all--men by nature high-strung and shy, yet tranquil, balanced, and strong; who write, in short, from the spiritual side of things. These could not, in ordinary times, hope for a wide, general favor, and they sailed the nautiluses of literature; dropping from the surface of themselves, equally native to the cooler, deeper waters below. But so strong have been the gales of awakening love of reading, that even these stranger ships, not bound for the ports of popularity, find wind enough to waft them wherever refinement and scholarship care to deal in their rare and choice cargoes.

An extreme of this class is Aubrey de Vere. Naturally not a poet of the people, and still further isolated by holding and eloquently celebrating a faith which incurs certain ostracism from the literature of sectarian bigotry, he is almost unknown in America. Fresh from his works, we are almost at a loss to understand how, in a country not only of so many Catholic leaders, but where there is so much pretension to literary taste, he can be such a stranger. All the usual and more accessible sources are so barren of his biography that we cannot trust ourselves to attempt any sketch of his life. From materials so meagre and of such indifferent authenticity, nothing satisfactory--nothing vivified--can be gathered; and biography that fails in personality is a body without a soul. So we content ourselves with the poet as we see him in his works.

In attempting an analysis of the qualities displayed in these volumes, we find, to begin with, none of the inequalities of those writers who begin quite young, and whose works go comet-like through after years, the youthful nebulosity tailing off from the maturer nucleus, in a long string of promising but not much performing versicles. There is none of the crudeness of journey work, but everywhere thought and gravity. The latter quality indeed is conspicuous. De Vere can be too sarcastic for us to deny him wit, but humor seems to be unknown to him. There is not the ghost of a joke in all his pages. We call this remarkable, because he treats of so very many things. In Thomson's Seasons (even waiving Thomson's nationality) or Paradise Lost--in any one poem--we may not expect humor; but in a miscellany, where every side of a man's mind usually displays itself, it seems odd not to find a trace of sense of the ludicrous. Certainly there is variety enough for it. The range of subjects is perhaps not very great, but the individual poems exhibit almost every shade of style, beginning on the hither side of quaintness and bringing up on the boundaries of the colloquial. {74} An artificial style like that of the Idyls of the King, or the Emersonian dialect ("_virtute ac vitiis sapientia crescat_"), our author never attempts; his thoughts, as a rule, seem to choose their own channel. He is willing enough to spend pains in making a thought clear, but such grave, antique costuming of ideas he takes no time for. The manner is always kept well in subordination to the matter of what he has to say.

There is a strange versatility in these books in unconsciously adopting peculiarities of other writers. The author himself, in his notes, acknowledged this, or rather detects himself after the fact, in a few instances; but though acute so far, he does not see half. More honest and unconscious imitation there never was, and just as the impression of the archetype rarely rose to a fact of consciousness, so the consequent resemblance seldom amounts to a traceable parallelism. There is no reproduction of passages, but of characteristics. A shade, a turn of phrase, a suggestion, a _soupçon_, as we read, recalls at once some great writer. The sonnets are full of subtle odors and flavors of Shakespeare, evanescent, intangible, and charming. There are also what the French would call "coincidences of style" with Coleridge, and often, especially in the May Carols, with Tennyson. Both are easily accounted for; the one by kindred tendencies to philosophy, the other by the strong likeness in plan to In Memoriam. But perhaps the most singular of all occurs in the very forcible poem called The Bard Etheil, which bears a curious resemblance to the poet of all poets the very opposite of De Vere--Robert Browning. There is nothing at all like this poem in all our author's works. It stands as saliently alone as a meteoric boulder in a meadow. The subject is an Irish bard, a relic of the bardic days, but a zealous convert to a Christianity of his own, tinged with a wild, ineradicable barbarism, whose outcroppings make the interest of the character. There is all Browning's sharp outline sketching, all his power of handling contradictions of character, yet none of the topsy-turvy words and sentences without which the Great Inversionist would not be himself;--in short, it is Browning with the constitutional gnarl in the grain left out.

Another--a closer parallelism than usual--we find in The Year of Sorrow:

"The weaver wove till all was dark. And long ere morning bent and bowed Above his work with fingers stark. And made, nor knew he made, a shroud."

The terrible parallel passage in the Song of the Shirt is too familiar to need more than an allusion.

Yet through all these coincidences runs an abundant individuality that proves De Vere to be anything but a wilful or even permissive plagiarist. He is, in simple truth, a great reader, with a mind in such true tune with all things high and refined, that it responds as the accordant string of some delicate instrument echoes a musical note. There needs no better test than this, that mere imitators invariably copy faults, while Mr. De Vere always reproduces excellences.

In point of language, our author inherits an Irishman's full measure of vocabulary. Through a most varied series of metres, his verse is full of ease, fluency, and grace. In rhythm he rises to the rank of an artist. He has passed the first degree--that baccalaureateship of verse-making whose diploma is perfect smoothness and melody; where Tom Moore took a double first, and beyond which so few ever attain. He is one of the _maestri_, like Tennyson and Swinburne, who know the uses of a discord, and can handle diminished sevenths. His lines are full of subtle shadings, and curious subfelicities of diction, that not every one feels, and few save the devotee to metre (such as we own ourselves to be) pause to analyze and admire. His taste, too, is fastidiously unerring; there is never a swerve beyond the cobweb boundaries of the line of beauty. {75} Sometimes he misses the exact word he wants, but he never halts for want of a good one. The only deficiency arises from his temperament. Where spirit demands to be heard in sound as felt in sense, he uniformly fails. He cannot often make his lines bound and ring like Moore's. In the face of the fiery episodes of Irish history which he deals with in Inisfail, he is too often like one of his own bards on a modern battle-field.

