found united. The stream seems to shoot forth with wondrous force from its mountain channel. The wanderer often thinks of the monk, and contrasts his despairing faith with his own cold faithlessness. He returns to Sicily, and there he hears one day, issuing from a chapel,

"A chant that brought the tears into my eyes,

Whose words were, 'Requiem eternam dona eis.'

Then follow deep musings on "the wonderous life of Him of Galilee," which still retains a traditionary hold on the heart and conscience of the unbeliever.

"O where is He, the only One in Whom
My dark imagination still believes?
I come, like Mary, weeping to His tomb,
But ah! no angels tell me that He lives!
The troubled sea its raging waters heaves

For all the prayers of shipwrecked agony.
No sinking form with straining eyes perceives

The cruel waves, that rear their crests so high,

Before those Charmëd Feet like couchant lions lie."

Colonna issues from the chapel. To him the English wanderer avows his grief in language that expresses with the intensity of poetic power the doubts and cravings of our modern rationalists-a Jowett and his friends-all the poor seekers that never find. Cristofero, the former Colonna, rebukes him and relates his history; how he had roused himself from his despair to wait on the declining days of the poor madman, the murderer of Gemma, and in this painful task had found relief. The Italian passionate wildness of much of this narrative is redolent of the land of cypress and of orange groves, of burning suns and boundless skies: it has the rich loveliness of the song of the nightingale, the starry majesty of summer night. So then the monk finds partial comfort.

"He paused, grief-choked, and I from distant quire

Did hear, or heard methought, the solemn strain,

In wail unutterable, then aspire,

And wondrous words that strove to ease its pain:

'O Thou who on the cross for me hast lain,'

They, 'Quærens me sedisti lassus,' sighed, 'Let not thy love for me have been in vain, But Juste Judex ultionis hide.

Me ere that dreadful day by Thy redeeming side.""

No legal fiction of forensic righteousness, no Calvinistic selfish exultation in safety, not the religion of base fear, but that of

sacred love and sorrow. Cristofero went on to relate how he had ministered to his dying first love, how in his labours for others he had found partial peace. The heart of the English wanderer melts within him, he cries also for relief, and receives the same grave answer from example rather than from precept. These are Catholics, who pray and do more than they preach, not Presbyterian praters, who think the great object of life is to exhort and bear testimony.

"I saw him, not in scorn of penitence,
Fasting or prayer, but in humility

Heroical, till death should call him hence,
Christ's precepts strive to follow-not as they
Who deem they have more wit to disobey.

I saw how grief forgot her tears for him

Who strove with tender words her pain to stay;
I saw how guilt would shake in every limb

Before his strong rebuke, and hardened eyes o'erbrim.

He said, as he did waste away, 'Untold

Delight anew within my bosom springs :

I see new leaves and starry buds unfold,

And in the light expanding beauteous wings,

And Heav'n in earth's enchantments moves and sings.'
She had returned at length, of love and peace
The fair Eurydice repentance brings :

As softly day by day he did decrease,

She in undying beauty bade his sorrows cease.

And the poet adds in his own person—

"And I—I hear mysterious melodies

Timid awake from bird, and leaf, and shore.
Returning glory fills the purple skies,

The nodding reeds do whisper as of yore,
And waving branches speak to me once more.
For I have learned-and by no language vain-

Since pity all divine can man restore

To first estate, I dare not scorn man's pain,

Or scoff. Ah! I have found my reverence again."

And then follows the last exquisite stanza already cited"For I have seen a Form diviner far."

This poem is nothing more nor less than a revelation to weary hearts and complaining spirits. Heaven seems to us to have given to this generation a poet according to its need.

None can more exquisitely warble than Tennyson its dim hopes and lofty aspirations—

"Thou seemest human and divine;"

But his is not the gift of faith, and we must not seek from him what he cannot bestow on us, the spirit of Catholic conviction. Others have written devotionally with an exquisite charm. No age has produced more perfect sweetness long drawn out, and thrilling with the instinct of meek devotion, than that of the poet of "Lyra Innocentum" and "The Christian Year;" and the gorgeous richness of Isaac Williams' "Thoughts in Past Years" recalls the Oriental splendours of Shelley, with how much more of substance and of truth! But neither of these seems to have descended into the abyss of doubt like Gerard Leigh, and to have fought his way to light again. Here is a poet for the rising generation, for Oxford and for Cambridge, with their generous aspirations and mingling doubts and fears. We will close this notice with one very brief specimen of the shorter poems, which shows, as does the whole collection, the Catholic, not of the Roman, but of the English variety. It is headed "A Thought."

