Chapter 10

May-Day and other Pieces.ByRalph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

We wonder whether those who take up Mr. Emerson's poem now, amid the glories of the fading summer, are not giving the poet a fairer audience than those who hurried to hear his song in the presence of the May he celebrates. As long as spring was here, he had a rival in every reader; for then we all felt ourselves finer poets than ever sang of the season, and did not know that our virtue was but an effect of Spring herself,—an impression, not an expression of her loveliness, which must pass with her. Now, when the early autumn is in every sense, and those days when the year first awoke to consciousness have grown so far away, we must perceive that no one has yet been allowed to speak so well for the spring of our New World as this poet. The very irregularity of Mr. Emerson's poem seems to be part of its verisimilitude, and it appears as if all the pauses and impulses and mysterious caprices of the season—which fill the trees with birds before blossoms, and create the soul of sweetness and beauty in the May-flowers under the dead leaves of the woodlands, while the meadows are still bare and brown—had so entered into this song, that it could not emulate the deliberation and consequence of art. The "May-Day" is to the critical faculty a succession of odes on Spring, celebrating now one aspect and now another, and united only by their title; yet since an entire idea of spring is evolved from them, and they awaken the same emotions that the youth of the year stirs in us, we must accept the result as something undeniably great and good. Of course, we can complain of the way in which it is brought about, just as we can upbraid the New England climate, though its uncertain and desultory April and May give us at last the most beautiful June weather in the world.

The poem is not one that invites analysis, though it would be easy enough to instance striking merits and defects. Mr. Emerson, perhaps, more than any other modern poet, gives the notion of inspiration; so that one doubts, in reading him, how much to praise or blame. The most exquisite effects seem not to have been invited, but to have sought production from his unconsciousness; graces alike of thought and of touch seem the unsolicited gifts of the gods. Even the doubtful quality of occasional lines confirms this impression of unconsciousness. One cannot believe that the poet would wittingly write,

"Boils the world in tepid lakes,"

for this statement has, for all that the reader can see to the contrary, the same value with him as that preceding verse, telling how the waxing heat

"Lends the reed and lily length,"

wherein the very spirit of summer seems to sway and droop. Yet it is probable that no utterance is more considered than this poet's, and that no one is more immediately responsible than he. We must attribute to the most subtile and profound consciousness the power that can trace with such tenderness and beauty the alliance he has shown between earth and humanity in the exultation of spring, and which can make matter of intellectual perception the mute sympathies that seemed to perish with childhood:—

"The pebble loosened from the frostAsks of the urchin to be tost.In flint and marble beats a heart,The kind Earth takes her children's part,The green lane is the school-boy's friend,Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,The fresh ground loves his top and ball,The air ring's jocund to his call,The brimming brook invites a leap,He dives the hollow, climbs the steep."

Throughout the poem these recognitions of our kindred with external nature occur, and a voice is given to the blindly rejoicing sense within us when the poet says,

"The feet that slid so long on sleetAre glad to feel the ground"

and thus celebrates with one potent and satisfying touch the instinctive rapture of the escape from winter. Indeed, we find our greatest pleasure in some of these studies of pure feeling, while we are aware of the value of the didactic passages of the poem, and enjoy perfectly the high beauty of the pictorial parts of it. We do not know where we should match that strain beginning,

"Why chidest thou the tardy spring?"

Or that,

"Where shall we keep the holiday,And duly greet the entering May?"

Or this most delicate and exquisite bit of description, which seems painteda tempera,—in colors mixed with the transparent blood of snowdrops and Alpine harebells:—

"See, every patriot oak-leaf throwsHis elfin length upon the snows,Not idle, since the leaf all dayDraws to the spot the solar ray,Ere sunset quarrying inches down,And half-way to the mosses brown:While the grass beneath the rimeHas hints of the propitious time,And upward pries and perforatesThrough the cold slab a hundred gates,Till green lances, piercing through,Bend happy in the welkin blue."