So much for the mere style; the man himself remains. Pre-eminently he is a philosopher--too much of one to be a great poet. Not that any man can be a poet at all without being also a philosopher. Only his philosophy should be to his poetry as a woman's brain to her heart--a suggesting, subordinate element--the "refused" wing of his progress. With him it is just the reverse. Philosophy is the primary fact of his inner life, out of which blossom incidentally his poetry and his patriotism, but whose legitimate and beautiful fruit is his religion. The consequence is, everything is too much a development of high principle, instead of an impulse of deep feeling. He is too _right_, too reasonable, too well-considered. He has not enough _abandon_. This one, but final and fatal fault to the highest poetical success, ramifies curiously through everything he writes. The first result is occasionally too much abstractness. There are fetters of thought poetry cannot be graceful in. Her vocation is to lead us among the fostered flowers and whispering groves of the beautiful land, not to go botanizing far up the cold heights, among the snow-growths, whose classification is caviare to the general. There let science climb with her _savans_. On rare occasions, indeed, the poet may tellingly deal with the naked truths of nature, but it demands the inspiration of a Lysimachus and the glorious contours of a Phryne. Tennyson, in his In Memoriam, has touched with the rarest felicity on the most pregnant problems of natural divinity, without even rippling the smoothness of his verse; De Vere has done the same, with excellent success, in his May Carols; but he tries too often not to fail oftener than we could wish. It must be owned an honorable failure; not of strength, but of grace. His lines lift the weight they grapple with, but he does not interest us in the labor. At the risk of trespassing on time-honored critical demesnes, we differ with that tacit _consensus doctorum_ which suffers sonnets, and some other things, to be as abstract as the author pleases.

Another effect of this over-philosophic temperament, while equally hurtful to his popularity, greatly endears him to the few. It is the pure and elevated tone of all he writes. In this quality he is eminent. He is a mountaineer on the steeps of Parnassus, whose game by instinct never flies to the plains. He lifts ordinary subjects into a seeming of unreality. Things seem to lose outline and glide away from the grasp; as clouds that have form enough when seen from the earth, are shapeless vapor to the aeronaut among them. So, again, the interest fails in comparison with a lower grade of thought. People will buy very indifferent sketches, but care very little for the most accurate bird's-eye view. There is a singular charm in this unlabored, if not unconscious loftiness; but the mass of readers weary, as they do of a lecture on astronomy, from over-tension of unused faculties. What is the difference to a reader whether an author passes beyond his reach by going apart into abstruseness or soaring away into idealism?

We have shown before how the versification suffers. Everywhere reason clogs the wings of rhyme. Our author is for ever putting his Pegasus in harness to the car of some truth or other. A warm human sympathizer, a deep and poetical worshipper, a burning and noble protestant against the woes and wrongs of Ireland, with scholarship, reading, talent, every auspicious omen, he has never fulfilled, and may never fulfil, the promise that is in him. {76} His reason is for ever making clear to his better angels of fancy and feeling the exact boundaries of just thought, which they may not overstep. It robs his philanthropy of human tenderness, his religion of ardor, his patriotism of enthusiasm. His is the calm, trained strength of perfect mental soundness; the fiery contractile thrills, that make of the impassioned man a giant for one grand effort, he seems to do battle with and slay before they can grow into acts. What a combination of qualities goes to the making of a great poet!

The poems now before us range themselves mainly into three grand classes--sonnets, religions poems, and lyrics, etc., on Ireland. There are some noteworthy exceptions, however--as, for example, the excellent poems on Shelley and Coleridge, whom he thoroughly appreciates, the widely known stanzas called The AEolian Harp, and the splendid lines on Delphi--one of his very best efforts. But our purpose lies rather with the poet, as revealed through his works, than with the poems themselves. So we must leave a wide, unnoted margin of miscellaneous pieces, where any reader whom we may succeed in interesting in the beauties of our author may range unprejudiced by our expressions of opinion, and confine ourselves to our true subject--the poet himself, viewed successively in the three great pathways he has opened for himself. We only pause to advise our reader that we make no pretensions to gathering the harvest, but leave golden swathes behind instead of ordinary gleaning.

Sonnets seem to require a peculiar talent. Almost all our best men have written them, and almost all badly, while the small newspaper and periodical craft strand on them daily. Only our deepest and most refined thinkers have written really good ones, and to succeed in them at all, is to join a very limited coterie, where Shakespeare and Milton have but few compeers. When, then, we say that De Vere is the author of some of the best we have in our literature, we justify high expectation.

He is one of the most voluminous of sonnet writers. There are in the books between one hundred and fifty and two hundred. It seems to be his favorite outlet for those briefer, choicer reflections that lose their charm by being amplified for the vulgar comprehension,

". . . . As orient essences, diffuse On all the liberal airs of low Cashmere, Waft their rich faintness far to stolid hinds, To whom the rose is but a thorny weed;"

but which, after all, are the trifles that make up the inner life of a soul, and for whose waste, as our author himself says,

"Nature, trifled with, not loved, Will be at last avenged."

It may well be imagined that this is a path peculiarly adapted to our author's contemplative yet versatile mind. He is singularly fitted for this style of composition, which does not demand the least particle of that kind of spirit and impulsive animation in which he is wanting; and accordingly he has written a number of sonnets which will, we think, compare with the very best for eloquence and just thought. Walter Savage Landor--_non sordidus auctor_--deliberately pronounced the one on Sunrise the finest in the language.

