Later on that day, while little Marian was taking the very profoundest

nap that ever a baby was blessed with, (she had a pretty way of dropping

asleep in unexpected corners of the house, like a kitten,) I somehow

strayed into a confidential talk with Janet about her mistress. I was

rather troubled to find that all her loyalty was for Laura, with nothing

left for Kenmure, whom indeed she seemed to regard as a sort of

objectionable altar, on which her darlings were being sacrificed. When

she came to particulars, certain stray fears of my own were confirmed.

It seemed that Laura's constitution was not fit, Janet averred, to bear

these irregular hours, early and late; and she plaintively dwelt on the

untasted oatmeal in the morning, the insufficient luncheon, the

precarious dinner, the excessive walking, the evening damps. There was

coming to be a look about her such as her mother had, who died at

thirty. As for Marian--but here the complaint suddenly stopped; it would

have required far stronger provocation to extract from the faithful soul

one word that might seem to reflect on Laura.

Another year, and her forebodings had come true. It is needless to dwell

on the interval. Since then I have sometimes felt a regret almost

insatiable, in the thought that I should have been absent while all that

gracious beauty seemed fading and dissolving like a cloud; and yet at

other times it has appeared a relief to think that Laura would ever

remain to me in the fulness of her beauty, not a tint faded, not a

lineament changed. With all my efforts, I arrived only in time to

accompany Kenmure home at night, after the funeral service. We paused at

the door of the empty house,--how empty! I hesitated, but Kenmure

motioned to me to follow him in.

We passed through the hall and went up stairs. Janet met us at the head

of the stairway, and asked me if I would go in to look at little Marian,

who was sleeping. I begged Kenmure to go also, but he refused, almost

savagely, and went on with heavy step into Laura's deserted room.

Almost the moment I entered the child's chamber, she waked up suddenly,

looked at me, and said, "I know you, you are my friend." She never would

call me her cousin, I was always her friend. Then she sat up in bed,

with her eyes wide open, and said, as if stating a problem which had

been put by for my solution, "I should like to see my mother."

How our hearts are rent by the unquestioning faith of children, when

they come to test the love which has so often worked what seemed to them

miracles,--and ask of it miracles indeed! I tried to explain to her the

continued existence of her beautiful mother, and she listened to it as

if her eyes drank in all that I could say, and more. But the apparent

distance between earth and heaven baffled her baby mind, as it so often

and so sadly baffles the thoughts of us elders. I wondered what precise

change seemed to her to have taken place. This all-fascinating Laura,

whom she adored, and who had yet never been to her what other women are

to their darlings,--did heaven seem to put her farther off, or bring her

more near? I could never know. The healthy child had no morbid

questionings; and as she had come into the world to be a sunbeam, she

must not fail of that mission. She was kicking about the bed, by this

time, in her nightgown, and holding her pink little toes in all sorts of

difficult attitudes, when she suddenly said, looking me full in the

face: "If my mother was so high up that she had her feet upon a star,

do you think that I could see her?"

This astronomical apotheosis startled me for a moment, but I said

unhesitatingly, "Yes," feeling sure that the lustrous eyes that looked

in mine could certainly see as far as Dante's, when Beatrice was

transferred from his side to the highest realm of Paradise. I put my

head beside hers upon the pillow, and stayed till I thought she was

asleep.

I then followed Kenmure into Laura's chamber. It was dusk, but the

after-sunset glow still bathed the room with imperfect light, and he lay

upon the bed, his hands clenched over his eyes.

There was a deep bow-window where Laura used to sit and watch us,

sometimes, when we put off in the boat. Her æolian harp was in the

casement, breaking its heart in music. A delicate handkerchief was

lodged between the cushions of the window-seat,--the very handkerchief

she used to wave, in summer days long gone. The white boats went sailing

beneath the evening light, children shouted and splashed in the water, a

song came from a yacht, a steam-whistle shrilled from the receding

steamer; but she for whom alone those little signs of life had been dear

and precious would henceforth be as invisible to our eyes as if time and

space had never held her; and the young moon and the evening star seemed

but empty things, unless they could pilot us to some world where the

splendor of her loveliness could match their own.

Twilight faded, evening darkened, and still Kenmure lay motionless,

until his strong form grew in my moody fancy to be like some carving of

Michel Angelo, more than like a living man. And when he at last startled

me by speaking, it was with a voice so far off and so strange, it might

almost have come wandering down from the century when Michel Angelo

lived.

"You are right," he said. "I have been living in a dream. It has all

vanished. I have kept no memorial of her presence, nothing to

perpetuate the most beautiful of lives."

Before I could answer, the door came softly open, and there stood in the

doorway a small white figure, holding aloft a lighted taper of pure

alabaster. It was Marian in her little night-dress, with the loose, blue

wrapper trailing behind her, let go in the effort to hold carefully the

doll, Susan Halliday, robed also for the night.

"May I come in?" said the child.

Kenmure was motionless at first, then, looking over his shoulder, said

merely, "What?"

"Janet said," continued Marian, in her clear and methodical way, "that

my mother was up in heaven, and would help God hear my prayers at any

rate; but if I pleased, I could come and say them by you."

A shudder passed over Kenmure; then he turned away, and put his hands

over his eyes. She waited for no answer, but, putting down the

candlestick, in her wonted careful manner, upon a chair, she began to

climb upon the bed, lifting laboriously one little rosy foot, then

another, still dragging after her, with great effort, the doll. Nestling

at her father's breast, I saw her kneel.

"Once my mother put her arm round me, when I said my prayers." She made

this remark, under her breath, less as a suggestion, it seemed, than as

the simple statement of a fact.

Instantly I saw Kenmure's arm move, and grasp her with that strong and

gentle touch of his that I had so often noticed in the studio,--a touch

that seemed quiet as the approach of fate, and as resistless. I knew him

well enough to understand that iron adoption.

He drew her toward him, her soft hair was on his breast, she looked

fearlessly in his eyes, and I could hear the little prayer proceeding,

yet in so low a whisper that I could not catch one word. She was

infinitely solemn at such times, the darling; and there was always

something in her low, clear tone, through all her prayings and

philosophizings, which was strangely like her mother's voice. Sometimes

she seemed to stop and ask a question, and at every answer I could see

her father's arm tighten, and the iron girdle grow more close.

The moments passed, the voices grew lower yet, the doll slid to the

ground. Marian had drifted away upon a vaster ocean than that whose

music lulled her from without,--upon that sea whose waves are dreams.

The night was wearing on, the lights gleamed from the anchored vessels,

the bay rippled serenely against the low sea-wall, the breeze blew

gently in. Marian's baby breathing grew deeper and more tranquil; and as

all the sorrows of the weary earth might be imagined to exhale

themselves in spring through the breath of violets, so it seemed as if

it might be with Kenmure's burdened heart. By degrees the strong man's

deeper respirations mingled with those of the child, and their two

separate beings seemed merged and solved into identity, as they

slumbered, breast to breast, beneath the golden and quiet stars. I

passed by without awaking them; I knew that the artist had attained his

dream.

THE RELIGIOUS SIDE OF THE ITALIAN QUESTION.

I.

I have of late frequently been asked by my English friends why it is

that I decline to return to my country, and to associate my own efforts

for the moral and political advancement of Italy with those of her

governing classes. "The amnesty has opened up a path for the _legal_

dissemination of your ideas," they tell me. "By taking the place already

repeatedly offered you among the representatives of the people, you

would secure to those who hold the helm of the state the support of the

whole Republican party. Do you not, by throwing the weight of your name

and influence on the side of the malcontents, increase the difficulties

of the government, and prolong the fatal want of moral and political

unity, without which the mere material fact of union is barren, and

unproductive of benefit to the people?"

The question is asked by serious men, who wish my country well, and is

therefore deserving of a serious answer.

Before treating the personal matter, however, let me say that, since

1859, the Republican party has done precisely what my English friends

required it to do. The Italian Republicans have actually assisted and

upheld the government with an abnegation worthy of all

praise,--sacrificing even their right of Apostolate to the great idea of

Italian unity. Perceiving that the nation was determined to give

monarchy the benefit of a trial, they have--in that reverence for the

national will which is the first duty of Republicans--patiently awaited

its results, and endured every form of misgovernment rather than afford

a pretext to those in power for the non-fulfilment of their declared

intention of initiating a war to regain our own territory and true

frontier,--a war without which, as they well knew, the permanent

security and dignity of Italy were impossible, and which, had it been

conducted from a truly national point of view, would have wrought the

moral redemption of our people.