There is not great range of sentiment in "May-Day," and through all the incoherence of the poem there is a constant recurrence to the master-theme. This recurrence has at times something of a perfunctory air, and the close of the poem does not seal the whole with any strong impression. There is a rise—or a lapse, as the reader pleases to think—toward a moral at the close; but the motion is evidently willed of the poet rather than the subject. It seems to us that, if the work have any climax, it is in those lines near the end in which the poet draws his reader nearest his own personality, and of which the delicately guarded and peculiar pathos scarcely needs comment:—

"There is no bard in all the choir,Not Homer's self, the poet sire,Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,Or Shakespeare, whom no mind can measure,Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,Scott, the delight of generous boys,Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,—Not one of all can put in verse,Or to this presence could rehearse,The sights and voices ravishingThe boy knew on the hills in spring,When pacing through the oaks he heardSharp queries of the sentry-bird,The heavy grouse's sudden whir,The rattle of the kingfisher;Saw bonfires of the harlot fliesIn the lowland, when day dies;Or marked, benighted and forlorn,The first far signal-fire of morn.These syllables that Nature spoke,And the thoughts that in him woke,Can adequately utter noneSave to his ear the wind-harp lone.And best can teach its Delphian chordHow Nature to the soul is moored,If once again that silent string,As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."Not long ago, at eventide,It seemed, so listening, at my sideA window rose, and, to say sooth,I looked forth on the fields of youth:I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,I knew their forms in fancy weeds,Long, long concealed by sundering fates,Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates,Stronger and bolder far than I,With grace, with genius, well attired,And then as now from far admired,Followed with loveThey knew not of,With passion cold and shy.O joy, for what recoveries rare!Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,—Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoilOf life resurgent from the soilWherein was dropped the mortal spoil."

"Not long ago, at eventide,It seemed, so listening, at my sideA window rose, and, to say sooth,I looked forth on the fields of youth:I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,I knew their forms in fancy weeds,Long, long concealed by sundering fates,Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates,Stronger and bolder far than I,With grace, with genius, well attired,And then as now from far admired,Followed with loveThey knew not of,With passion cold and shy.O joy, for what recoveries rare!Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,—Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoilOf life resurgent from the soilWherein was dropped the mortal spoil."

Among the other poems in this volume, it appears to us that "The Romany Girl," "Voluntaries," and "The Boston Hymn" are in their widely different ways the best. The last expresses, with a sublime colloquiality in which the commonest words of every-day parlance seem cut anew; and are made to shine with a fresh and novel lustre, the idea and destiny of America. In "Voluntaries" our former great peril and delusion—the mortal Union which lived by slavery—is at first the theme, with the strong pulse of prophecy, however, in the mournful music. Few motions of rhyme so win and touch as those opening lines,—

"Low and mournful be the strain,Haughty thought be far from me;Tones of penitence and pain,Moanings of the tropic sea,"—

in which the poet, with a hardly articulate sorrow, regards the past; and Mr. Emerson's peculiarly exalted and hopeful genius has nowhere risen in clearer and loftier tones than in those stops which open full upon us after the pathetic pleasing of his regrets:—

"In an age of fops and toys,Wanting wisdom, void of right,Who shall nerve heroic boysTo hazard all in Freedom's fight,—Break sharply off their jolly games,Forsake their comrades gay,And quit proud homes and youthful dames,For famine, toil, and fray?Yet on the nimble air benignSpeed nimbler messages,That waft the breath of grace divineTo hearts in sloth and ease.So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low,Thou must,The youth replies,I can.* * * *"Blooms the laurel which belongsTo the valiant chief who fights;I see the wreath, I hear the songsLauding the Eternal Rights,Victors over daily wrongs:Awful victors, they misguideWhom they will destroy,And their coming triumph hideIn our downfall, or our joy:They reach no term, they never sleep,In equal strength through space abide;Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,The strong they slay, the swift outstride:Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,And rankly on the castled steep,—Speak it firmly, these are gods,All are ghosts beside."

* * * *

"Blooms the laurel which belongsTo the valiant chief who fights;I see the wreath, I hear the songsLauding the Eternal Rights,Victors over daily wrongs:Awful victors, they misguideWhom they will destroy,And their coming triumph hideIn our downfall, or our joy:They reach no term, they never sleep,In equal strength through space abide;Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,The strong they slay, the swift outstride:Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,And rankly on the castled steep,—Speak it firmly, these are gods,All are ghosts beside."

It is, of course, a somewhat Emersonian Gypsy that speaks in "The Romany Girl," but still she speaks with the passionate, sudden energy of a woman, and flashes upon the mind with intense vividness the conception of a wild nature's gleeful consciousness of freedom, and exultant scorn of restraint and convention. All sense of sylvan health and beauty is uttered when this Gypsy says,—

"The wild air bloweth in our lungs,The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,The birds gave us our wily tongues,The panther in our dances flies."