Two others, by which he is probably best known to American readers, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, one written March, 1860, the other, June 12, 1861, addressed to Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the North American Review. Both relate to the national struggle, and indicate a somewhat lively interest in our affairs, but otherwise are not remarkable. Much better than these we find the following. It is a good sample besides of the author's general style:

"Silence and sleep, and midnight's softest gloom, Consoling friends of fast declining years, Benign assuagers of unfruitful tears, Soft-footed heralds of the wished-four tomb! Go to your master, Death--the monarch whom Ye serve, whose majesty your grace endears. And in the awful hollows of his ears Murmur, oh! ever murmur: 'Come, O come!' Virginal rights have I observed full long, And all observance worthy of a bride. Then wherefore, Death, dost thou to me is wrong, So long estranged to linger from my side? Am I not thine? Oh! breathe upon my eyes A gentle answer, Death, from thine elysian skies!"

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It is no easy thing to be publicly and yet gracefully sad. Do not we mentally associate an idea of weakness or effeminacy with melancholic writings? Yet here is--we feel it at once--the true sadness we all respect: the unaffected weariness which does not cry out its grief, but sighs because it suffers and is strong.

It is not often that De Vere leaves the lofty pinnacles of thought or the pleasant hills of fancy for sterner fields, but here for once he swoops from his eyrie into the following scathing lines. They are the last of five very spirited sonnets on Colonization, each of which is worth quoting, did but our space permit:

"England, magnanimous art thou in name; Magnanimous in nature once thou wert; But that which ofttimes lags behind desert, And crowns the dead, as oft survives it--fame. Can she whose hand a merchant's pen makes tame, Or sneer of nameless scribe--can she whose heart In camp or senate still is at the mart, A nation's toils, a nation's honors claim? Thy shield of old torn Poland twice and thrice Invoked; thy help as vainly Ireland asks, Pointing with stark, lean linger from the West-- Of western cliffs plague-stricken, from the West-- Gray-haired though young. When heat is sucked from ice, Then shall a Firm discharge a national task."

This speaks for itself. It sums up the faults of the English nation better in a dozen lines than a congress of vaporers about British tyranny or essayists on _perfide Albion_ could do in a month of mouthings. There is not a weak line or phrase in it, or one that is not auxiliary to the general effect intended. This, in short, is what we call masterly.

There are a score of other sonnets that we would wish to quote in illustration of the refined thought and elegant delicacy of diction which characterize them all; but we are constrained to content ourselves with one also noticed by Landor for its singular felicity and beauty. It is from his first book, page 268:

"Flowers I would bring. If flowers could make thee fairer. And make, if the muse were dear to thee; (For loving these would make thee love the bearer.) But sweetest songs forget their melody, And loveliest flowers would but conceal the wearer: A rose I marked, and might have plucked; but she Blushed as she bent, imploring me to spare her, Nor spoil her beauty by such rivalry. Alas! and with what gifts shall I pursue thee. What offerings bring, what treasures lay before thee; When earth with all her floral train doth woo thee, And all old poets and old books adore thee; And love to thee is naught; from passionate mood Secured by joy's complacent plenitude?"

This poem is remarkable to us as containing one of the few recognitions we have ever seen of that beauty which rises above the province of passion, and strikes a dim awe into admiration. They are not many who can feel it, and few, indeed, who have expressed it. The same thought occurs in another passage referred to by Landor:

"Men loved; but hope they deemed to be A sweet impossibility."

But we have a further reason for preferring this to several equally fine. It is to note what may be another of De Vere's unconscious adaptations. The well-known scholar, Henry of Huntington, addressed to Queen Adelicia of Louvaine some lines which hinge upon the very same turn of thought. The real excellence of the verses emboldens us to subjoin a few of them, that the reader may observe the resemblance:

"Anglorum regina, tuos, Adeliza, decores Ipsa rcferre parans Musa stupore riget. Quid diadema tibi, pulcherrima? quid tibi gemma? Pallet gemma tibi, nec diadema nitet. Ornamenta cave; nec quicquam luminis inde Accipis; illa nitent lumine clara tuo . . . ."

We are not sure but the mediaeval poet, having no further idea beyond mere laudation, has rather the better of the complimenting. But then praise to a queen would be flattery to a subject.

Without trying the rather dubious policy of attempting to prove our taste, we think that upon these sonnets alone we could rest De Vere's claim to be a first-class sonnet writer. If it were not a received impossibility, we should be tempted to call him the equal in this respect of Shakespeare. Of course we admit the impossibility.

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Leaving the sonnets, we come to a far more interesting portion of the works before us--the religious poems. As a Christian, our author is indeed admirable. He evinces not only a deep, strong, real, and realizing faith, but much fruitful thought over the mental details, so to speak, and a wonderful comprehension of the theory, theology, and mysteries of the church.

More properly than religious poems, we should speak of poems on religion; for the man's whole life is a religious poem. Scarcely a scrap is not full of his deep Catholicity. Of verses specially and professedly devotional, these volumes contain few, besides the May Carols, save some Poems on Sacred Subjects, which we find below the author's average. Some of them carry abstractness to the verge of vagary. What color of pretence, for instance, has a man for printing (if he _must_ write it), and deliberately inviting the public to read, a copy of verses on the Unity of Abstract Truth? We internally know we are not Wordsworths, but it is very unpleasant to have it made so plain. In shrewd anticipation of any mental queries, we utterly decline saying whether we have read the lines or not. We cannot determine which would be the more to our credit.