The monarchy, however, which, as I pointed out in my article on "The

Republican Alliance," had had five years to prepare, and was in a

position to take the field with thirty-five thousand regular troops,

one hundred thousand mobilized National Guards, thirty thousand

volunteers under Garibaldi, and the whole of Italy ready to act as

reserve, and make any sacrifices in blood or money, abruptly broke off

the war after the unqualifiable disasters of Custozza and Lissa, at a

signal from France,--basely abandoning our true frontier, the heroic

Trentino,--and accepted Venice as an alms scornfully flung to us by the

man of the 2d of December.

I may be told that a people of twenty-four millions who tamely submit to

dishonor deserve it.

I admit it; but it must not be forgotten that our masses are uneducated,

and that it is the natural tendency of the uneducated to accept their

rulers as their guides, and to govern their own conduct by the example

of their _soi-disant_ superiors; and I assert that, if our people have

no consciousness of their great destiny, nor sense of their true power

and mission,--if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the

present day grouped around, I will not say the _conception_ of unity,

but the mere unstable _fact_ of union, the great soul of Italy still

lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy

and the Empire,--the cause is to be found in the immorality and

corruption of our rulers.

The true life of a people must be sought in the ruling idea or

conception by which it is governed and directed.

The true idea of a nation implies the consciousness of a common _aim_,

and the fraternal association and concentration of all the vital forces

of the country towards the realization of that aim.

The national aim is indicated by the past tradition, and confirmed by

the present conscience, of the country.

The national aim once ascertained, it becomes the basis of the sovereign

power, and the criterion of judgment with regard to the acts of the

citizens.

Every act tending to promote the national aim is good; every act tending

to a departure from that aim is evil.

The moral law is supreme. The religion of duty forms the link between

the nation and humanity; the source of its _right_, and the sign of its

place and value in humanity.

* * * * *

Such are the essential characteristics of what we term a nation at the

present day. Where these are wanting, there exists but an aggregate of

families, temporarily united for the purpose of diminishing the ills of

life, and loosely bound together by past habits or interests, which are

destined, sooner or later, to clash. All intellectual or economic

development among them,--unregulated by a great conception supreme over

every selfish interest,--instead of being equally diffused over the

various members of the national family, leads to the gradual formation

of educated or financial _castes_, but obtains for the nation itself

neither recognized function, position, dignity, nor glory among foreign

peoples.

These things, which are true of all peoples, are still more markedly so

of a people emerging from a prolonged and deathlike stupor into new

life. Other nations earnestly watch its every step. If its advance is

illumined by the signs of a high mission, and its first manifestations

sanctified by the baptism of a great _principle_, other nations will

surround the new collective being with affection and hope, and be ready

to follow it upon the path assigned to it by God. If they discover in it

no signs of any noble inspiration, ruling moral conception, or potent

future, they will learn to despise it, and to regard its territory as a

new field for a predatory policy, and direct or indirect domination.

Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high

mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone, among the

nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection

and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind

always to harmonize _thought_ and _action_ confirms the prophecy of

history, and points out the _rôle_ of Italy in the world to be a work

of moral unification,--the utterance of the synthetic word of

civilization.

Italy is a religion.

And if we look only to the _immediate_ national aim, and the inevitable

consequences that must follow the complete constitution of Italy as a

nation, we see that to no people in Europe has been assigned a higher

office in the fulfilment of the educational design, to the evolution of

which Providence guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be

of itself a potent _initiative_ in the world. The mere fact of our

existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification of

the external and internal life of Europe.

Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the

exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the

humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we

should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a

Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a

Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.

We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming,

for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which

Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined

within Biblical limits.

Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power

which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a

nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however,--God

alone knows the grief with which I write it,--that sense with us is

wanting.

And now a word as to the amnesty.

Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere

where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none

who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past

life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of

_oblivion_ and _pardon_ for having loved Italy above all earthly things,

and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a

dream.

But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence;

and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of

my last years possible, it would be useless.

My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political

regeneration of my country have been, are, and will be governed by a

religious idea.

The past, present, and future of our rulers have been, are, and will be

led astray by materialism.

Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political

questions are necessarily secondary and derivative.

They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole

legitimate source of all authority--in a religion of duty, of which

politics should be the application--_cannot_, through any amount of

personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the

worship of temporary and material interest.

Our rulers have no great ruling conception,--no belief in the supremacy

of the moral law,--no just notion of life, nor of the human unity,--no

belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the _duty_ of mankind to

reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the

logical consequence of their want of all faith in God and his law are

the substitution of the idea of _interest_ for the idea of _duty_,--of a

paltry notion of _tactics_, for the fearless affirmation of the

truth,--of opportunity, for principle.

It is for this that they protest against, without resisting, wrong,--for

this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous

by-paths, fascinated by the thought of displaying _state-craft_, and

forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into

slavery. It is for this that our government has reduced Italy to the

condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition

copies the wretched tactics of the _Left_ in the French Chamber, which

prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the present corruption,

degradation, and enslavement of their country.

These things, I repeat, are _consequences_, not causes. We may change as

we will the individuals at the head of the government; the system itself

being based upon a false _principle_, the fatal idea will govern them.

They _cannot_ righteously direct the new life of the Italian people, and

redeem them from a profound unconscious immorality of ancient date.

The present duty of the democratic party in Italy, then,--since they

cannot serve God and Mammon,--is to educate the people; and, remembering

that the basis of all education is truth, to endeavor to prove to them

that the actual political impotence and corruption of Italy are derived

from two causes which may be summed up in one,--we have no religion, and

we have set up a negation in its place.

II.

On the one side we have--as our only form and semblance of religion--the

Papacy.

I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other

dared openly to venture on the problem,--when the boldest contented

themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those

writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought

proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian

primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of

Catholicism,--I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and

Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence

of _quite another death_.

I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.

Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse

beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a

religion,--a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the

nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs

the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either

know or ought to know the cause of this.

All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of

its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in

falsehood,--not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in

indulgences three centuries ago,--not because this or that Pope

trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of

his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in

order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion,--not

because they have governed and persecuted men according to their

arbitrary will; but because they _cannot_ do other, even if they would.

These evils and these sins are not _causes_, but _consequences_.

Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals

should be converted;--that the Jansenists, or other Reformers, should

recall the misguided Popes to the charity and humility of their ancient

way of life,--they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater

dignity;--it can never again be what once it was, the ruler and director

of the conscience of the peoples.

The mission of the Papacy--a great and holy mission, whatever the

fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and

calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the

contrary--is fulfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power

of genius, no miracle of will, can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was

the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy

of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal

governments--of the spirit over matter, of God over Cæsar--an organic

social _fact_.

And such was in truth the mission of the Papacy,--the secret of its

power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by

humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of

the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron strength of

will,--Gregory VII.,--and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and

fifty years afterwards, the gigantic attempt had become but the dim

record of a past never to return. With the successors of Innocent III.

began the decline of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity.

A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in

the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in

the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred

more the servant of Cæsar, and had lost one half of Europe.

From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to

the thing we now behold it;--disinherited of all power of inspiration

over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all

liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense

of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by

foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken

by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.

The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action

at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a

conception of heaven since changed,--from a notion of life since proved

imperfect,--from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the

new epoch in course of initiation,--from a solution of the eternal

problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human

heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.

The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and

consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or

direct the human race.

The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with

heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare

this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which,

feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel

out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed

until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run

the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.

The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived

its existence and its mission was that of the _fall_ of man and his

redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula

were:--

The doctrine of the necessity of _mediation_ between man and God;

The belief in a _direct_, _immediate_, and _immutable_ revelation, and

hence in a privileged class,--naturally destined to centralize in one

individual,--the office of which was to preserve that revelation

inviolate;

The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and

the consequent substitution of unlimited _faith_ in the _Mediator_, for

works,--hence _grace_ and _predestination_ more or less explicitly

substituted for _free-will_;

The separation of the human race into the _elect_ and the _non-elect_;

The _salvation_ of the one, and the eternal _damnation_ of the other;

and, above all,

The duality between earth and heaven, between the _ideal_ and the

_real_, between the _aim_ set before man and a world condemned to

anathema by the _fall_, and incapable, through the imperfection of its

finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.