"Terminus" has a wonderful didactic charm, and must be valued as one of the noblest introspective poems in the language. The poet touches his reader by his acceptance of fate and age, and his serene trust of the future, and yet is not moved by his own pathos.

We do not regard the poem "The Adirondacks" as of great absolute or relative value. It is one of the prosiest in the book, and for a professedly out-of-doors poem has too much of the study in it. Let us confess also that we have not yet found pleasure in "The Elements," and that we do not expect to live long enough to enjoy some of them. "Quatrains" have much the same forbidding qualities, and have chiefly interested us in the comparison they suggest with the translations from the Persian: it is curious to find cold Concord and warm Ispahan in the same latitude. Others of the briefer poems have delighted us. "Rubies," for instance, is full of exquisite lights and hues, thoughts and feelings; and "The Test" is from the heart of the severe wisdom without which art is not. Everywhere the poet's felicity of expression appears; a fortunate touch transfuses some dark enigma with color; the riddles are made to shine when most impenetrable; the puzzles are all constructed of gold and ivory and precious stones.

Mr. Emerson's intellectual characteristics and methods are so known that it is scarcely necessary to hint that this is not a book for instant absorption into any reader's mind. It shall happen with many, we fancy, that they find themselves ready for only two or three things in it, and that they must come to it in widely varying moods for all it has to give. No greater wrong could be done to the poet than to go through his book running, and he would be apt to revenge himself upon the impatient reader by leaving him all the labor involved in such a course, and no reward at the end for his pains.

But the case is not a probable one. People either read Mr. Emerson patiently and earnestly, or they do not read him at all. In this earnest nation he enjoys a far greater popularity than criticism would have augured for one so unflattering to the impulses that have heretofore and elsewhere made readers of poetry; and it is not hard to believe, if we believe in ourselves for the future, that he is destined to an ever-growing regard and fame. He makes appeal, however mystically, only to what is fine and deep and true and noble in men, and no doubt those who have always loved his poetry have reason to be proud of their pleasure in it. Let us of the present be wise enough to accept thankfully what genius gives us in its double character of bard and prophet, saying, when we enjoy the song, "Ah, this is the poet that now sings!" and when the meaning is dark, "Now we have the seer again!"

An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church.ByHenry C. Lea. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1867.