But we pass by unnumbered beauties to reach our author's best and most memorable work--May Carols. This is noble alike in design, tone, and execution. The plan is simple--to produce a series of poems in honor of the Blessed Virgin, graduating poetical expositions of her relations to faith according to the progress of her month of May. It is just the topic for him, and the result is the most beautiful development of the entire subject that can be imagined. We have no words for the subtlety and success with which the individualities of Mary and Jesus are wrought out. The man who, without seeking adventitious aid by startling and shocking the habits of Christian thought and Christian reverence, can so draw a portrait of the Saviour, has in this alone deserved the thanks of the ages as a standard-bearer on the march of the hosts of God. These great delineations form the first and main function of the whole work. We cannot set forth his purpose more lucidly than in his own words, as we find them in the preface:

"The wisdom of the church, which consecrates the fleeting seasons of time to the interests of eternity, has dedicated the month of May (the birth-day festival, as it were, of creation) to her who was ever destined in the divine counsels to become the Mother of her Creator. It belongs to her, of course, as she is the representative of the incarnation, and its practical exponent to a world but too apt to forget what it professes to hold. The following poems, written in her honor, are an attempt to set forth, though but in mere outline, each of them some of the great ideas or essential principles embodied in that all-embracing mystery. On a topic so comprehensive, converse statements, at one time illustrating highest excellence compatible with mere creaturely existence, at another, the infinite distance between the chief of earthly creatures and the Creator, may seem, at first sight, and to some eyes, contradictory, although in reality mutually correlative. On an attentive perusal, however, that harmony which exists among the many portions of a single mastering truth can hardly fail to appear, and with it the scope and aim of this poem."

This certainly is aiming high. Not only does the poet include in his plan the moral delineation of her whom the church holds the highest type of created humanity; he scales the heavens themselves. But our author is impious Enceladus crushed beneath his own presumption, but a Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and rising to the infinite sky in beatific visions. Perhaps we best realize the boldness of the enterprise when we think for how many centuries the praise of the Mother and Son has exhausted thought and imagination of the greatest souls. He is a daring gleaner who follows the fathers of the church over their chosen fields. Yet the May {79} Carols are a sheaf from the same golden foison where Augustine and Aquinas and Chrysostom led the reapers. How fruitful must be the soil!

We have never seen anything to compare with the picture of the Holy Child here presented, unless it be the picture of the Holy Mother. We cannot, in our allotted space, render all the admirable gradations and delicate shadings, but must cull with difficult choice one or two only. One of the first is the

MATER CHRISTI

Daily beneath his mother's eyes Her lamb maturity his lowliness: 'Twas hers the lovely sacrifice With fillet and with flower to dress.

Beside his little cross he knelt, With human-heavenly lips he prayed; _His will with in her will she felt, And yet his will her will obeyed_. . . .

He willed to lack; he willed to bear; He willed by suffering to be schooled; He willed the chains of flesh to wear; Yet from her arms the world he ruled.

_As tapers 'mid the noontide glow With merged yet separate radiance burn_, With human taste and touch, even so, The things he knew he willed to learn.

He sat beside the lowly door: His _homeless_ eyes appeared to trace In evening skies remembered lore, And shadows of his Father's face.

One only knew him. She alone Who nightly to his cradle crept. And _lying like the moonbeam prone Worshipped her Maker as he slept_.

Whoever can read that without admiring it, is a clod: whoever can read it without having his whole idea of Christ's childhood intensely vivified and expanded, must be a St. John or an angel. How beautiful, and, when we look at it, how bold is the epithet "homeless!" How exactly it embodies the longing of his spirit out of its human prison toward the freedom of the heavens! Yet how daringly true to imagine the omnipresent Deity homeless! Again, how acutely the last scene characterizes the tender timidity of Mary's mother-love, and how natural and intensely human the conscious, sweet self-deception which brought her to worship when only the humanity slept, and she seemed separated from her Son and alone with her Creator! But the simile of the taper is perhaps the best touch of all, as being the masterly expression of one of the most subtle and difficult conceptions of the human mind. It must divide the honors of comparison with the concluding lines of the

MATER SALVATORIS.

O heart with his in just accord! O soul his echo, tone for tone! O spirit that heard, and kept his word! O countenance moulded like his own!

Behold, she seemed on earth to dwell; But, hid in light, alone she sat Beneath the throne ineffable, Chanting her clear magnificat.

Fed from the boundless heart of God, The Joy within her rose more high. And all her being overflowed, Until the awful hour was nigh.

Then, then there crept her spirit o'er The shadow of that pain world-wide, Whereof her Son the substance bore;-- Him offering, half in him she died.

_Standing like that strange moon, whereon The mask of earth lies dim and dead, An orb of glory, shadow-strewn, Yet girdled with a luminous thread_.

For originality, and perfect expression of an idea by an image, we know of nothing better in all our range of poetry than those two similes. That last is especially wonderful for its reconditeness. Who would ever think of an annular eclipse of the moon as an illustration of religion? And yet how marvellously well it does illustrate! The first verse of the poem is very poor and strained in its rhythm, and the second not much better in its mysticism, which is rather adapted to the enthusiasm of the middle ages; but the end counterbalances all.

Having thus digressed to the Blessed Virgin, we go on to note in how many lights these poems display her. The idea of her they present is, to an ordinary idea, as the flashing, many-faceted jewel to the rough gem of the mines. Here, for example, the whole poetry of motherhood is pressed into her service in a few dense lines:

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O Mother-Maid! to none save thee Belongs in full a parent's name: So faithful thy virginity, Thy motherhood so pure from blame!

All other parents, what are they? Thy types. In them thou stood'st rehearsed, (As they in bird, and bud, and spray). Thine Antitype? The Eternal First!

