The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877

by Various

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Priesthood in the Light of the New Testament. By E. Mellor, D.D. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.

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

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

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

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

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

Whether all these reasons can produce a bias towards the priesthood in humanity identical with the bias it has unfortunately towards selfishness and sin, we will leave to the author to assert. We think that all those reasons, when well understood and stated properly, dispose humanity towards the priesthood—in fact, create an instinct for it—and that that instinct is a legitimate, noble, generous craving of the human heart; and to say that they create a bias identical with a bias to sin is to show the most supine ignorance of human nature, of the history of mankind, and the true philosophy of history. But let that pass; do all these reasons account for the existence and claims of the priesthood? According to the author himself they do not. For he says himself all this contributed to prepare the way for a transformation of that religion which knows no earthly mediator (page 75).

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

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

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

Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York, for the Year ending December 31, 1876.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Question of Honor: A Novel. By Christian Reid, author of A Daughter of Bohemia, Valerie Aylmer, Morton House, etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wonders of Prayer: A remarkable record of well authenticated answers to prayer. By Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T. Williams, Publisher.

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

The Little Pearls; or, Gems of Virtue. Translated by Mrs. Kate E. Hughes. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

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

Beside the Western Sea: A Collection of Poems. By Harriet M. Skidmore (“Marie”). New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

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

“I watched the folding of a soft white wing

Above the city’s heart;

I saw the mist its silent shadows fling

O’er thronged and busy mart.

Softly it glided through the Golden Gate

And up the shining bay,

Calmly it lingered on the hills, to wait

The dying of the day.

Like the white ashes of the sunset fire,

It lay within the West,

Then onward crept above the lofty spire,

In nimbus-wreaths to rest.

It spread anon—its fleecy clouds unrolled,

And floated gently down;

And thus I saw that silent wing enfold

The Babel-throated town.

A spell was laid on restless life and din,

That bade its tumult cease;

A veil was flung o’er squalor, woe, and sin,

Of purity and peace.

And dreaming hearts, so hallowed by the mist,

So freed from grosser leaven,

In the soft chime of vesper bells could list

Sweet, echoed tones of heaven;

Could see, enraptured, when the starlight came,

With lustre soft and pale,

A sacred city crowned with 'ring of flame,’

Beneath her misty veil.”

Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome. By R. H. Busk, author of Sagas from the Far East, etc. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1877.

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

Philip Nolan’s Friends: A story of the change of Western Empire. By Edward E. Hale. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.

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

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

The novel is readable, but not by any means artistic. The author lacks the power to create a character that can think and act like a human being. He wishes us to believe his heroine possesses beauty, sensibility, and vivacity; but he lacks the subtle power to invent actions and conversations which impress individuality, and we gather our notions of the lady more from his suggestions than from the movement of the story. This seems to be the author’s weakness: his figures act and he suggests the motives and impulses.

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

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

Reply to the Hon. R. W. Thompson, Secretary of the Navy, addressed to the American People. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., of the Society of Jesus. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

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

The Pearl among the Virtues; or, Words of Advice to Christian Youth. By P. A. De Doss, S.J. Translated from the original German by a Catholic priest. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

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

God the Teacher of Mankind: A Plain, Comprehensive Explanation Of Christian Doctrine. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis: Benziger Brothers. 1877.

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

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

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

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

Dora. By Julia Kavanagh.

Bessie:

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

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

The Catholic Keepsake. A gift-book for all seasons. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

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

Bessy; Or, the Fatal Consequence of Telling Lies. By the author of The Rat-Pond; or, The Effects of Disobedience. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

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

The Story of Felice. By Esmeralda Boyle. London: Trübner & Co. 1873.

Songs of the Land and Sea. By Esmeralda Boyle. New York: E. J. Hale & Son. 1875.

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

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

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE.

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

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

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

“For Agamemnon insulted Chryses”;

“But Agamemnon was much displeased”;

“Wounded is Diomed, Tydeus’ son,

Ulysses, also, and Agamemnon.”

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

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

“sicut inter ignes

Luna minores,”

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

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

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

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

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

“'Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus

Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,

Per damna, per cœdes, ab ipso

Ducit opes animumque ferro.’”[^[121]]

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

“Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit

Pennas, resigno quæ dedit ...

... probamque

Pauperiem sine dote quæro.”[^[122]]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When to future years thou extend’st thy cares,

Thou dealest in other men’s affairs”;

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

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying,”

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

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

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

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

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

is a perfect Saturnian verse on Terence’s model:

“Dăbūnt mălūm Mĕtēllī Nævĭō pŏētæ.”