This exhaustive treatise of Mr. Lea upon ecclesiastical celibacy we take to possess, like his excellent work upon "Superstition and Force," all the capital requisites of an historical monograph,—an immense body of information and of reference on the subject in hand, a sufficiently cool and dispassionate manner of presenting facts, and asevere adherence to the central question. The amount of research and indeed of scholarship involved in the preparation of this volume is such as to command the warmest recognition. In these days of "picturesque" histories, of hasty criticism, and of precipitate generalizations, it is very gratifying to encounter a writer who construes his obligations with such austerity as Mr. Lea. He is content to marshal his facts and hisdatainto such an order that under a close inspection no one of them conceals the half-genuine look of its neighbor. He lets them tell their own story for good or for evil, and is never guilty, through the wish to be vivid and effective, of spreading his colors outside of the lines drawn by his authorities. Within these lines even his tints are sober and discreet, and careful not to depart too widely from those somewhat neutral hues which, wherever man's knowledge of the past rests upon accidentally preserved documents and monuments, must continue to be the colors of history. Nevertheless, with all the various merits of a well-executed monograph, Mr. Lea's work has certain of the corresponding defects. Perhaps, indeed, it were more just to say that these defects correspond to the limitations of the general reader's knowledge, rather than to any imperfection in the author's programme. In the course of a special history executed on such a scale as the present one, and with all its soberness of style, so little mechanical in spirit, and so free from chronological dryness, it is almost inevitable that the reader's impressions should become somewhat overbalanced. He is likely to forget that he is taking a partial view of a great subject, and that he must hold his opinions liable to correction when he has surveyed the whole field. A dishonest writer, we conceive, may readily take advantage of this perfectly logical error. He has accumulated an immense mass of material bearing on a particular point, extracted and expressed, by long labor, from a field in which it has lain interfused with material of a very different, and even of a directly opposite significance. There are a hundred literary arts by which a writer may put forward his fractional gleaning as a representation of the whole. In this matter of ecclesiastical celibacy, for instance, the result of Mr. Lea's researches is that practically the thing has never existed in the Christian Church. That is to say, the regulations enforcing it have at all times been more violated and eluded than obeyed. With the Reformation a large section of the Church ceased to admit its needfulness, and the field of its enforcement was very much curtailed. But the Catholic Church continued to cling to it as almost the central principle of its being, and continued likewise to connive at an inveterate system of escape from its harsh conditions. Mr. Lea's volume is a long record of reiterated legislation and exhortation against unchastity, formal and actual, and of a series of equally uninterrupted disclosures of the futility of such legislation. And, nevertheless, there is no doubt that, during all the long ages of its history, the Church was the abode and the refuge of a vast deal of purity and continence, to say nothing of the various other virtues by which its members have been distinguished. But the reader sees only the obverse of the medal: he sees a custom of prodigious bearings, if duly carried out, honored chiefly in the breach; and he will be very apt to close the book with an impression that the Church has been through all time a sink of incurable corruption. It is superfluous to say that this impression will be quite as erroneous as it would be to assert that, on the other hand, its practice has kept pace with its high pretensions. Neither view of the case is just. If there is one thing that strikes us more than another, in reading Mr. Lea's work, it is that, on the whole, the Church must have been at any moment a tolerably faithful reflection of the manners and feelings of the time. Its empire was practicable only by means of a constant renewal of the exquisite and everlasting compromise between man's transient interests and his external destiny. Taken as a whole, it never pretended to ride rough-shod over his natural passions and instincts. It pretended to convert them to its own service and aggrandizement. It respected them, it handled them gently. And as these passions and instincts have never been exclusively evil or exclusively good, so the Church has never been wholly corrupt or wholly pure. It has been animated by the average moral enlightenment of the time, and it has grown with men's moral growth. Reared, as it was, upon the primitive needs of men's nature, it is difficult to see how the result should have been different. And if the Catholic Church has lost that firmness of grasp upon human affection which it once possessed, it is not that laymen have become more virtuous than priests; it is that they havebecome more intelligent. The intellectual growth of the Church has lagged behind its moral growth. Secular humanity is perfectly willing to admit that its sacerdotal counterpart observes the Decalogue equally well with itself; but it contests the right of an institution, of whose long spiritual efforts this insignificant accomplishment is the only surviving result, to impose itself further upon men's respect and obedience. The reader has only to remember, then, that Mr. Lea's volume is not a history of the Church at large, but only a history of a single province, and he will find it full of profit and edification.

It is no exaggeration to repeat, as we have said, that the Church never achieved anything like complete celibacy. A rapid survey of the ground under Mr. Lea's guidance will confirm and explain this statement. During the first three centuries there is no evidence that celibacy was deemed essential to the clerical character, or even that it was thought especially desirable. It was natural that during the early years of the Church, and under the stress of persecution, it should not multiply the restrictions placed upon the freedom of its adherents. Up to the period of the Council of Nicæa, therefore, the virtues of chastity were maintained only by isolated groups of ascetics, animated by that spirit of Puritanism which seems to have existed in every faith in every stage of its history. When men are looking about them for means to mortify the flesh and to stifle the heart, a prohibition of marriage is the first expedient that suggests itself. Until this is done away with, further severities are impossible. Marriage, however, was not condemned at a single blow. The first step was to forbid second marriages. A bachelor in holy orders might marry with impunity; a widower did so at his peril. Having effected this concession, the ascetic spirit found means to increase its influence. It received a strong impulse at the close of the second century, as Mr. Lea affirms, by the rise of the Neoplatonic philosophy, with all its mystical and stoical tendencies, and by the introduction into Europe and the rapid spread of the great Manichæan heresy. In the view of this doctrine, man's body was the work of the Devil, and condemned as such to ceaseless abuse and mortification by his soul. Among the ascetic excesses which were the logical consequences of such a dogma, inveterate chastity was, of course, not the last to be enjoined. Manichæism was an object of violent detestation to the Church; but as the latter could not afford to let itself be outdone in austerity by a vulgar heresy, it began to adopt a similar uncompromising attitude towards marriage. The Council of Nicæa was held in 325. This body, however, was chiefly occupied with debates upon Arianism, and is responsible but for a single enactment bearing on the subject in hand. The bearing of this enactment is, moreover, indirect, inasmuch as Mr. Lea conclusively proves that it refers not to lawful wives, (as in later ages of the Church it became needful to assume that itdidrefer,) but to female companions of the unlicensed sort. For more than half a century after the Nicæan Council, the movement of the celibatarian spirit is lost sight of in the all-absorbing disputes on the Arian heresy. A strong reaction, however, is signalized by the issue, under Pope Damasus, in the year 385, of the first definite command imposing perpetual celibacy as an absolute rule of discipline on the ministers of the altar. This was very well as an injunction, but it was nothing without enforcement. More than half a century again elapsed before the new discipline was substantially acknowledged. By the mass of the servants of the Church—among which several names stand apart as those of its more eminent opponents—it was received with bitter resentment and incompliance. But it had the popular favor for it on one side, and on the other the passionate energies of the three great Latin fathers,—Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome. The people had not yet reached that state of mind when it clamored imperiously either for priestly marriage, or, in simple self-defence, for an organized substitute. Mr. Lea at this point devotes a chapter to the Eastern Church, of which it is sufficient for us to say, that in this establishment the question of celibacy was less violently agitated than among its neighbors, and that a final decision was more speedily reached. Early in the sixth century, Justinian published an edict which still forms the basis of its celibatarian discipline. Marriage in orders is forbidden, and men who have been twice married are inadmissible. Monks are of course bound to chastity, but the lower grades of the secular clergy are free to marry.