Prime Parent He: and next Him thou! Overshadowed by the Father's Might, Thy 'Fiat' was thy bridal vow; Thine offspring He, the "Light of Light."

Her Son Thou wert: her Son Thou art, O Christ! Her substance fed Thy growth:-- She shaped Thee in her virgin heart, Thy Mother and Thy Father both!

Let us pass on from this, without breaking the continuity, to

CONSERVABAT IN CORDE.

As every change of April sky Is imaged in a placid brook, Her meditative memory Mirrored His every deed and look.

As suns through summer ether rolled Mature each growth the spring has wrought, _So Love's strong day-star turned to gold Her harvests of quiescent thought_.

_Her soul was as a vase, and shone Translucent to an inner ray; Her Maker's finger wrote thereon A mystic Bible new each day_.

Deep Heart! In all His sevenfold might The Paraclete with thee abode; And, sacramented there in light, Bore witness of the things of God.

The last verse has a flaw rare in these volumes--a mixture of metaphors. In the first two lines, "heart" is strongly personified, and clearly represents Mary herself. In the third with no intimation whatever, and without a break in the construction of the sentence, the same heart is become a place, and is indicated by "there." We cannot imagine how the author, with his susceptible taste, read it over in the proof-sheets without feeling the jar of the phrases.

So much for the loving side of Mary's character. In depicting her suffering, the poet has even excelled this. The first broad stroke of his picture is

MATER DOLOROSA

She stood: she sank not. Slowly fell Adown the Cross the atoning blood. In agony ineffable She offered still His own to God.

No pang of His her bosom spared; She felt in Him its several power. But she in heart His Priesthood shared: She offered Sacrifice that hour. . . .

Beautifully our author hag named the succeeding poem also Mater Dolorosa. The one is the agony of loss, the other the bitterness of bereavement:

From her He passed: yet still with her The endless thought of Him found rest; A sad but sacred branch of myrrh _For ever folded in her breast_.

A Boreal winter void of light-- So seemed her widowed days forlorn: _She slept; but in her breast all night Her heart lay waking till the morn_.

Sad flowers on Calvary that grew;-- Sad fruits that ripened from the Cross;-- These were the only joys she knew: Yet all but these she counted loss.

Love strong as Death! She lived through thee That mystic life whose every breath _From Life's low harp-string amorously Draws out the sweetened name of Death_.

Love stronger far than Death or Life! Thy martyrdom was o'er at last Her eyelids drooped; and without strife To Him she loved her spirit passed.

For once we can leave the of a poem to the unaided italics with a good grace. To expound the exquisiteness of these lines would be like botanically dissecting a lily. But there is a deeper underlying excellence that may perhaps not suggest itself so irresistibly--the marvellous intuitive delicacy of the whole conception embodied by this poem. Only a truly profound religious feeling could thus happily have characterized the effect of such a sorrow on such a nature. A mere pietist would have painted a sanctified apathy; a merely smart writer would have imbued her with an eagerness for the end of earthly trouble; a man of talent would have made her resigned to death; the man of genius makes her resigned _to life_. Here is the effortless exactness of true poet.

Two more views, and we can turn from this picture of the Blessed Virgin of the May Carols--one, her human and inferior relation to God; and the other, her human and superior relation to ourselves. To the first point, perhaps the most explicit of the poems is the following, which, also, is a good example of the author s peculiar, sudden manner of turning his broad philosophy into the channel of some forcible application:

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Not all thy purity, although The whitest moon that ever lit The peaks of Lebanonian snow Shone dusk and dim compared with it;--

Not that great love of thine, whose beams Transcended in their virtuous heat Those suns which melt the ice-bound streams, And make earth's pulses newly beat:--

It was not these that from the sky Drew down to thee the Eternal Word: He looked on thy humility; He knew thee, "Handmaid of thy Lord."

Let no one claim with thee a part; Let no one, Mary, name thy name, While, aping God, upon his heart Pride sits, a demon robed in flame.

Proud Vices, die! Where Sin has place Be Sin's familiar self-disgust. Proud Virtues, doubly die; that Grace At last may burgeon from your dust.

But the poem which of all most truly, tenderly, and perfectly develops the whole beautiful spiritual dependence of the true Catholic upon the Mother of his God, is the Mater Divinae Gratis, already published in The Catholic World for May, p. 216.

The beauty of this piece has already attracted wide attention. The wonder is that any Catholic could have passed it by. It is a theological treatise in itself. Could all the repositories of divinity furnish a more complete reputation of those cold and narrow organisms (we hesitate to call them hearts) whose breasts would seem to have room for just so much piety, of a prescribed quality and regulation pattern, and who insist that every one we love is a unit in the divisor which assigns to each his portion of that known and limited store, our affection? These people sincerely cannot see how one can love Mary too without loving God less. It is as if a tree could not strike another root without sapping its trunk. Perish this narrowness! How long before these strait-laced souls--the moral progeny of that unhappiest of men, Calvin--will learn to love God as well as believe in him?