In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not

contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to

contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the

_individual_; it offered the individual a means of salvation _in despite

of_ the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on

earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to

declare to him, _The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and

put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven_.

The new formula of life and its law--unknown at that day, but revealed

to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity,

confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of

genius and the grand results of scientific research--may be summed up in

the single word _Progress_,[D] which we now know to be, by Divine

decree, the inherent tendency of human nature,--whether manifested in

the individual or the collective being,--and destined, more or less

speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.

The logical consequences of the new formula are:--

The substitution of the idea of a _law_ for the idea of a

_Mediator_;--the idea of a _continuous_ educational revelation for that

of an _immediate_ arbitrary revelation;

The apostolate of genius and virtue, and of the great collective

intuitions of the peoples, when roused to enthusiastic action in the

service of a truth, substituted for the _privilege_ of a priestly

_class_;

The sanctity of tradition, as the depository of the progress already

achieved; and the sanctity of individual conscience, alike the pledge

and the means of all future progress;

_Works_, sanctified by faith, substituted for mere faith alone, as the

criterion of merit and means of salvation.

The new formula of life cancels the dogma of _grace_, which is the

negation of that capacity of perfectibility granted to _all_ men; as

well as that of _predestination_, which is the negation of _free-will_,

and that of eternity of punishment, which is the negation of the divine

element existing in every human soul.

The new formula substitutes the conception of the slow, continuous

progress of the human _Ego_ throughout an indefinite series of

existences, for the idea of an impossible perfection to be achieved in

the course of one brief existence; it presents an absolutely, new view

of the mission of man upon earth, and puts an end to the antagonism

between earth and heaven, by teaching us that this world is an abode

given to man _wherein_ he is bound to merit salvation, by his own works,

and hence enforces the necessity of endeavoring, by thought, by action,

and by sacrifice, to transform the world,--the duty of realizing our

ideal here below, as far as in us lies, for the benefit of future

generations, and of reducing to an earthly _fact_ as much as may be of

the _kingdom_--the conception--of God.

The religious synthesis which is slowly but infallibly taking the place

of the synthesis of the past comprehends a new term,--the continuous

_collective_ life of humanity; and this alone is sufficient to change

the _aim_, the _method_, and the moral _law_ of our existence.

All links with heaven broken, and useless to the earth, which is ready

to hail the proclamation of a new dogma, the Papacy has no longer any

_raison d'être_. Once useful and holy, it is now a lie, a source only of

corruption and immorality.

Once useful and holy, I say, because, had it not been for the unity of

moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the

Papacy, we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to

come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we

should not now have been prepared to proclaim the dogma of human

equality on earth. And, I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at

the present day, because every great institution becomes such if it

seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. The

substitution of the enslavement for the slaughter of the conquered foe

was a step towards progress, as was the substitution of servitude for

slavery. The formation of the _Bourgeoise_ class was a progress from

servitude. But he who at the present day should attempt to recede

towards slavery and servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate

the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the

social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization,

past and future, and a teacher of immorality.

It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to

win _the city of the future_ and the triumph of truth, to make war, not

only upon the temporal power,--who should dare deny that to the admitted

representative of God on earth?--but upon the Papacy itself. It is

therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is

founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient and unequal

to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity.

They who at the present day attack the _Prince_ of Rome, and yet profess

to venerate the _Pope_, and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty

of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.

They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of _a free

Church in a free State_ are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or

destitute of every spark of moral conviction.

The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence

against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy the name. It

is--like all the programmes of mere liberty--an implicit declaration

that the institution against which we are compelled to invoke either our

individual or collective rights is corrupt, and destined to perish.

Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the

authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period

of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a

special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from

infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it,

you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure,--to look

forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the

positive organic _principle_ destined to govern that normal state. By

keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the _moral_ from the

political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from

earth.

When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith

in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into

a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become

the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of

life.

So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always

conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma.

If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy,

such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament,

the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty

of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into

egotism and the adoration of the _accomplished fact_, and hence,

inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.

For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at

France.

III.

On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of

no less corruption, stands _materialism_.

Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay,

is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death

of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects

which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity,

and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition,

deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death

of one of its incarnations.

Luther compared the human mind to a drunken peasant, who, falling from

one side of his horse, and set straight on his seat by one desirous of

helping him, instantly falls again on the other side. The simile--if

limited to periods of transition--is most just. The youth of Italy,

suddenly emancipated from the servile education of more than three

centuries, and intoxicated with their moral liberty, find themselves in

the presence of a Church destitute of all mission, virtue, love for the

people, or adoration of truth or progress,--destitute even of faith in

itself. They see that the existing dogma is in flagrant contradiction of

the ruling idea that governs all the aspirations of the epoch, and that

its conception of divinity is inferior to that revealed by science,

human conscience, philosophy, and the improved conception of life

acquired by the study of the tradition of humanity, unknown to man

previously to the discovery of his Eastern origin. Therefore, in

order--as they believe--to establish their moral freedom radically and

forever, they reject alike all idea of a church, a dogma, and a God.

Philosophically speaking, the unreflecting exaggerations of men who have

just risen up in rebellion do not portend any serious damage to human

progress. These errors are a mere repetition of what has always taken

place at the decay and death of every dogma, and will--as they always

have done--sooner or later wear away. The day will come when our Italian

youth will discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with

denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and

the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded,

from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection

of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct

forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had

ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which

prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian

school of art.

Art, society, religion,--all these are faculties inseparable from human

life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself.

Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic,

and religious _expression_. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and

of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask

through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the

problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the

Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite

conditions of his earthly existence. He will, from time to time, adopt a

different solution, in proportion as the horizon of tradition is

progressively enlarged, and the human conscience enlightened; but

assuredly it will never be a mere negation.

Philosophically speaking, materialism is based upon a singular but

constant confusion of two things radically distinct;--life, and its

successive modes of manifestation; the _Ego_, and the organs by which it

is revealed in a visible form to the external world, the non-_Ego_. The

men who, having succeeded in analyzing the _instruments_ by means of

which life is made manifest in a series of successive finite phenomena,

imagine that they have acquired a proof of the _materiality_ of life

itself, resemble the poor fool, who, having chemically analyzed the ink

with which a poem was written, imagines he has penetrated the secret of

the genius that composed it.

Life,--thought,--the initiative power of motion,--the conception of the

Infinite, of the Eternal, of God, which is inborn in the human

mind,--the aspiration towards an ideal impossible of realization in the

brief stage of our earthly existence,--the instinct of free will,--all

that constitutes the mysterious link within us to a world beyond the

visible,--defy all analysis by a philosophy exclusively experimental,

and impotent to overpass the sphere of the secondary laws of being.

If materialists choose to reject the teachings of tradition, the voice

of human conscience and intuition, to limit themselves to the mechanism

of analytical observation, and substitute their narrow, undirected

physiology for biology and psychology,--if then, finding themselves

unable by that imperfect method to comprehend the primary laws and

origin of things, they childishly deny the existence of such laws, and

declare all humanity before their time to have been deluded and

incapable,--so be it. Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a

century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger.

Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear

them--in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine

to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity

and progress--spouting materialism in the name of science, because they

have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott,

might rather move one to amusement than anger.

But Italy is not a nation; she is only in the way to become one. And the

present is therefore a moment of grave importance; for, even as the

first examples set before infancy, so the first lessons taught to a

people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating

as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines

of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be

but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during

the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign

conquest, and roused the _Mountain_ to bloody and terrible means of

repression.

Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set

before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it

now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may

be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated,

liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the

past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing

into egotism.

Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to

egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear

them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and

I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the

moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study

their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation

to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the

present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material

interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the

degradation and infamy of slavery.

Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the

cradle of a nation.

Either we must admit the idea of a God,--of the moral law, which is an

emanation from him,--and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by

mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,--or we must admit the

idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the

worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of _fact_. From

this dilemma there is no escape.

Either we must accept the sovereignty of an _aim_ prescribed by

conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to

unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the _nationality_ of a given

people among the many of which humanity is composed,--an aim recognized

by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore _religious_; or we

must accept the sovereignty of the _right_, arbitrarily defined, of each

nation, and its practical consequences,--the pursuit by each individual

of his own interest and his own _well-being_, the satisfaction of his

own desires,--and the impossibility of any sovereign _duty_, to which

all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the

governed, owe obedience and sacrifice.

Which of these doctrines will be most potent to lead our nation to high

things? Let us not forget that, although the educated, intellectual, and

virtuous may be willing to admit that the _well-being_ of the individual

should be founded--even at the cost of sacrifice--upon the _well-being_

of the many, the majority will, as they always have done, understand

their _well-being_ to mean their positive satisfaction or enjoyment;

they will reject the notion of sacrifice as painful, and endeavor to

realize their own happiness, even to the injury of others. They will

seek it one day from liberty, the next from the deceitful promises of a

despot; but the practical result of encouraging them to strive for the

realization of their own happiness as a right, will inevitably be to

lead them to the mere gratification of their own individual egotism.

If you reject all Supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all

obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have

no right to prescribe _your_ conception of _well-being_ to others, as

worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which

to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you

are strong enough to impose it. Such was the method adopted by the

French Revolutionists, and they, in their turn, succumbed to the force

of others, without knowing in the name of what to protest. And you would

have to do the same. Without God, you must either accept anarchy as the

normal condition of things,--and this is impossible,--or you must seek

your authority in the _force_ of this or that individual, and thus open

the way to despotism and tyranny.

But what then becomes of the idea of progress?--what of the conception

we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but

infallible education of humanity,--of the link of _solidary_ ascending

life which unites succeeding generations,--of the duty of sacrificing,

if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the

generations of the future,--of the pre-eminence of the fatherland over

individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will,

in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their

nation?

There are _materialists_, illogical and carried away by the impulses of

a heart superior to their doctrines, who do both feel and act upon this

worship of the ideal; but _materialism_ denies it. Materialism, as a

doctrine, only recognizes in the universe a finite and determinate

quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and

susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain

productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances

not to be predicated or foreseen; or through the necessary succession of

causes and effects,--of events inevitable and independent of all human

action.

Materialism admits neither the intervention of any creative

intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the

law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and

the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term _Pantheism_

at the present day, by confounding the _subject_ and the _object_ in

one, cancels alike the _Ego_ and non-_Ego_, good and evil, God and man,

and, consequently, all individual mission or free-will. The wretched

doctrine, recognizing no higher historic formula than the necessary

alternation of vicissitudes, condemns humanity to tread eternally the

same circle, being incapable of comprehending the conception of the

spiral path of indefinite progress upon which humanity traces its

gradual ascent towards an ideal beyond.

Strange contradiction! Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of

egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them

with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great

nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first

intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole

strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a

theory the ultimate consequences of which are to establish egotism upon

a basis of right!

They call upon their people worthily to carry on the grand traditions of

their past, when all around them--popes, princes, military leaders,

_literati_, and the servile herd--have either insolently trampled

liberty under foot, or deserted its cause in cowardly indifference; and

they preach to them a doctrine which deprives them of every pledge of

future progress, every stimulus to affection, every noble aspiration

towards sacrifice,--they take from them the faith that inspires

confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of

triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of

shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to them: _There is

no hope of any future for you. Faith in immortality--the lesson

transmitted to you by all past humanity--is a falsehood; a breath of

air, or trifling want of equilibrium in the animal functions, destroys

you wholly and forever. There is even no certainty that the results of

your labors will endure; there is no Providential law or design,

consequently no possible theory of the future; you are but building up

to-day what any unforeseen fact, blind force, or fortuitous circumstance

may overthrow to-morrow._

They teach these brothers of theirs, whom they desire to elevate and

ennoble, that they are but dust,--a necessary, unconscious secretion of

I know not what material substance; that the _thought_ of a Kepler or

Dante is _dust_, or rather _phosphorus_; that genius, from Prometheus to

Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the _moral law_,

free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the _Ego_, are

illusions; that events are successively our masters,--inexorable,

irresponsible, and insuperable to human will.

And they see not that they thus confirm that servile submission to the

_accomplished fact_, that doctrine of _opportunity_, that bastard

Machiavellism, that worship of temporary interests, and that

indifference to every great idea, which find expression in our country

at the present day in the betrayal of national duty by our higher

classes, and in the stupid resignation of our masses.

IV.

I invoke the rising--and I should die consoled, even in exile, could I

see the first signs of its advent, but this I dare not hope--I invoke

the rising of a truly Italian school;--a school which, comprehending the

causes of the downfall of the Papacy, and the impotence of the merely

negative doctrine which our Italian youth have borrowed from superficial

French materialists and the German copyists, should elevate itself above

both, and come forward to announce the approaching and inevitable

religious transformation which will put an end to the existing divorce

between thought and action, and to the crisis of egotism and immorality

through which Europe is passing.

I invoke the rising of a school destined to prepare the way for the

_initiative_ of Italy;--which shall, on the one side, undertake the

examination of the dogma upon which Catholicism was founded, and prove

it to be worn out, exhausted, and in contradiction to our new conception

of life and its laws; and, on the other hand, the refutation of

materialism under whatsoever form it may present itself, and prove that

it also is in contradiction of that new conception,--that it is a

stupid, fatal negation of all moral law, of human free-will, of our

every sacred hope, and of the calm and constant virtue of sacrifice.

I invoke a school which shall philosophically develop all the

consequences, the germ of which--neglected or ignored by superficial

intellects--is contained in the word Progress considered as a new _term_

in the great historical synthesis, the expression of the ascending

advance of humanity from epoch to epoch, from religion to religion,

towards a vaster conception of its own _aim_ and its own law.

I invoke the rising of a school destined to demonstrate to the youth of

Italy that _rationalism_ is but an _instrument_,--the instrument adopted

in all periods of transition by the human intellect to aid its progress

from a worn-out form of religion to one new and superior,--and science

only an accumulation of materials to be arranged and organized in

fruitful synthesis by a new moral conception;--a school that will recall

philosophy from this puerile confusion of the _means_ with the _aim_, to

bring it back to its sole true basis, the knowledge of life and

comprehension of its law.

I invoke a school which will seek the truth of the epoch, not in mere

analysis,--always barren and certain to mislead, if undirected by a

ruling principle,--but in an earnest study of universal tradition, which

is the manifestation of the collective life of humanity; and of

conscience, which is the manifestation of the life of the individual.

I invoke a school which shall redeem from the neglect cast upon it by

theories deduced from one of our human faculties alone that _intuition_

which is the concentration of all the faculties upon a given subject;--a

school which, even while declaring it exhausted, will respect the

_past_, without which the _future_ would be impossible,--which will

protest against those intellectual barbarians for whom every religion is

falsehood, every form of civilization now extinct a folly, every great

pope, king, or warrior now in the course of things surpassed a criminal

or a hypocrite, and revoke the condemnation, thus uttered by presumption

in the present, of the past labors and intellect of entire humanity;--a

school which may condemn, but will not defame,--will judge, but never,

through frenzy of rebellion, falsify history;--a school which will

declare the death that _is_, without denying the life that _was_,--which

will call upon Italy to emancipate herself for the achievement of new

glories, but strip not a single leaf from her wreath of glories past.

Such a school would regain for Italy her European initiative, her

primacy.

Italy--as I have said--is a religion.

Some have affirmed this of France. They were mistaken. France--if we

except the single moment when the Revolution and Napoleon summed up the

achievements of the epoch of _individuality_--has never had any external

mission, other than, occasionally, as an arm of the Church, the

_instrument_ of an idea emanating from Papal Rome.

But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and

the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious.

The essence of every religion lies in a power, unknown to mere science,

of compelling man to reduce thought to action, and harmonize his

practical life with his moral conception. The genius of our nation,

whenever it has been spontaneously revealed, and exercised independently

of all foreign inspiration, has always evinced the religious character,

the unifying power to which I allude. Every conception of the Italian

mind sought its incarnation in action,--strove to assume a form in the

political sphere. The ideal and the real, elsewhere divided, have always

tended to be united in our land. Sabines and Etruscans alike derived

their civil organization and way of life from their conception of

Heaven. The Pythagoreans founded their philosophy, religious

associations, and political institutions at one and the same time. The

source of the vitality and power of Rome lay in a religious sense of a

collective mission, of an _aim_ to be achieved, in the contemplation of

which the individual was submerged. Our democratic republics were all

religious. Our early philosophical thinkers were all tormented by the

idea of translating their ideal conceptions into practical rules of

government.

