Mr. Miles's poem, "Christine," has [{718}] been already before our readers, in the pages of the Catholic World, and we are sure that its appearance in book form will be welcomed by all who have perused its beautiful verses.
It is the work of an artist, and as such, one likes to have it, as it were, completely under view, and not scattered in fragments amidst other productions which intrude upon our vision, and interrupt its continuity.
Mr. Miles has given us a poem of no ordinary merit. Powerfully dramatic, it not only paints the scenes of the story in strong, vivid colors, but brings the actors into a living reality as they pass before us. Few writers of our day possess much dramatic power, and this accounts for their short-lived fame. He who would write for fame must give us pictures of real life, and not pure reflective sentiment.
Poetry and its more subtle-tongued sister, music, are as much nobler and worthier of immortality than are painting or sculpture, as the reality is superior to the image. Poetry and music are the true clothed in the beautiful, whilst painting and sculpture can only give us beautiful yet lifeless images of the true. The Psalms of David remain, but the Temple of Solomon and all its glory is departed. Poetry, the purest form of language, is also the best expression of divine, living and eternal truth, in so far as humanity can express it. Being the expression of absolute truth, poetry and music are the truly immortal arts which will live in heaven. No one ever yet imagined that the blessed, in presence of the Unveiled Truth, will express their beatitude in painted or sculptured images; but the revealed vision of the inspired poet, who drew his inspiration at the Source of truth, upon whose bosom he leaned, telling us of the saints, "harping upon their harps of gold," and "singing the song of the Lamb," finds a responsive assent in all our minds. Caught up into the embrace of the infinitely true, and the infinitely beautiful, they must necessarily give expression to that upon which the soul lives, and with which it is wholly enlightened.
There, too, they must possess a quasi creative power of expression of the true, (in so far as they are thus endowed by virtue of their union with God, who is pure act, through the Word made Flesh,) just as we possess it here in germ by the dramatic form, which actualizes to us the otherwise abstract truth expressed. Hence the superiority of the dramatic, in which of course we include the descriptive, over the sentimental. Mr. Miles possesses this genius in no mean degree, as he has already shown in his "Mahomet." The poem before us abounds in dramatic passages of rare beauty. Let our readers turn to the third song, and read the flight of Christine. They will find it to be a description unsurpassed in the English language. The death of "faithful Kaliph," and the knight's tender plaint over his "gallant grey," forgetful of even his rescued spouse, introduced to us in the flush of victory over the demon foe, just when our stronger passions are wrought up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, is one of those sudden and thrilling transitions from the sublime to the pathetic which may crown Mr. Miles as a master of the poet's pen.
"Raphael Sanzio" dying, the first of the additional poems, possesses much of the merit we have signalized, but its versification and wording are too harsh for the subject. It is not the death of him whom we have known as Raphael. It reads as though told by one who was forced to admire, yet did not love, the great artist. There is a charming little poem, entitled, "Said the Rose," which is worth all the minor poems put together, if poetry can be valued against poetry. We may say, at least, that it alone is worth many times the price of the whole volume; and our readers, who may have already enjoyed the perusal of "Christine" in our pages, will not fail to thank us for this hint to purchase the complete volume.
Mr. Kehoe, the publisher, is giving us some creditable books, as the "Life and Sermons of Father Baker," the "May Carols of Aubrey de Vere," and "The Works of Archbishop Hughes," bear testimony. The present one is got up in a superior manner, both in type, paper, and binding, and is a worthy dress for author's work.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND, FROM THE FALL OF WOLSEY TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH.
By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Vols. V. and VI. 8vo, pp. 474, 495. New York: Charles Scribner & Co.
Mr. Froude's thorough-going Protestantism is by this time too familiar to our [{719}] readers for them to expect a very lively satisfaction in reading the story of the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary which he has given in these volumes. We have neither the space nor the inclination to follow him in his review of those melancholy times. We prefer to accord a hearty recognition to the undoubted merits of his work; his graphic and picturesque style; his artistic eye for effect; his excellent judgment in the examination of old-time witnesses; and the rare self-control which in the midst of his abundance of hitherto unused material has saved him from encumbering his pages and overloading his narrative with facts and illustrations of only minor interest. He gives us sometimes little bits of truth where we had least reason to look for them. Cordially as he detests Mary the queen, he is tenderer than most historians of his ultra sort to Mary the woman. "From the passions which in general tempt sovereigns into crime," he says, "she was entirely free; to the time of her accession she had lived a blameless, and in many respects a noble life; and few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing. Philip's conduct, which could not extinguish her passion for him, and the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her supposed pregnancy, it can hardly be doubted, affected her sanity. Those forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to write tear-blotted letters to her husband; those bursts of fury over the libels dropped in her way; or the marchings in procession behind the Host in the London streets[!]--these are all symptoms of hysterical derangement, and leave little room, as we think of her, for other feeling than pity." The persecution, for which her reign is remembered was partly the result, Mr. Froude thinks, of "the too natural tendency of an oppressed party to abuse suddenly recovered power." Moreover, "the rebellions and massacres, the political scandals, the universal suffering throughout the country during Edward's minority, had created a general bitterness in all classes against the Reformers; the Catholics could appeal with justice to the apparent consequences of heretical opinions; and when the Reforming preachers themselves denounced so loudly the irreligion which had attended their success, there was little wonder that the world took them at their word, and was ready to permit the use of strong suppressive measures to keep down the unruly tendencies of uncontrolled fanatics."
Mr. Froude's history will be completed in two more volumes.