How would Mr. Gladstone’s menace,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,”

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

“Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty,”

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

“Now had fiery Phlegon his dayes revolution ended,

And his snoring snout with salt waves all to be-washed,”

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

“Sicut si quando vincleis venatica velox”;

“Sicut fortis equus spatio qui forte supremo”;

“Quai neque Dardaneis campeis potuere perire

Nec cum capta capei, nec cum combusta cremari.”

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

¸ “Num Sigæis occumbere campis,

Num capti potuere capi? num incensa cremavit

Troja viros?”[^[125]]

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

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

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

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

“Then to thy parent’s hest take heede, dread not, my mind obey:

In yonder place where stones from stones and bildings huge to sway

Thou seest, and mixt with dust and smoke thicke stremes of reekings rise,

Himselfe the god Neptune that side doth furne in wonders wise:

With forke three tinde the wall vproots, foundations allto shakes;

And qvite from vnder soile the towne, with ground-works all uprakes.

On yonder side with Furies most, dame Juno fiercely stands,

The gates she keeps, and from the ships the Greekes, her friendly bands,

In armour girt she calles.

Lo! there againe where Pallas sits, on fortes and castle-towres,

With Gorgon’s eyes, in lightning cloudes enclosed, grim she lowres,

The father-god himself to Greekes their mightes and courage steres,

Himselfe against the Troyan blood both gods and armour reres.

Betake thee to thy flight, my sonne, thy labours’ ende procure,

I will thee never faile, but thee to resting-place assure.

She said, and through the darke night shade herselfe she drew from sight;

Appeare the grisly faces then, Troyes en’mies vgly dight.”

Mr. Morris gives it thus:

“And look to it no more afeard to be

Of what I bid, nor evermore thy mother’s word disown.

There where thou seest the great walls cleft and stone turn off from stone,

And seest the waves of smoke go by with mingled dust-cloud rolled,

There Neptune shakes the walls and stirs the foundings from their hold

With mighty trident, tumbling down the city from its base.

There by the Scæan gates again hath bitter Juno place

The first of all, and wild and mad, herself begirt with steel,

Calls up her fellows from the ships.

Look back! Tritonian Pallas broods o’er topmost burg on high,

All flashing bright with Gorgon grim from out her stormy sky;

The very Father hearteneth on, and stays with happy might

The Danaans, crying on the gods against the Dardan fight.

Snatch flight, O son, whiles yet thou mayst, and let thy toil be o’er;

I by thy side will bring thee safe unto thy father’s door.

“She spake, and hid herself away where thickest darkness poured.

Then dreadful images show forth, great godheads are abroad,

The very haters of our Troy.”

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

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

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

for

“Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant,”

or

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

as an equivalent for

“Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”

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

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

“Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus;

Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus”;[^[128]]

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

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

“O Muses of Sicilian ile, let’s greater matters singe!

Shrubs, groves, and bushes lowe delight and please not every man.

If we do singe of woods, the woods be worthy of a consul.”

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

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

“What man, what hero [Clio] wilt thou raise

With shrillest pipe or Lyra’s softer lays?

What god whose name in sportive straine

Echo will chaunt thee back againe?”[^[129]]

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

“What man, what hero, or what god select’st thou,

Theme for sweet lyre or fife sonorous, Clio,

Whose honored name shall that gay sprite-voice, Echo,

Hymn back rebounding?”

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

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

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

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

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

“That servile path thou nobly dost decline

Of tracing word for word and line for line....

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue

To make translations, and translators too.

They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,

True to his sense, but truer to his fame.”

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

“Hence ye profane, I hate ye all,

Both the great vulgar and the small”

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

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

“Seest thou not how Soracte’s head

(For all his height) stands covered

With a white periwig of snow,

While the laboring woods below

Are hardly able to sustain

The weight of winter’s feathered rain?”

He had evidently been reading and, with Dryden, admiring Sylvester’s Du Bartas:

“And when the winter’s keener breath began

To crystallize the Baltic Ocean,

To glaze the lake, to bridle up the floods,

And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mother!” murmured Alba faintly.

“My child!”

“Kiss me, mother.... I am going....”

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

But Alba had passed beyond the mother’s voice.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mother!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

“You never loved him, Alba.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alba!”

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

“Hermann!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He kissed her without answering, and they went home.

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

THE END.

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

I.

Amid those shining ways of Italy

I thought of one who walks with bandaged eyes,

Led by some loving guide who, in sweet guise

Of eloquent speech, makes blinded vision see

The very lines that make tall towers fair,

The peaceful saints that guard cathedral door—

In death still keeping watch the people o’er—

Lifting tired souls to holy heights of prayer.

Even frail nest familiar form doth wear

Built far above upon the shoulders broad

Of sculptured friar, bearing light the load

His brother birds give, trustful, in his care.

So, poet-led, seemeth scarce need of eyes,

Pictured earth’s loveliness in words so wise.

II.

The blinded wanderer sees the far-off light

Of shadowy Alp, and his the lingering glow

That breathes in western skies along the low

And gleaming marshes darkening with the night.

Not bluer to fond eyes that see most clear

Are Naples’ waves than break they in his sight;

Nor floats St. Peter’s dome in softer light,

Seen from the Pincian, than its image fair

Rests in the pilgrim’s heart that in Rome sings

Its Nunc dimittis, whether it hold dear

For Brutus’ sake the city, or revere

The holier presence shadowing with strong wings

The mighty one, earth’s new Jerusalem,

Whose virtue fills her very garment’s hem.

III.

He sees the shadows o’er the valley creep—

Nay, even knows he, through his guide’s clear speech,

Where, at each hour, the ilex shade shall reach.

Though blinded, he can feel the sunshine steep

The hill he climbs; fair Italy’s soft air

Grow yet more soft with pity for poor eyes

That only feel the brightness of her skies,

Not know the infinite depths that glisten there.

And quick his ears catch sound of falling stream,

Twitter of leaves in Vallombrosan woods,

Bird-carol flung from chestnut solitudes;

While soft-voiced waves, like music in a dream,

Now tread with rippling touch Sorrento’s shore,

Now rise and fall Venetian stairway o’er.

IV.

He hears in Roman mouth the Tuscan speech;

Hears Naples chant the light of Syracuse,

Siena’s tongue, in guileless praise let loose,

In its pure utterance ancient glory teach.

And tells the poet to the wondering heart

Old histories of older Latin days;

Of distraught Italy’s sad, stormy ways

When feud and treason tore her sons apart,

When Dante ate the exile’s bitter bread,

When eagles dark swept down upon the land,

And lilies white, that should all stain withstand,

With deeds unworthy were discolorèd.

While from the Vaudois’ shivering mountain crown

The echoes of their bard-sung wars sweep down.

V.

Singeth the poet of still nearer days

When all the little lands fade one by one,

Like wan stars melting 'neath Sardinia’s sun—

While, for her crowning, 'mid the strangers’ praise,

Hastes Italy unto the Capitol.

Life of her sons laid down for her new life,

Maidens their soldiers arming for the strife,

Weeping the field where love and banner fall.

Sings he of carbine and of bayonet

That gleam and darken on Perugian hills,

Of sorrow that a frightened city fills,

And priestly robe with blood defenceless wet.

White Roman robe earth’s shadow marketh dark—

World-licensed target for the poets’ mark!

VI.

The pilgrim hearkens to his guide’s strong words,

Basks in their sunshine, thanketh for their dew,

Yet wonders, could his eyes behold the blue

As well as ears can mark the song of birds,

If something still he lacks he might not find—

Some perfect key of heavenly harmony

That should attune all sad discordancy,

In true accord the clashing fragments bind.

Soft fall the Angelus bells on listening ear,

The Miserere, in distress divine,

Wails from the heart of city Leonine.

Feels he the light that makes his darkness clear,

Grasps he the chord of pure and infinite blue

His picture lacks to make its color true.

VII.

So, poet-led, I trod Italian ways,

Seeing the glimmer of pale olive-trees,

Drifting, entranced, o’er warm Sicilian seas,

Hearkening Siena’s perfect speech of praise,

Drinking of Trevi’s fountain, o’er and o’er,

Yet craving ever something still more rare,

Some gift of grace that Italy must wear

To make her so the heart’s-best evermore;

Some crown above her hills, than her blue seas

More luminous, beyond her painters’ fame,

Or passionate poets’ soaring words of flame,

More than all proudest earthly destinies.

So drowned, amid the peal of Saxon bells,

Thought of that life wherein her true soul dwells.

VIII.

Seemed it as if the poet built a shrine—

Lifting its towers in the radiant air

The doves might haunt to make it seem more fair,

Lifting its columns that an art divine

With watching saints should crown, setting its floor

In firm mosaic, where, alas! inwrought

Should forms misshapen of ungentle thought

Sadden the Roman sunshine wandering o’er,

That, creeping onward, still should hope to kiss

The gladder sunshine of St. Philip’s feet.

Heaped high the altar with all flowers sweet—

Rich Italy’s unstinted loveliness—

Kindled the lamp before the inmost shrine,

Withheld the presence of the Guest Divine!