And as to our external mission.

We alone have twice given _moral_ unity to Europe, to the known world.

The voice that issued from Rome in the past was addressed to and

reverenced by humanity,--"Urbs Orbi."

Italy is a religion. And when, in my earliest years, I believed that

the _initiative_ of the third life of Europe would spring from the

heart, the action, the enthusiasm and sacrifice of our people, I heard

within me the grand voice of Rome sounding once again, hailed and

accepted with loving reverence by the peoples, and telling of moral

unity and fraternity in a faith common to all humanity. It was not the

unity of the past,--which, though sacred and conducive to civilization

for many centuries, did but emancipate _individual_ man, and reveal to

him an ideal of liberty and equality only to be realized in Heaven: it

was a new unity, emancipating _collective_ humanity, and revealing the

formula of Association, through which liberty and equality are destined

to be realized here on earth; sanctifying the earth and rendering it

what God wills it should be,--a stage upon the path of perfection, a

means given to man wherewith to deserve a higher and nobler existence

hereafter.

And I saw Rome, in the name of God and Republican Italy, substituting a

declaration of PRINCIPLES for the barren declaration of

rights,--principles the logical consequences of the parent idea,

PROGRESS,--and revealing to the nations a common aim, and the basis of a

new religion. And I saw Europe, weary of scepticism, egotism, and moral

anarchy, receive the new faith with acclamations. I saw a new pact

founded upon that faith,--a pact of united action in the work of human

perfectibility, involving none of the evils or dangers of the former

pact, because among the first consequences of a faith founded upon the

dogma of progress would be the justification of _heresy_, as either a

promise or endeavor after progress in the future.

The vision which brightened my first dream of country has vanished, so

far as concerns my own life. Even if that vision be ever fulfilled,--as

I believe it will be,--I shall be in the tomb. May the young, as yet

uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may

they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly

protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a

dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal worship

of the Ideal.

The religious question is pre-eminent over every other at the present

day, and the moral question is indissolubly linked with it. We are bound

either to solve these, or renounce all idea of an Italian mission in the

world.

JOSEPH MAZZINI.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: This sacred word, which sums up the dogma of the future,

has been uttered by every school, but misunderstood by the majority.

Materialists have usurped the use of it, to express man's

ever-increasing power over the productive forces of the earth; and men

of science, to indicate that accumulation of _facts_ discovered and

submitted to analysis which has led us to a better knowledge of

secondary causes. Few understand it as the expression of a providential

conception or design, inseparable from our human life and foundation of

our moral law.]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty._ By J. W. DE

FORREST. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The light, strong way in which our author goes forward in this story

from the first, and does not leave difficulty to his readers, is

pleasing to those accustomed to find an American novel a good deal like

the now extinct American stage-coach whose passengers not only walked

over bad pieces of road, but carried fence-rails on their shoulders to

pry the vehicle out of the sloughs and miry places. It was partly the

fault of the imperfect roads, no doubt, and it may be that our social

ways have only just now settled into such a state as makes smooth going

for the novelist; nevertheless, the old stage-coach was hard to travel

in, and what with drafts upon one's good nature for assistance, it must

be confessed that our novelists have been rather trying to their

readers. It is well enough with us all while the road is good,--a study

of individual character, a bit of landscape, a stretch of well-worn

plot, gentle slopes of incident; but somewhere on the way the passengers

are pretty sure to be asked to step out,--the ladies to walk on ahead,

and the gentlemen to fetch fence-rails.

Our author imagines a Southern loyalist and his daughter sojourning in

New Boston, Barataria, during the first months of the war. Dr. Ravenel

has escaped from New Orleans just before the Rebellion began, and has

brought away with him the most sarcastic and humorous contempt and

abhorrence of his late fellow-citizens, while his daughter, an ardent

and charming little blonde Rebel, remembers Louisiana with longing and

blind admiration. The Doctor, born in South Carolina, and living all his

days among slaveholders and slavery, has not learned to love either; but

Lillie differs from him so widely as to scream with joy when she hears

of Bull Run. Naturally she cannot fall in love with Mr. Colburne, the

young New Boston lawyer, who goes into the war conscientiously for his

country's sake, and resolved for his own to make himself worthy and

lovable in Lillie's blue eyes by destroying and desolating all that she

holds dear. It requires her marriage with Colonel Carter--a Virginia

gentleman, a good-natured drunkard and _roué_ and soldier of fortune on

our side--to make her see Colburne's worth, as it requires some

comparative study of New Orleans and New Boston, on her return to her

own city, to make her love the North. Bereft of her husband by his own

wicked weakness, and then widowed, she can at last wisely love and marry

Colburne; and, cured of Secession by experiencing on her father's

account the treatment received by Unionists in New Orleans, her

conversion to loyalty is a question of time duly settled before the

story ends.

We sketch the plot without compunction, for these people of Mr. De

Forrest's are so unlike characters in novels as to be like people in

life, and none will wish the less to see them because he knows the

outline of their history. Not only is the plot good and very well

managed, but there is scarcely a feebly painted character or scene in

the book. As to the style, it is so praiseworthy that we will not

specifically censure occasional defects,--for the most part, slight

turgidities notable chiefly from their contrast to the prevailing

simplicity of the narrative.

Our war has not only left us the burden of a tremendous national debt,

but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto

staggered very lamely. Every author who deals in fiction feels it to be

his duty to contribute towards the payment of the accumulated interest

in the events of the war, by relating his work to them; and the heroes

of young-lady writers in the magazines have been everywhere fighting the

late campaigns over again, as young ladies would have fought them. We do

not say that this is not well, but we suspect that Mr. De Forrest is the

first to treat the war really and artistically. His campaigns do not try

the reader's constitution, his battles are not bores. His soldiers are

the soldiers we actually know,--the green wood of the volunteers, the

warped stuff of men torn from civilization and cast suddenly into the

barbarism of camps, the hard, dry, tough, true fibre of the veterans

that came out of the struggle. There could hardly be a better type of

the conscientious and patriotic soldier than Captain Colburne; and if

Colonel Carter must not stand as type of the officers of the old army,

he mast be acknowledged as true to the semi-civilization of the South.

On the whole he is more entertaining than Colburne, as immoral people

are apt to be to those who suffer nothing from them. "His contrasts of

slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and _insouciance_ of

character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral

architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual

temples common in New Boston," do take the eye of peace-bred

Northerners, though never their sympathy. Throughout, we admire, as the

author intends, Carter's thorough and enthusiastic soldiership, and we

perceive the ruins of a generous nature in his aristocratic Virginian

pride, his Virginian profusion, his imperfect Virginian sense of honor.

When he comes to be shot, fighting bravely at the head of his column,

after having swindled his government, and half unwillingly done his

worst to break his wife's heart, we feel that our side has lost a good

soldier, but that the world is on the whole something better for our

loss. The reader must go to the novel itself for a perfect conception of

this character, and preferably to those dialogues in which Colonel

Carter so freely takes part; for in his development of Carter, at least,

Mr. De Forrest is mainly dramatic. Indeed, all the talk in the book is

free and natural, and, even without the hard swearing which

distinguishes the speech of some, it would be difficult to mistake one

speaker for another, as often happens in novels.

The character of Dr. Ravenel, though so simple, is treated in a manner

invariably delightful and engaging. His native purity, amiability, and

generosity, which a life-long contact with slavery could not taint; his

cordial scorn of Southern ideas; his fine and flawless instinct of

honor; his warm-hearted courtesy and gentleness, and his gayety and wit;

his love of his daughter and of mineralogy; his courage, modesty, and

humanity,--these are the traits which recur in the differing situations

with constant pleasure to the reader.

