20 JULY 1878, Page 3

The sudden death of Miss Catherine Winkworth, the accom- plished

compiler and translator of the " Lyra Germanica," on July 1st, in Savoy, deprives us of a woman of rare refinement and ability, who had had the wisdom to cut out for herself a definite literary sphere, and to confine her efforts to that sphere. Her endeavour was to make English Protestants acquainted with the poetry and meditation of those large-minded and devout German mystics, whose spiritual feeling really made the first breach in the Roman Catholic formalism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In her studies of Pastor Fliedner and Amelia W. Sieveking, as well as in her double series of beautiful translations from the early German poetry of devotion, Miss Winkworth opened to English Protestants a world of religious sympathy, the knowledge of which tended not merely to deepen their religious faith and freedom, but to afford them the means of understanding even the genuinely Roman Catholic devotion of the mystic school. Between the true religious of both Churches there is, in fact, far more sympathy, than there is between the formalists and the true religious even of the same Church. And this Miss Wink- worth, no doubt, saw. In devoting her delicate and refined in- sight to the task of interpreting to English Protestants the religious mysticism of Germany, she did more to check sectarian narrowness than she could possibly have achieved by any more direct method.