"Behold yon spire, keen tapering to the light
Until the slender shaft supports the cross.
E'en such was Mary. We, in Heaven's eye,
The Church's body are, but she the spire,
The very apex trembling in the sun,
Crowned with the passion of the Crucified!

ART. XXII-1. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D. Longman. 1864.

2. From Oxford to Rome; and how it fared with some who lately made the journey. By A COMPANION TRAVELLER. Longman. 1847.

3. How and Why I became a Catholic. By W. R. BROWNLOW, M.A. Burns and Lambert. 1864.

Our

year,

We live our lives—our real and true lives, each one of usalone. From our first conscious existence to the present hour we have gone on receiving impressions peculiar to ourselves, connecting them with other impressions, suffering from them, learning by them, or combining them and so originating new ones. Some of us have done this with all the busy activity of a highly nervous temperament, and some of us have been only passively receiving them. Some have allowed the seed merely to accumulate in the mental granary, while with others each thought and trifling event, becomes an active principle of life, sprouting out and bearing fruit which it richly bestows on others. We see the results, we do not see the process. Our deepest sorrows are hidden, and are gone over and over in our thoughts, and alleviated or aggravated by chance words and sentences, and changes in our physical condition, unknown to any human being. dearest and most intimate friends live with us year after and we wonder sometimes to think how little they really know of us, and what a world of thought and feeling is revolving within us unsuspected by them. And if we attempt to tell sympathizing friend or spiritual guide, we feel keenly that the few bald words in which we try to convey the concentrated results of days, and nights, and months, and years of mental experiences, are utterly futile for the purpose. They convey but a mere mention of that which needs an elaborate treatise they are but the index of contents to a long and infinitely complex portion of a life's history. And even if listener could be found, and time be given, and memory truthfully recall all the thoughts that constitute the real true existence of the man, no human language, no words, could ever place it comprehensibly before another consciousness than our own. Even in the presence of the one Human and yet Infinite Sympathy, the heart will often find that "Thou knowest all" will be its only utterance, or a silent presentation of itself and its bitter struggles and nameless suffering,

all that it can bring to the only Friend to Whom misconception of our meaning is an impossibility. No wonder, then, that we live alone; no wonder that we so misunderstand one another, when one thought out of a million is all we ever see, and probably even the expression of that one has a different meaning to us and to the thinker of it, in consequence of our difference of mind and circumstance. Nevertheless changes in character are more easily betrayed than we imagine. A sentence that we lightly utter, and may think conveys nothing to the hearer, will often reveal volumes, especially where both hearts write in the same language. Tone, manner, words, and the antecedents which gave rise to the sentence, have a power of expression of which in our own case we are unconscious. How eagerly we look at the face of a friend from whom we have been long parted, and trace in the altered expression of countenance the silent record of all the changes that have passed over it since last we read its history! And in the same way we look anxiously for the new work of some author who has long ago possessed the master key to our hearts, and try to learn from it whether he has thought out the ideas that he imparted to us in the same direction as ourselves, and discover whether he has gone onward, and can take us still further in the path that we once learnt how to tread from him.

One look backward on the solitary thought of our own lives, and the impossibility of its being understood by any one else will make us very tender and wary of pronouncing judgment when the results of thought in other minds are partially laid before us. We need to realize the infinitude of thought and mental conflict which has prefaced the words, "I find that the position of the Church of England is untenable," whenever of late years it has been spoken from the depths of the heart. Our deepest and most sensitive thought-lives lie hidden with God and our own consciousness, but there is a point where the Divine Mind enters into communication with ours through the medium of the priesthood, where the powers of time and eternity, and the direct influences of God and man meet in our souls. Here our keenest feelings centre, and the acutest pain is given by disappointment, loss, or change; and here many have been called upon to endure severe conflicts and separation, either from their early friends, or from those who first led them to know and to satisfy the requirements of their inmost souls.

In the last twenty years, men in England have been learning new and strange lessons, and plunging into deeper