Miss Lillie Ravenel is as charming as her adored papa, and is never less

nor more than a bright, lovable, good, constant, inconsequent woman. It

is to her that the book owes its few scenes of tenderness and sentiment;

but she is by no means the most prominent character in the novel, as the

infelicitous title would imply, and she serves chiefly to bring into

stronger relief the traits of Colonel Carter and Doctor Ravenel. The

author seems not even to make so much study of her as of Mrs. Larue, a

lady whose peculiar character is skilfully drawn, and who will be quite

probable and explicable to any who have studied the traits of the noble

Latin race, and a little puzzling to those acquainted only with people

of Northern civilization. Yet in Mrs. Larue the author comes near making

his failure. There is a little too much of her,--it is as if the wily

enchantress had cast her glamour upon the author himself,--and there is

too much anxiety that the nature of her intrigue with Carter shall not

be misunderstood. Nevertheless, she bears that stamp of verity which

marks all Mr. De Forrest's creations, and which commends to our

forbearance rather more of the highly colored and strongly-flavored

parlance of the camps than could otherwise have demanded reproduction in

literature. The bold strokes with which such an amusing and heroic

reprobate as Van Zandt and such a pitiful poltroon as Gazaway are

painted, are no less admirable than the nice touches which portray the

Governor of Barataria, and some phases of the aristocratic,

conscientious, truthful, angular, professorial society of New Boston,

with its young college beaux and old college belles, and its life pure,

colorless, and cold to the eye as celery, yet full of rich and wholesome

juices. It is the goodness of New Boston, and of New England, which,

however unbeautiful, has elevated and saved our whole national

character; and in his book there is sufficient evidence of our author's

appreciation of this fact, as well as of sympathy only and always with

what is brave and true in life.

_A Journey to Ashango-Land: and further Penetration into Equatorial

Africa._ By PAUL B. DU CHAILLU. With Maps and Illustrations. New York:

D. Appleton & Co.

Somewhere in the heart of the African continent, Mr. Du Chaillu, laying

his head upon a rock, after a day of uncommon hardship, finds reason to

lament the ungratefulness of the traveller's fate, which brings him,

through perilous adventure and great suffering, to the incredulity and

coldness of a public unable to receive his story with perfect faith. It

is such a meditation as ought to reproach very keenly the sceptics who

doubted Mr. Du Chaillu's first book; it certainly renews in the reader

of the present work the satisfaction felt in the comparative

reasonableness of the things narrated, and his consequent ability to put

an unmurmuring trust in the author. Here, indeed, is very little of the

gorilla whom we formerly knew: his ferocity is greatly abated; he only

once beats his breast and roars; he does not twist gun-barrels; his

domestic habits are much simplified; his appearance here is relatively

as unimportant as Mr. Pendennis's in the "Newcomes"; he is a deposed

hero; and Mr. Du Chaillu pushes on to Ashango-Land without him.

Otherwise, moreover, the narrative is quite credible, and, so far,

unattractive, though there is still enough of incident to hold the idle,

and enough of information in the appendices concerning the

characteristics of the African skulls collected by Du Chaillu, the

geographical and astronomical observations made _en route_, and the

linguistic peculiarities noted, to interest the scientific. The book is

perhaps not a fortunate one for those who occupy a place between these

classes of readers, and who are tempted to ask of Mr. Du Chaillu, Have

you really four hundred and thirty-seven royal octavo pages of news to

tell us of Equatorial Africa?

Our traveller landed in West Africa in the autumn of 1863, and, after a

short excursion in the coast country in search of the gorilla, he

ascended the Fernand Vaz in a steamer seventy miles, to Goumbi, whence

he proceeded by canoe to Obindji. Here, provided with a retinue of one

hundred men of the Commi nation, his overland journey began, and led

him through the hilly country of the Bakalai southeastwardly to the

village of Olenda. From this point, before continuing his route, he

visited the falls of the Samba Nagoshi, some fifty miles to the

northward, and Adingo Village, twenty miles below Olenda. Starting anew

after these excursions, he penetrated the continent, on a line

deflecting a little south of east, as far as Mouaou Kombo, which is

something more than two hundred miles from the sea.

In first landing from his ship, Mr. Du Chaillu lost his astronomical

instruments, and was obliged to wait in the coast country until a new

supply could be obtained from England. Midway on his journey to Mouaou

Kombo, his photographic apparatus was stolen, and the chemicals were, as

he supposes, swallowed by the robbers, to some of whom their dishonest

experiments in photography proved fatal. The traveller's means of

usefulness were limited to observation of the general character of the

country, some investigation of its vegetable and animal life, and study

of the customs of its human inhabitants,--in none of which does he

develop much variety or novelty.

Nearly the whole route lay through hilly or mountainous country, for the

most part thickly wooded and sparsely peopled. There was a very notable

absence of all the larger African animals, and those encountered seemed

to be as peaceful in their characters as their neighbors, the tribes of

wild men. The nations through which Du Chaillu passed after leaving the

Commi were the Ashira, the Ishogo, the Apono, and the Ashango, and none

appears to have differed greatly from the others except in name. In

habits they are all extremely alike, uniting a primitive simplicity of

costume and architecture to highly sophisticated traits of lying and

stealing. They are not warlike, and not very cruel, except in cases of

witchcraft, which are extremely dealt with,--as, indeed, they used to be

in New England. Fetichism is the only religion of these tribes, and they

seem to believe firmly in no superior powers but those of evil. They are

docile, however, and susceptible of control. Du Chaillu had the

misfortune to spread the small-pox among them from some infected members

of his train; and although all their superstitious fears were excited

against him, the people were held in check by their principal men; and

Du Chaillu met with no serious molestation until he reached Mouaou

Kombo. Here he found the inhabitants comparatively hostile and

distrustful, and in firing off a salute,--with the double purpose of

intimidating them and restoring them to confidence,--one of his retinue

accidentally shot two of the villagers. All hopes of friendly

intercourse and of further progress were now at an end, and Du Chaillu

began a rapid retreat, his men casting away in their flight his

photographs, journals, and note-books, and hopelessly impairing the

value of the possible narrative which he might survive to write.

Such narrative as he has actually written, we have briefly sketched. Its

fault is want of condensation and of graphic power, so that, although

you must follow the traveller through his difficulties and dangers, it

is quite as much by effort of sympathy as by reason of interest that you

do so. For the paucity of result from all the labor and hardship

undergone, the author--considering the losses of material he

sustained--cannot be justly criticised; but certainly the bulk of his

volume makes its meagre substance somewhat too apparent.

_Liffith Lank, or Lunacy._ By C. H. WEBB. New York: Carleton.

_St. Twel'mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga._ By C. H.

WEBB. New York: C. H. Webb.

In the first of these clever and successful burlesques, Mr. Webb has

travestied rather the ideas than the manner of Mr. Reade; and one who

turned to "Liffith Lank" from the wonderful parodies in "Punch's Prize

Novelists," or those exquisitely finished pieces of mimicry, the

"Condensed Novelists" of the Californian Harte, would feel its want of

fidelity to the method and style of the author burlesqued. Yet the

essential absurdities of "Griffith Gaunt" are most amusingly brought out

in "Liffith Lank"; and as the little work makes the reader laugh at the

great one, he has no right, perhaps, to ask more of it, or to complain

that it trusts too much to the facile pun for its effects, which are

oftener broad than poignant.

Nevertheless, in spite of our logical content with "Liffith Lank," we

are very glad to find "St. Twel'mo" much better, and we only doubt

whether the game is worth the candle; but as the candle is Mr. Webb's,

he can burn it, we suppose, upon whatever occasion he likes. He has here

made a closer parody than in his first effort, and has lost nothing of

the peculiar power with which he there satirized ideas. That quality of

the Bronté sisters, of which Miss Evans of Mobile is one of the many

American dilutions,--that quality by which any sort of masculine

wickedness and brutality short of refusing ladies seats in horse-cars is

made lovely and attractive to the well-read and well-bred of the

sex,--is very pleasantly derided, while the tropical luxuriance of

general information characteristic of "St. Elmo" is unsparingly

ridiculed, with the help of frequent extracts from the novel itself.

Mr. Webb appears in "St. Twel'mo" as both publisher and author, and,

with a good feeling significant of very great changes in the literary

world since a poet toasted Napoleon because he hanged a bookseller,

dedicates his little work "To his best friend and nearest relative, the

publisher."

_The Literary Life of James K. Paulding._ Compiled by his Son, WILLIAM

I. PAULDING. New York: Charles Scribner and Company.

James K. Paulding was born in 1778 at Great-Nine Partners, in Dutchess

County, New York, and nineteen years later came to the city of New York

to fill a clerkship in a public office. His family was related to that

of Washington Irving by marriage; he was himself united to Irving by

literary sympathy and ambition, and the two young men now formed a

friendship which endured through life. They published the Salmagundi

papers together, and they always corresponded; but with Irving

literature became all in all, and with Paulding a favorite relaxation

from political life and a merely collateral pursuit. He wrote partisan

satires and philippics, waxing ever more bitter against the party to

which Irving belonged, and against England, where Irving was tasting the

sweets of appreciation and success. He came to be Navy Agent at New York

in 1823, and in 1838 President Van Buren made him his Secretary of the

Navy. Three years later he retired from public life, and spent his

remaining days in the tranquil and uneventful indulgence of his literary

tastes.

Dying in 1859, he had survived nearly all his readers, and the present

memoir was required to remind many, and to inform more, of the existence

of such works as "The Backwoodsman," a poem; the Salmagundi papers in a

second series; "Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, a story of the New World,"

in two volumes; "The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham,"

satirizing Owen's theories of society, law, and science; "The New Mirror

for Travellers, and Guide to the Springs," a satire of fashionable life

in the days before ladies with seventy-five trunks were born; "Tales of

the Good Woman," a collection of short stories; "A Life of Washington";

"American Comedies"; "The Old Continental," and "The Puritan and his

Daughter," historical novels; and innumerable political papers of a

serious or a satirical sort. As it has been the purpose of the author of

this memoir to let Paulding's life in great part develop itself from his

letters, so it has also been his plan to spare comment on his father's

literary labors, and to allow their character to be estimated by

extracts from his poems, romances, and satires. From these we gather the

idea of greater quantity than quality; of a poetical taste rather than

poetic faculty; of a whimsical rather than a humorous or witty man.

There is a very marked resemblance to Washington Irving's manner in the

prose, which is inevitably, of course, less polished than that of the

more purely literary man, and which is apt to be insipid and strained in

greater degree in the same direction. It would not be just to say that

Paulding's style was formed upon that of Irving; but both had given

their days and nights to the virtuous poverty of the essayists of the

last century; and while one grew into something fresher and more

original by dint of long and constant literary effort, the other,

writing only occasionally, remained an old-fashioned mannerist to the

last. When he died, he passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens,

Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is

wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though

unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is

second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous

and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence

which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our own more

pyrotechnic literary time.

Of Paulding himself one thinks, after reading the present memoir, with

much regard and some regret. He was a sturdy patriot and cordial

democrat, but he seems not to have thought human slavery so very bad a

thing. He is perceptibly opinionated, and would have carried things with

a high hand, whether as one of the government or one of the governed. He

was not swift to adopt new ideas, but he was thoroughly honest in his

opposition to them. His somewhat exaggerated estimate of his own

importance in the world of letters and of politics was one of those

venial errors which time readily repairs.

_History and General Description of New France._ By the Rev. P. F. X. DE

CHARLEVOIX, S. J. Translated, with Notes, by JOHN GILMARY SHEA. New

York: J. G. Shea. Vol. I.

Charlevoix's "History of New France" is very well known to all who study

American history in its sources. It is a well-written, scholarlike, and

readable book, treating of a subject which the author perfectly

understood, and of which he may be said to have been a part. Tried by

the measure of his times, his research was thorough and tolerably exact.

The work, in short, has always been justly regarded as a "standard," and

very few later writers have thought it necessary to go beyond or behind

it. Appended to it is a journal of the author's travels in America, in

the form of a series of letters to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières, full of

interest, and a storehouse of trustworthy information.

Charlevoix had been largely quoted and extensively read. Not to know

him, indeed, was to be ignorant of some of the most memorable passages

in the history of this continent; but, what is certainly remarkable, he

had never found an English translator. At the time of the Old French

War, when the public curiosity was strongly interested in everything

relating to America, the journal appended to the history was "done into

English" and eagerly read; but the history itself had remained to this

time in the language in which it was originally written. This is not to

be regretted, if it has been the occasion of giving us the truly

admirable work which is the subject of this notice.

The spirit and the manner in which Mr. Shea has entered upon his task

are above all praise. It is with him a "labor of love." In these days of

literary "jobs," when bad translating and careless editing are palmed

off upon the amateurs of choice books in all the finery of broad margins

and faultless typography, it is refreshing to meet with a book of which

the mechanical excellence is fully equalled by the substantial value of

its contents, and by the thorough, conscientious, and scholarlike

character of the literary execution. The labor and the knowledge

bestowed on this translation would have sufficed to produce an original

history of high merit. Charlevoix rarely gives his authorities. Mr. Shea

has more than supplied this deficiency. Not only has he traced out the

sources of his author's statements and exhibited them in notes, but he

has had recourse to sources of which Charlevoix knew nothing. He is thus

enabled to substantiate, correct, or amplify the original narrative. He

translates it, indeed, with literal precision, but, in his copious notes

he sheds such a flood of new light upon it that this translation is of

far more value to the student than the original work. Since Charlevoix's

time, many documents, unknown to him, though bearing on his subject,

have been discovered, and Mr. Shea has diligently availed himself of

them. The tastes and studies of many years have made him familiar with

this field of research, and prepared him to accomplish an undertaking

which would otherwise have been impracticable.

The first volume is illustrated by facsimiles of Charlevoix's maps,

together with his portrait and those of Cartier and Menendez. It forms a

large octavo of about three hundred pages, and as a specimen of the

typographical art is scarcely to be surpassed. We learn that the second

volume is about to appear.

_The Comparative Geography of Palestine, and the Sinaitic Peninsula._ By

CARL RITTER. Translated and adapted to the use of Biblical Students by

WILLIAM L. GAGE. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1866. 4 vols.

American critics have found fault with Mr. Gage, as it seems to us

somewhat too strongly, for certain features of this work. He has been

blamed for adapting it "to the use of Biblical students," as though

thereby he must necessarily tamper with scientific accuracy of

statement,--for too much condensation, and for too little,--for omitting

Ritter's maps,--and for certain incongruities of figures and

measurement. It has also been said, that the book itself, being fifteen

years old, is already antiquated, and that many recent works, not

mentioned by Ritter, or at least not adequately used, have modified our

knowledge of Palestine since his day. But, after all, these critics have

ended by saying that the work is a good and useful one, and by awarding

credit to Mr. Gage for his fidelity, industry, and accuracy in his part

of the work. So that, perhaps, the fault-finding was thrown in only as a

necessary part of the duty of the reviewer; for fault-finding is, _ex

officio_, his expected function. A judge ought always to be seated above

the criminal, and every author before his reviewer is only a culprit.

The author may have given years to the study of the subject to which his

reviewer has only given hours. But what of that? The position of the

reviewer is to look down, and his tone must always be _de haut en bas_.

We do not, ourselves, profess to know as much of the geography of

Palestine as Professor Ritter, probably not as much as Mr. Gage. Were it

not for the sharp-eyed critics, we should have wholly missed the

important verification of the surface-level of Lake Huleh. We have in

past years studied our "Palästina," by Von Raumer, and followed the

careful Dr. Robinson with gratitude through his laborious researches.

But we must confess that we are grateful for these volumes, even though

they have no maps, and cannot but think it honorable in Mr. Gage to

prefer to publish the book with none, rather than with poor ones. We see

no harm in adapting the work to the use of Biblical students, by

abridging of omitting the topics which have no bearing on the Bible

history. No one else is obliged to purchase it, and the warning is given

beforehand.

These four volumes contain a vast amount of interesting and important

matter concerning Sinai and Palestine. The journals of travellers of all

times are laid under contribution, and you are allowed often to form

your own judgments from the primitive narratives. You are like one

sitting in a court and hearing a host of witnesses examined and

cross-examined by able counsel, and then listening to the summing up of

a learned judge. It is easy to see how much more vivid such descriptions

must be than a dry _résumé_ without these accompanying _pièces

justificatifs_.

