The Life of S. Augustine, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church.By P. E. Moriarty, D.D. Ex-Assistant General O.S.A. Philadelphia: Cunningham. 1873.
This is a popular biography, though proceeding from the pen of a learned man, and showing marks of erudition. The sketch is a complete one, and shows great power of generalization and condensation in the writer, with vigor and impetus of style. It is not, however, minute in respect to the saint's public life, or his great work as a philosopher and doctor of the church. This could not be expected in a work of moderate size adapted for popular reading. There is, however, a brief summary of the saint's writings, with a synopsis, and an account of the Augustinian Order, all of which are of interest and value to the general reader.
Photographic Views; or, Religious and Moral Truths Reflected in the Universe. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., S.J. New York: P. O'Shea. 1873.
A handsomely printed volume, with a very ornamental title-page quite appropriate to the nature of the book. The views of truth presented in this book are expressed in aphorisms. Good taste, poetic sensibility, spiritual wisdom, and the purest Christian feeling are their chief characteristics. We are disposed to think this the best of F. Weninger's works. There are many persons who take great delight in aphorisms of this kind, and we think all such readers will like this book. It is good also as a help to meditation, and a treasury of short spiritual readings for those who have not time for long ones; and will be useful to those who like to stop occasionally in more laborious occupations of the mind, and gather a little spiritual nosegay.
Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore.By the late C. A. Sainte-Beuve. With a Selection from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1873.
Madame Valmore was one of those poets of the affections who
“Learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
No one can look for a moment at her portrait as depicted in this touching book without feeling that the thorn is continually pressing against her gentle breast. Her poetry and her letters are the very outcry of impassioned love and grief. “I am like the Indian that sings at the stake,” she says. One of her volumes is entitled Tears, every line of which is a pensive sigh. Her poems are full of “the charm of that melancholy which M. de Segur calls the luxury of grief.” M. Michelet says: “She alone among us had the gift of tears—that gift which smites the rock and assuages the thirst of the soul!” M. Sainte-Beuve calls her “the Mater Dolorosa of poetry,” but that title, consecrated to a higher, diviner type of sorrow, is one that most of us would shrink from applying to ordinary mortals.
It would almost seem as if the highest, purest notes—“half ecstasy, half pain”—only spring from the soul overshadowed by sorrow, as the eyes of some birds are darkened when they are taught to sing. Mme. Valmore herself, in allusion to a brother poet, wonders “if actual misery were requisite for the production of notes that so haunt one's memory.”
The tombs among which she used to play as a child in the old churchyard at Douai seem to have cast their funereal shadows over her whole life—shadows that lend to her sad muse so attractive a charm. One of her poems thus begins: