BOOKS.

MR. DE VERE'S "LEGENDS AND RECORDS OF THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE."

To read this volume is a singular rest amidst the trouble and fever of our sensational secularism and our passionate politics. It fixes the mind on spiritual ideals which our age has almost for- gotten, and on that stately march of history which makes political despair seem so childish and so dim-sighted. A good many of Mr. De Yere's poems,—and, we think, the most beautiful of them, rare concerned with the legends of the saints, and bring back with new force to a world full of the jars of mechanical progress and of intellectual triumphs, the time when the highest ambition of the heart was satisfied if it could learn to subdue its own pride, to extinguish its own impatience, to forego its own cravings, to exalt in its own disappointments, so long as it could win a step nearer to the life of Christ, or better still, as we fear the feeling was, to the crown of martyrdom. The rest of Mr. De Vere's poems in this volume, those in blank verse, are devoted to the delineation of the concurrent progress of Church and State, the development of European history between the Christian era and the empire of Charlemagne, and the view of that history which a mind really steeped in Catholic culture, and not, like Gibbon's, merely taught by it to love the superficial gilding of a brilliant tradition, is com- pelled to take. Both these kinds of poem are of deep interest, and fascinate the mind with their imaginative beauty and their reflective power. But those which are devoted to the study of the saintly life are, we think, the more fascinating of the two. For Mr. De -Pere knows what he means when he writes of that life. To him, the legendary marvel, the traditional miracle, is but the accident of the story. It is the passion with which the individual mind gave itself up in the early days of the Church • Igen& and Row& of the Church and the Empire. By Aubrey De Vern imam: Neon Danl. and Co.

to cultivating the mind of Christ, the inextinguishable love with which it pursued that ideal, that gave its interest to the legendary wonder, not the legendary wonder which gave its interest to the saintly life. In the very first legend, " The legend of Saint Thecla," the poet paints her life in the valleys of the Taurus, thus

" Fair were those peopled vales in them she dwelt As Eremite 'mid Lybian sands, alone : She lived in God, and all the earth, she felt, Formed but one marble footstep for His throne : Yet flower-like was her heart, sweetness sane sin— It was God's Eden; yea, He walked therein.

To her close by shone out the things remote For that cause holier seemed the things close by : Them too the eternal light of Duty smote: All service service seemed of One on high Worldlings, though seeking God, sleep oft, oft faint : No man is wholly Theist save the Saint.

No other wholly loves his kind she dipped The blind man's pitcher in the darkling wave : She cheered the sick-room ohill : the vines she clipped That made its casement gloomy as the grave: She stayed the widow's tears : from unknown skies She flashed new light into the orphan's eyes."

That is a picture not so entirely remote from the consciousness of to-day, for when has there been a more diffused and earnest organisation of saintly efforts to nurse the sick, to console the widow, and to foster the orphan than there is now ? But the difference between these when they proceed only from the love of man, and when the love of man springs from an infinitely deeper love of God, is finely marked by Mr. De Vere in this poem. "No man is wholly Theist save the Saint," he says, and he might equally truly have said that no man is wholly humanist save the saint, There is no sufficient depth of hope for human patience and tenderness, unless the source of that patience and tenderness is in an eternal spring. In the poem on "Saint Dionysins, the Areopagite," Mr. De Vere has sketched with very fine touch the spiritual weakness of even the Greek passion for beauty, though there is a spiritual beauty which may be allowed to rank with the love of holiness itself, simply because truly spiritual beauty includes holiness, though it includes something besides, that delicate finish and harmony of conduct which holiness can only gain after long effort, and when it has been softened by the influence of wide sympathies " 0 what a snare to thee, my Greece, was beauty ! Thy fancy robbed thy heart. Beauty to thee Was beauty's ruin. Truth must needs be beauteous; Yea, but that smile about her lips for thee

Cancelled the lovelier terrors of her brow, .. The ardours of her eyes. Then mad'st thy past Thus with Religion Charm, but scare me not !' The shadows of high things were dear to thee ; Their substance was offence.