There is something very difficult of analysis about the power of these poems. They have none of that dramatic force which consists in skilfully selecting and emphasizing the striking sonnets of the situation. De Vere's strength does not seem to tend toward the outward personality, but rather lies in the direction of the soul and its sensations. When we lay down the May Carols, we do not conceive a whit the more clearly how the Virgin Mary looked; there is no impression to overlie and mar our memories of the great painters' pictures of her. But we cannot read aright without bearing away an expanded comprehension and near, real, vivid insight into her love, her pain, her humility, her deserving, her glory. We so enter in spirit into the scenes of her life as absolutely to lose sight of the surroundings. This kind of power may not be the most broadly effective, but we must admit that it reaches our admiration through our best faculties. Its secret lies in the fact that the author's own ideas both of Christ and his Mother are so complete and exalted. At what advantage, for example, he stands over the author of Ecce Homo, who, it seems, would have us believe Christ in his childhood to have been a Hebrew boy, much like other Hebrew boys, till ill-explained causes metamorphosed a Galilean peasant youth into the most transcendent genius of history! With this cold casuistic theory compare De Vere's picture of the mother lying worshipping by the moonlit cradle of her Son and God. He accepts in their entirety the received ideas of the church, neither varying nor wishing to vary one jot or tittle of the law, but lovingly investing it with all the developments of thought and all the decorations of fancy. No Catholic can help being struck by the singular doctrinal accuracy which pervades without perturbing the whole of this work. The result is a portraiture of the incarnation and the Blessed Virgin, such as an author who could set all the ruggedness of Calvary before our eyes, and make every waving olive-leaf in Gethsemane musically mournful in our souls, could not hope to rival by all the efforts of graphic genius.

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But scarcely less remarkable is the success in the other grand aim of the May Carols--what he himself calls "an attempt at a Christian rendering of external nature." His attempt has brought forth a series of purely descriptive pieces, interspersed at intervals, intended to present the symbolism which the aspect of May's successive phases might offer to the imagination of faith. To cultivate Christianity in the shifting soil of fancy is of itself a bold endeavor; but when the method proposed is by picturing the delicate and evanescent shades of spring's advance, the difficulty can be realized.

How far the author succeeds in this most subtle undertaking of educing the symbolism of May, we must leave to country criticism for final adjudication. We have our opinion; we can discover many sweet emblems; but we cannot analyze or reason out our thoughts satisfactorily. We recognize portraits in the May-gallery, but are not familiar enough with nature's costumes to judge of the historical order. We can exult with the earth in the gladness of the season; we are permeated in a measure, as are all, with the influences of the bluer skies, the softer breezes, the more confident advance of the flowers. But when it comes to reading the succession of the changing clouds, harmonizing the melody of the gales, deciphering the hieroglyphics that spring's myriad fingers write in verdure on the woods and meadows, we feel that ours is but a city acquaintance with May. We have rested too well content with the beauty to think of its moral suggestiveness or significance.

But this we do know, that the author has struck such a vein of descriptive felicity that, according to Dr. Holmes's witty logic, he can afford to write no more description till he dies. There are touches of this here and there in other places, but nothing to promise such little gems of landscape as stud the May Carols. There is an accession of naturalness and a flow of happy phrases as soon as he reaches one of these themes, that is like swimming out of fresh water into salt. Take for instance, this:

When April's sudden sunset cold Through boughs half-clothed with watery sheen Bursts on the high, new-cowslipped wold, And bathes a world half gold half green,

_Then shakes the illuminated air_ With din of birds; the vales far down Grow phosphorescent here and there; Forth flash the turrets of the town;

Along the sky thin vapors scud; _Bright zephyrs curl the choral main;_ The wild ebullience of the blood Rings joy-bells in the heart and brain:

Yet in that music discords mix; The unbalanced lights like meteors play; And, tired of splendors that perplex, The dazzled spirit sighs for May.

It is a great disadvantage to these beautiful little poems to be thus taken from their frames, thereby losing their emblematic and retaining only their intrinsic beauty. But even so, there are two more which we fearlessly present on the merit of their own unaided charms. Here is the first:

Brow-bound with myrtle and with gold, Spring, sacred now from blasts and blights, Lifts in a firm, untrembling hold Her chalice of fulfilled delights.

Confirmed around her queenly lip The smile late wavering, on she moves; And seems through deepening tides to step Of steadier joys and larger loves.

The stony Ash itself _relents, Into the blue embrace of May Sinking, like old impenitents Heart-touched at last;_ and, far away,

_The long wave yearns along the coast_ With sob suppressed, like that which thrills (While o'er the altar mounts the Host) Some chapel on the Irish hills.

We scarcely know which to admire most, the precise, clear-cut elegance of the opening personification, the beauty of the third verse, or the melody (how the first line matches the sense!) and admirable comparison in the last one. Only, if the poet had ever waded among the waves of bloom of our western prairies, he would have found a better expression than the awkward one of "deepening tides," which is out of character with the rest.

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But the last one we give is the finest. We had put it in the first rank ourselves before finding that it had also struck the fine ear of Mr. Landor. It is a Claude Lorraine done into verse:

Pleasant the swarm about the bough; The meadow-whisper round the woods; And for their coolness pleasant now The murmur of the falling floods.

Pleasant beneath the thorn to lie, And let a summer fancy loose; To hear the cuckoo's double cry; To make the noon-tide sloth's excuse.

Panting, but pleased, the cattle stand Knee-deep in water-weed and sedge, And scarcely crop the greener band Of osiers round the river's edge.

But hark! Far off the south wind sweeps The golden-foliaged groves among, Renewed or lulled, with rests and leaps-- Ah! how it makes the spirit long

To drop its earthly weight, and drift Like yon white cloud, on pinions free, Beyond that mountain's purple rift, And o'er that scintillating sea!

We do not think we can say anything that will add to this.

There are two very noticeable faults of detail in the May Carols. One is the great occasional looseness of rhyme. We are no lover even of the so-called rhymes to the eye--words ending, but not pronounced alike--but when there is no similarity of sound at all, we emphatically demur. Here are some, taken at random, of the numberless false rhymes which disfigure these poems: "Hills--swells;" "height--infinite;" "best--least" (these last two in one short piece of sixteen lines); "buds--multitudes;" "repose--coos;" "flower--more;" "pierce--universe," etc. Now such as these are utterly indefensible. The different sounds of the same vowel are as different among themselves as from any other sounds, and there is no sense in taking advantage of the accident that they are represented by the same letter to cheat the ear and plead the poverty of the alphabet. In a man who labored for words, we could condone a roughness here and there; but in a writer of De Vere's fluency there is no excuse for such gross carelessness.

