and more beautiful religion, which has in it something else than the valley of the shadow of death. Her striving to realize this ideal produced Gates Ajar and other similar works, whose immense popularity proves both her own power as a writer and also a widely-felt sympathy with the sentiments of her own mind. It is the Catholic theology alone which presents the true and complete doctrine respecting the beatific vision, the glorified humanity of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints, the angelic hierarchy, and the relation between the visible and invisible worlds; together with that element of the poetic and the marvellous after which the mind, the imagination, and the heart crave with an insatiable longing. We are tempted to close the present exercise, after the manner of the little book before us, with a few verses from an old hymn, written by one of the persecuted Catholics of Lancashire, at the close of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. The whole hymn may be found in the Month for September and October:
“Hierusalem, my happie home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrowes have an end?
Thy ioyes when shall I see?
“Thy walls are made of precious stones,
Thy bulwarks diamonds square,
Thy gates are of right orient pearle,
Exceedinge riche and rare.
“Thy turrettes and thy pinnacles
With carbuncles doe shine;
Thy verie streets are paved with gould
Surpassinge cleare and fine.
“Thy houses are of ivorie,
Thy windoes cristale cleare,
Thy tyles are made of beaten gould
O God, that I were there!
“Thy gardens and thy gallant walkes
Continually are greene;
There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
As noewhere else are seene.
“Quyt through the streetes with silver sound
The flood of life doth flowe,
Upon whose bankes on every syde
The wood of lyfe doth grow.
“Hierusalem, my happie home!
Would God I were in thee!
Would God my woes were at an end,
Thy ioyes that I might see!”
The Prisoners of St. Lazare. Edited by Mrs. Pauline de Grandprè. Translated from the French by Mrs. E. M. McCarthy. New York: Appleton & Co.
In this volume we have a rambling, desultory description of the prison of St. Lazare in Paris, and its inmates. It is a prison for women guilty of every variety of crime, and they are even incarcerated here on suspicion. But the majority of its occupants are women who have fallen from virtue more or less criminally. Two great unsolved questions of the age force themselves upon the attentive reader of this volume, filled with the pitiful tale of woman’s sin and shame: What can be done to succor unfortunates who have been ensnared and drawn away from the paths of virtue, and have a desire to return to an honest life; and what are the legitimate and proper employments of women outside of the family?