. . . . . . To the Greek a Truth Meant bat a thought. He atept from off it lightly : 'Twos but a stepping-stone athwart a stream : From stone to stone he stept, and then forgot them. The Egyptian sage with what he knew of Truth At least held commerce true."

And here, again, is a tine picture of the old Roman magnanimity and heroism as it was transformed and exalted by the effect of conversion to Christianity :— " Yet, though before him ever stood the vision

Of that high Truth which gives the human soul Of visible things sole mastery and fruition, More solid seemed he, and in self-control More absolute, than of old ; and from his eye Looked lordlier forth its old sobriety.

In him showed nothing of enthusiasm, Of thought erratic wistful for strange ways, Nothing of phrase fantastic, passion's spasm, Or self-applause masking in self-dispraise:

Some things to him once great seemed now but small: In small things greatness dwelt, and God in all."

We may say that the whole object of these poems is to show us Roman valour transformed by Christian teaching into Catholic virtue, and in the form in which the Holy Roman Empire embodied it, looking "lordlier forth its old sobriety." In the principal poem of the book, that on "The Legend of St. Alexis,"—a very painful legend, in which a sacrifice not exactly such as was required of Abraham, bat one not less difficult, is demanded from a Roman youth in a form which seems in some sense even more arbitrary,—Mr. De Vere dwells once more on the virtues latent in the Roman stock while he describes the ancestry of Alexis :—

" That stook was ancient when great Meese fell ; Ancient when Hannibal with gloomy brow From Zama rode, till then invincible; Ancient when Cinoinnatus left hie plough ; Ancient when Liberty in crimson dyed

Leaped forth, re-virgiued, from a virgin's side."

A finer line than this last has perhaps hardly been written in England for many years. It is one of those lines which only a true poet could produce.

The story of the legend is that Alexis, though filled first of all with the love of Christ, is married by his father and mother's will to a lovely young Greek, for whom he feels a true though subordinate love, and that on the morning of the wedding he is bidden by God to leave her and fly to Edessa, it being promised that the sacrifice shall be full of the highest blessing to his father and mother and wife, as well as to himself. At Edessa he lives many years, till his outward form is no longer recognisable, and then is bidden to return to his father's house, but not to reveal himself to either father or mother or wife ; and there, without their recognising him, he dies, having first written the story of his life for them to read when all is over. This seemingly cruel trial is, of course, intel- ligible only as a trial which divine wisdom knows to be the beet for the perfection and exaltation of all the hearts which it well-nigh breaks ; but granted the absolute certainty of a divine revelation,—which is the only assumption that could redeem the flight of Alexis from the charge of ruthless indif- ference to the highest claims of human affection,—it is, of course, impossible to deny that Alexis showed himself worthy of his saintly calling by obeying it. At the same time, we do not think that so painful a subject is a very good one for a poem. The divine command must remain so arbitrary to our impressions,—it is so difficult to make us realise that in that way and no other, God could best have purified the hearts of these human beings, that it takes more magic than Mr. De Vere has at his command to make us see that perfect blending of the super- natural with the natural on which the success of such a poem must hang. But though we do not think that he fully succeeds in reconciling his readers to his subject, we admit the great beauty of the poem itself. The picture of the young saint, the picture of the Greek bride who is to be deserted by him on the very day her heart is full of joy at their union, the picture of the patrician father who hopes that in his son the Roman char- acter shall regain all its power and have the added grandeur of true spiritual faith, are all finely given. Here, for instance, is a picture of Christian Rome, ending with a fine panegyric on the Christian patrician :- " An exhalation of celestial grace

Moved o'er the Empire from the Martyrs' tombs : Christians, oft slaves, were found in every place ; Their words, their looks, brightened the heathen gloomy Such gleams still hallow Antoninus' page, The saintly Pagan and Imperial Sage.

Prescient of fate the old worship lay in swoon, Helpless though huge, dying and all but dead ; The young Faith clasped it as the keen new moon, A silver crescent risen o'er ocean's bed, Clasps that sad orb whose light from earth is won :- Its youthful conqueror parleys with the sun.

The Poor came first, and reaped the chief reward ; Old Houses next : Truth loves Humility : Humility ie humblest when most hard To reach—the lowliness of high degree : Such bowed to Christ in turn he gave to them The stars of Truth's whole heaven for diadem."