We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression--a ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas--that is unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to fighting-weight--all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish.

It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his writings. Irish they are to the core--as animated as the best in proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders--but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn on it. Most of the best among his single poems--The Irish Celt to the Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and others--are either too long or too close-woven for quotation. Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts, independent of the Irish bearing.

[Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London, 1848.]

But the most prominent and elaborate of these poems is Inisfail, or Ireland in the Olden Time--a chronological series of odes, songs, and all manner of remarks in rhyme, illustrative of Ireland's history and the feeling of her people, through the various epochs of her national and denationalized life. There is more historical research, more talent, and more time buried to waste in this poem, than would make ten ordinary shallow reputations. The author shows a thorough and a _vitalized_ knowledge of Irish history, and he penetrates well and nobly the {84} succession of popular sentiment; nay, he has done a more difficult thing still--he has caught much of the spirit of bardic verse. Only our very decided and deliberate opinion is, that the spirit of bardic verse is extremely like the gorilla--very hard to catch, and not particularly beautiful when caught. We have read, we are fairly sure, the better part of the English-Irish poetry that has attained any note--that class of which Clarence Mangan stands at the head, and are very much grieved and dissatisfied with it. Wherever the Gaelic ode-form is adopted, or the Gaelic symbolism--the Roisin Dhu, Silk of the Kine, etc.--we cannot help wishing it absent. Whatever has pleased us in poems of this sort would have pleased as well or better in another guise; whatever has fatigued or offended, has generally done so on account of its Gaelic form. From weary experience, we have reached the firm conclusion that the Gaelic style is peculiarly adapted to the Erse tongue, and we earnestly hope that future twangings of the harp that hung in Tara's halls may be either in the aforesaid dialect, or else, like Moore's Irish Melodies (and does any one wish for anything more nobly Irish?), consonant in style with the spirit of the language they are written in. The best talent devoted to grafting Gaelic blossoms on English stems has only served to show them essentially uncongenial. Every attempt of this kind reads like a translation from Erse into English, and, like all translations, hints in every turn of the superiority of the original. And, speaking disinterestedly (we are, as it happens, neither Gael nor Sassenach), we scarcely think any translator likely to swim in waters where Clarence Mangan barely floated.

Thus we admire much of Inisfail for the wonderful adaptiveness which revivifies for us the dead feelings of dead generations, while at the same time we cannot thoroughly like nor enjoy it. There is great artistic taste throughout, but the poetical merit, as indeed might be expected, Appears to us to be greatest in the delineations from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century--neither too far nor too near in point of time. The outlawry times elicit some fine lines: in fact, violation of law seems always to bring our author out at his best. Of the earlier poems, perhaps the best are The Malison and The Faithful Norman. These are of the first, or pure Irish period. The next, or Irish-Norman epoch, is full of the best and the worst of our author's verse. Of The Bard Ethell we have spoken before. The Bier that Conquered is a striking poem, as are also the quaint, rambling, suggestive lines called The Wedding of the Clans. Amid several long, fierce, and highly Gaelic exultations over battles, chiefs, and things in general, we find a noble poem. The Bishop of Ross, which we really regret we cannot quote here. Just before it, however, is one of the best which we may have space for:

KING CHARLES'S "GRACES."

A.D. 1626

"Thus babble the strong ones, 'The chain is slackened! Ye can turn half round on your sides to sleep! With the thunderbolt still your isle is blackened, But it hurls no bolt upon tower or steep. We are slaves in name! Old laws proscribed you; But the king is kindly, the Queen is fair. They are knaves or fools who would goad or bribe you A legal freedom to claim. Beware!'

II.

"We answer and thus: Our country's honor To us is dear as our country's life! That stigma the bad law casts upon her Is the brand on the fame of a blameless wife Once more we answer: From honor never Can safety long time be found apart; The bondsman that vows not his bond to sever, Is a slave by right, and a slave in heart!"

There is the true ring about this--strength and spirit both. Close by it is another--the only one of the odes we like--The Suppression of the Faith in Ulster, which is of the same calibre.

The last book (there are three) is full of beauty as the style grows modern. But we have cited so much that is beautiful, that we prefer quoting one of the few but forcible instances where our most Christian poet gives vent to his very considerable powers of sarcasm:

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GOOD-HEARTED.

"The young lord betrayed an orphan maid-- The young lord soft-natured and easy: The man was 'good-hearted,' the neighbors said; Flung meat to his dogs; to the poor flung bread. His father stood laughing when Drogheda bled; He hated a conscience queasy!

II.

"A widow met him, dark trees o'erhead, Her child and the man just parted-- When home she walked her knife it was red; Swiftly she walked, and muttered, and said, 'The blood rushed fast from a fount full-fed! Ay, the young lord was right "good-hearted!"'

III.

"When morning wan its first beam shed. It fell on a corpse yet wanner; The great-hearted dogs the young lord had fed Watched, one at the feet and one at the head-- But their months with a blood-pool hard by were red; They loved--in the young lord's manner."

There is something about the fierce bitterness here that strongly reminds one of Tennyson's poem of The Sisters, with its weird line--

"Oh! the Earl was fair to see!"

From several of very nearly the same purport, we select the following, influenced to choose it, as we own, by the wonderful flow of its measure, as well as its truly Irish beauty. There is a kind of peculiar richness of diction that no other nation on earth ever attains. Every reader of Tom Moore will know what we mean, and recognize a kindred spirit in

SEMPER RADEM

"The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean, Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright; And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotion Swells up as to meet it, _and clings to its light_. The orb, unabiding, grows whiter, mounts higher; _The pathos of darkness descends on the brine_-- O Erin! the North drew its light from thy pyre; Thy light woke the nations; the embers were thine.

II.

"'Tis sunrise! The mountains flash forth, and, new-reddened, The billows grow lustrous so lately forlorn; From the orient with vapors long darkened and deadened. _The trumpets of Godhead are pealing the morn:_ He rises, the sun, in his might reascending; _Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea!_ O Erin! who proved thee returns to thee, blending The future and past in one garland for thee!"

But what we regard as really the finest poem in Inisfail is an apparent, perhaps a real, exception to our rule above stated, that whatever of this poetry pleases us would please as well if divested of its Gaelic form. The charm of this lies in its being so essentially Irish in conception. It is just such an original, bold, wild inspiration as no other body than an Irish clan could without incongruity be made to feel. There is more intense _Irishness_ (what other word will express it?) in it than in all the poems--ay, and half the poets--of this century. We give it with the author's own explanation prefixed:

THE PHANTOM FUNERAL.

"James Fitz-Garret, son of the great Earl of Desmond, had been sent to England, when a child, as a hostage, and was for seventeen years kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in the Queen's religion. James Fitz-Thomas, the 'Sugane Earl,' having meantime assumed the title and prerogatives of Earl of Desmond, the Queen sent her captive to Ireland, attended by persons devoted to her, and provided with a _conditional_ patent for his restoration .... As the young earl walked to church, it was with difficulty that a guard of English soldiers could keep a path open for him. From street and window and housetop every voice urged him to fidelity to his ancestral faith. The youth, who did not even understand the language in which he was adjured, went on to the Queen's church, as it was called; and with loud cries his clan rushed away and abandoned his standard for ever. Shortly afterward he returned to England, where, within a few months, he died.

Strew the bed and strew the bier (Who rests upon it was never man) With all that a little child holds dear, With violets blue and violets wan.

Strew the bed and strew the bier With the berries that redden thy shores, Corann; His lip was the berry, his skin was clear As the waxen blossom--he ne'er was man.

Far off he sleeps, yet we mourn him here; Their tale was a falsehood; he ne'er was man! 'Tis a phantom funeral! Strew the bier With white lilies brushed by the floating swan.

They lie who say that the false queen caught him A child asleep on the mountains wide; A captive reared him, a strange faith taught him;-- 'Twas for no strange faith that his father died!

They lie who say that the child returned A man unmanned to his towers of pride; That his people with curses the false Earl spurned: Woe, woe, Kilmallock! they lie, and lied!

The clan was wroth at an ill report. But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears. The child that was motherless played. "'Twas sport." A child must sport in his childish years!

Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low! The women of Desmond loved well that child! Our lamb was lost in the winter snow; Long years we sought him in wood and wild.

How many a babe of Fitzgerald's blood In hut was fostered though born in hall! The old stock burgeoned the fair new bud, The old land welcomed them, each and all!

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Glynn weeps to-day by the Shannon's tide, And Shanid and she that frowns o'er Deal; There is woe by the Laune and the Carra's side, And where the knight dwells by the woody Feale.

In Dingle and Beara they chant his dirge: Far off he faded--our child--sing low! We have made him a bed by the ocean's surge, We have made him a bier on the mountain's brow.

The clan was bereft! the old walls they left; With cries they rushed to the mountains drear. But now great sorrow their heart has cleft;-- See, one by one they are drawing near!

Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low! The flakes fall fast on the little bier;-- The yew-branch and eagle-plume over them throw! The last of the Desmond chiefs lies here."

We close, far from completing our sketch of the poet. We have not exhausted the volumes before us, and they do not exhaust their author. De Vere has written several other books, mostly of early date--from 1843 to 1850--which one must read to know him entirely. But we are very sure that those who will read the books from which we have drawn our illustrations will read all. There are few authors who grow so upon the reader. Somehow the force and beauty of the thoughts do not impress at first. We think the rationale of the process is that we mostly begin by reading three parts of sound to one of sense. After the melody comes the harmony; gradually, on after-reading, the glitter of the words ceases to dazzle, and then, if ever, we commune mind to mind with the author. This is as rare with modern readers as a hand-to hand bayonet fight in modern battles. Now Aubrey de Vere writes a great deal of thought so very quietly, that we miss the cackling which even talent nowadays is apt to indulge in on laying any supposed golden eggs of wisdom. Hence we have some singular opinions about him. One finds him cold and impassible; another votes him a sort of gentlemanly Fenian visionary, while a third devotes a column of one of our best hypercritical periodicals to viewing him as a mere love-poet. These are all windfall opinions, which had been better ripening on the tree. The grace, the rhythm, and, above all, the stern ascendency of truthful exactness over inaccurate felicities of expression, strike one constantly more and more. We have ourselves passed through these phases of opinion, besides several others; but every day fortifies our final conviction. It is, that Aubrey de Vere is one of those true poets whom the few love well; who will always have admirers, never popularity; and who must wait for his full fame until that distant but coming day when blind, deep movements of unity shall thrill the sects of Christendom, and bigotry no longer veil from the gifted and appreciative the merits of the first Catholic poet of to-day.

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From The Lamp.

UNCONVICTED; OR, OLD THORNELEY'S HEIRS.