The first of the four volumes concerns the peninsula of Mount Sinai. It

gives the history of all the travels in that region, and the chief works

concerning it from the earliest time; the routes to Mount Sinai; the

voyages of Hiram and Solomon through the Red Sea to India; an

interesting discussion of the name Ophir; the different groups of

mountains in this region; the Bedouin tribes of the peninsula, and of

Arabia Petræa; and a full account of Petra, the monolithic city of Edom.

The second volume begins with a comparative view of Syria, and a review

of the authorities on the geography of Palestine. Then follows an

account of the Land of Canaan and its inhabitants before the conquest by

the Israelites, and of the tribes outside of Palestine who remained

hostile to the Israelites. We next have an account of the great

depression of the Jordan Valley, the river and its basin. Chapters on

the sources of the Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, the caravan road to

Damascus, and the river to the Dead Sea, and an account of the

travellers who have surveyed the region, follow,--with an Appendix, in

which is contained a discussion of the site of Capernaum, and Tobler's

full list of works on Palestine.

Vol. III. contains chapters on the Mouth of the Jordan; the Dead Sea;

the Division among the Ten Tribes; an account of Judæa, Samaria, and

Galilee; the routes through the Land; and several scientific essays.

Vol. IV. gives a full account of Jerusalem, ancient, mediæval, and

modern; a discussion of the holy places; an account of the inhabitants;

the region around Jerusalem; the roads to and from the city; Samaria;

and Galilee;--concluding with an index of subjects, and another of

texts.

On the whole, we must express our gratitude to Mr. Gage for his labor of

love, in thus giving us the results of the studies of his friend and

master on this important theme. Students of the Bible and of Syrian

geography can nowhere else find the matters treated so fully and

conscientiously and exhaustively discussed as here.

As the principal objection made to the translation of Mr. Gage is that

it omits Ritter's maps, it is proper to state that Professor Kiepert

declared them to be worthless; that the publisher declined an offer to

sell five hundred sets, lying on his hands, to the Clarks of Edinburgh,

because he could not conscientiously recommend them. Inasmuch as good

Bible maps of Palestine are to be had everywhere, and as Robinson's are

sold by themselves in a little volume, the student does not seem to

have much reason to complain.

The past quarter of a century has not added much to our knowledge of

Palestine. Stanley, Bonor, Stewart, Lynch, Tobler, Barclay, De Saulcy,

Sepp, Tristam, Porter, Wetystein, the Duc de Luyner, and others, have

travelled and written, but the mysteries remain mysteries still.

_Memoirs and Correspondence of Madame Récamier._ Translated from the

French and edited by ISAPHENE M. LUYSTER. Fourth Edition. Boston:

Roberts Brothers.

In an article contributed a year or two since to these pages, Miss

Luyster sketched the career of the beautiful and good woman whose

history is minutely recounted in the volume before us. It is a

fascinating history, for Madame Récamier was altogether as anomalous as

any creation of French fiction. Her marriage was such only in name; she

lived pure, and with unblemished repute, in the most vicious and

scandalous times; she inspired friendship by coquetry; her heart was

never touched, though full of womanly tenderness; a leader of society

and of fashion, she never ceased to be timid and diffident; she ruled

witty and intellectual circles by the charm of the most unepigrammatic

sweetness, the merest good-heartedness.

The correspondence of Madame Récamier consists almost entirely of

letters written to her; for this adored friend of literary men wrote

seldom herself, and at her death even caused to be destroyed the greater

part of the few notes she had made toward an autobiography. In the

present Memoirs Madame Lenormant chiefly relies upon her own personal

knowledge of Madame Récamier's life, and upon contemporary hearsay. It

is a very interesting book, as we have it, though at times provokingly

unsatisfactory, and at times inflated and silly in style. It is not only

a history of Madame Récamier, but a sketch of French society, politics,

and literature during very long and interesting periods.

Miss Luyster has faithfully performed the ever-thankless task of

translation; and, in preparing Madame Lenormant's work for the American

public, has somewhat restrained the author's tendency to confusion and

diffusion. Here and there, as editor, she has added slight but useful

notes, and has accompanied the Memoirs with a very pleasantly written

introduction, giving a skilful and independent analysis of Madame

Récamier's character.

_Old England: its Scenery, Art, and People._ By JAMES M. HOPPIN,

Professor in Yale College. New York; Hurd and Houghton.

"The 'Pavilion,' with its puerile domes and minarets, recalls the false

and flimsy epoch of that semi-Oriental monarch, George IV. His statue by

Chantrey stands upon a promenade called the 'Old Steine.' The house of

Mrs. Thrale, where Doctor Johnson visited, is still standing. The

atmosphere of Brighton is considered to be favorable for invalids in the

winter-time, as well as the summer."

In this haphazard way many of the various objects of interest in Old

England are introduced to his reader by a New England writer, who

possibly mistakes the disorder of a note-book for literary ease, or who

possibly has little of the method of picturesqueness in him. In either

case his reader returns from Old England with the impression that his

travelling-companion is a sensible, honest observer, who, in forming a

book out of very good material, has often builded, not better, but

worse, than he knew. There is no want of graphic touches; there is

enough of fine and poetic feeling; but there is no perspective, no

atmosphere: much of Old England through this book affects one somewhat

as a faithful Chinese drawing of the moon might.

At other times Mr. Hoppin's treatment of his subject is sufficiently

artistic, and he has seen some places and persons not worn quite

threadbare by travel. He did not pay the national visit to Mr. Tennyson,

although he had a letter of introduction; and of those people whose

hospitality he did enjoy, he writes with great discretion and good

taste. His sketch of the High Church clergyman at Land's End is a case

in point, and it has an interest to Americans for the light it throws

upon the present conflict of religious thought in England.

Mr. Hoppin writes best of the less frequented parts of England,--of

Land's End, and of Cornwall and Penzance; but he writes no more

particularly of them than of the suburbs of London. The chapter on

London art and the London pulpit is a curious _mélange_ of shrewd,

original thoughts about pictures and of acceptations of critical

authority, of sectarian belief and of worldly toleration, together with

a certain immaturity of literary judgment and a characteristic tendency

to incoherence. "Turner," he says, "did a great work, if it were only to

have been the occasion of Ruskin's marvellous eloquence"; and of Dr.

Cumming he writes, as if transcribing literally from his note-book: "His

voice is rich, and mellow without being powerful. He is a tall man, with

high, white forehead and white hair. It was difficult to find a seat,

even upon the pulpit stairs. Dr. Cumming, as a graceful, yet not

effeminate preacher, has good claims to his celebrity."

It remains for us to praise the author's conscientious effort at all

times to convey information, and his success in this effort. He has

doubtless seen everything that is worth seeing in the country he has

passed over; and if we cannot accept the whole of his book as

literature, we have still the impression that we should find it one of

the best and thoroughest of hand-books for travel in Old England.

_Hymns._ By HARRIET MCEWEN KIMBALL, Boston: E. P. Dutton and Company.

Religious emotion has asked very little of literary art; and if we are

to let hymnology witness, it has received as little as it has asked in

times past. To call upon Christ's name, to bless God for goodness and

mercy, suffice it; and no form of words enabling it to do this seems to

be found too feeble, or affected, or grotesque. For anything more, the

inarticulate tones of music are as adequate to devotion as the sublimest

formula that Milton or Dante could have shaped. It is only since

religion has been so much philosophized, and has in so great degree

ceased to be a passion, that we have begun to find the hymns which our

forefathers sang with rapturous unconsciousness rather rubbishy

literature. How blank, and void of all inspiration, they seem for the

most part to be! Good men wrote them, but evidently in seasons of great

mental depression. How commonplace is the language, how strained are the

fancies, how weak the thoughts! Yet through these stops of lead and

wood, the music of charity, love, repentance, aspiration, has poured

from millions of humble hearts in sweetness that blessed and praised.

With no thought probably of affecting the standard hymnnology were the

hymns written in the little book before us. They are characterized by

poetic purity of diction as well as tenderness of sentiment. They

express, without freshness of intuition, the emotions and desires of a

devoutly religious nature; and they commend themselves, like some of the

best and earliest Christian hymns, by their realization of the Divine

essence as something to be directly approached with filial and personal

affection. Here is no burst of fervid devotion, but rather a quiet love,

breathing contrition, faith, and praise in poems of gentle earnestness,

which even the reader not imbued with the element of their inspiration

may find graceful and pleasing.