And equally fine is the picture of the prescient thrill of dread with which the Greek girl enters the home in which she is to suffer so much :—

" The sun had set ; they clomb Mount Aventine,

That Augur-haunted height. They paused she saw Old Tiber, lately bright, in sanguine line Wind darkening t'warde the sea. A sudden awe Chilled her. She felt once more that evening breeze Which waves that yew-grove of the Eumenides Where Athens fronts Colones. There of old Sat Destiny's blind mark, King CEdipus; And, oft as she had passed it, shodderings cold Ran through her &bred frame, made tremulous As the jarred sounding-board of lyre or harp : So thrilled the girl that hour with ahiverings sharp.

' I know it! This is Rome's Oracular Hill!

Dreadful it looks ; a western Calvary A sacrificial aspect dark and still It wears, that saki:, "Prepare, 0 man, to die !"

Father ! you beam not on this mount of Fate ?'

Thus as she spake they reached his palace gate." But for the intrinsic difficulty of reconciling us to this apparent raising of a multitude of tender and innocent hopes only that they may be blighted by the direct command of God at the very moment when they seem to be fulfilled, the poem of St. Alexis would be, we think, the most beautiful in the volume. On the whole, however, we think we prefer the poem on "The Legend of St. Pancratius."

Many of the poems in blank verse, which are more of medita- tions than narratives, are also delightful reading ; for example, the poem on " St. Dionysitte, the Areopagite," from which we have already taken many fine lines, and that on " St. Boniface," which is steeped in a sort of triumphant humility, and contains one of Mr. De Vere's finest lines :— " Ah me ! man's sorrows are his chief illusions:"

The whole volume reads to us like a curious blending of the piety of the Middle Ages with the culture of our own century, —like what one of Giotto's saints, if he could now return to earth and be imbued with our modern knowledge without losing his faith, might write for us.

In his interesting preface, Mr. De Vere thus describes the position of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne :—" On one side of that empire," he says, " the Saracen dominion, which had nearly two centuries' start of it, burned like a volcano ; and On the other, the Byzantine Empire mouldered like a mummy." He has given the impression which he wished to convey still more powerfully in the closing stanza of the ode on "The Crowning of Charlemagne," an ode which does not, however, in its general level, come up to the fine stanza we are about to quote :— "Rise, then, thou chief of Empires and the last

Later there cast be none

Rise, first of Empires, since the whole world's Past

In thee lives on !

Ride forth, God'a Warrior, armed with God's command To chase the great Brand-Wielder with the brand To the Asian deserts back, and wastes of burning sand.

In one brief century from the Impostor's death Peet Mecca's gates the fiery flood had rolled In ruin o'er the Church's land of gold : Bethlehem and Nazareth The sepulchre of Christ, were hers no more : The Alexandrian Empire, Egypt hoar The gem-crowned realms that held the south in fee Dazzling the Afric limits of the Midland Sea, Were lost Iberia followed : trembled Gaul : And Arab Horse were seen from Rome's eternal wall !— Islam shall die! the Faith shall beret its chain !

Who smote the turbaned host on Poitiers' plain ?

Charles Martel, grandsire of one Charlemagne !

Not East and South alone :—to Christ give thou Those northern shores whereon ne'er grated Roman prow I

Show thou how great a thing Empire may be

When founded not on sanctities downtrod, When not by greed and guilt Ingloriously up-built, But reared to be a fortress of the free, A temple for our God."

We may observe parenthetically that Mr. De Vere is, we think, unjust to Mahomet, as the Roman Catholics generally are. He tells us that though the nations are not yet half- Christianised, not even those which are nominally Christian, yet he looks to history to fulfil the type of Charlemagne's empire better than it has ever been fulfilled yet,—which, indeed, is not saying much,—since he expects Christianity not only to complete the circuit which it has only as yet begun round the earth, but probably to complete many such circuits before the type of a Christian empire can come to true maturity. A book which can breathe this faith is one which it will be profitable for all bewildered and downcast statesmen and despondent politicians to read, and read again. They will not find it without many an earthly charm, as well as many a better inspiration.