The rise of the monastic orders in the West dates from the close of the fifth century, when St. Benedict founded in theLatian Apennines the community which subsequently became famous as the Convent of Monte Cassino. With this enterprise begins the real growth of the Church, which, of course, we do not propose to trace. With each succeeding century its area expanded, its power increased, and its responsibilities multiplied. It was called to preside at the organization of a new Europe, to witness and to accelerate the extinction of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the new nationalities, to save whatever was worth saving from the wreck of the old society, to stand firm against the Barbarians, to prosecute constant and wholesale conversions, and to preserve in the midst of these various cares the integrity of the idea of sacerdotal chastity. The idea, we say; for we may be sure that the practice was left to take care of itself. We are told that the Barbarian invaders were inexpressibly shocked by the licentiousness and immorality of the Latin civilization; and if this were so, it promised well for a thorough purgation of the Church in proportion as the new-comers were admitted into its fold. But as we continue to read, we see that, although upon society at large their arrival may have produced in certain directions a healthful and renovating effect, they speedily became converted to the general tolerance of ecclesiastical laxity. Italy and France, up to the domination of Charlemagne, were the only important countries in Europe. The history of France from Clovis to Charlemagne is a long record of disorder and iniquity, in which, if the Church plays no worse part than the state, it at least plays no better. In Italy religion and politics are involved in an inextricable tangle of convulsions and dissensions. During this time there is no better proof of the practical neglect into which the canon of celibacy had fallen, than the continual iteration to which it is subjected by councils and synods. Gregory the Great, in his conscientious efforts in the seventh century to enforce sacerdotal chastity at least,—or rather to check the flagrant violation of it,—in default of celibacy, had to contend, where France was concerned, with the powerless imbecility of the Merovingian monarchs.

His successors found more effectual assistance in the first strong-handed Carlovingians. Pope Zachary, in concert with Carloman, and St. Boniface, the great apostle of the Saxons, for the first time attached the penalties of deposition, degradation, and penance to proved impurity of life. This was the beginning of a series of reforms, of which Boniface was the leading spirit, and Pepin and Charlemagne the rigid guardians. But, although sacerdotal marriage became really the exception rather than the rule, in consequence of these enactments, it is doubtful whether morality was improved. It was a licentious age, and the clergy as well as the laity belonged to their age. In the tenth century clerical marriage began again to prevail, and again the strong hands of Gregory VII., and of the Popes who reigned under his direction, were needed to restore some degree of discipline. But vigorous as were their measures, and persevering their efforts, it was restored chiefly in name. Gregory's dissensions with the Empire offer Mr. Lea an occasion to exhibit the condition of morality in the German Church. We are unable to see that at this moment, as for some time to come, it differed materially in any of the countries of Europe. In many outlying provinces—in Wales, in Bohemia, in Sweden—lawful marriage took the place of simple cohabitation; but in the great central states the vices of the laity were still those of the clergy. If there was one spot indeed where these vices were more flourishing than elsewhere, all through the Middle Ages and into recent times, that spot was the very head-quarters of sanctity,—Rome itself. But this circumstance admits doubtless of a sufficiently logical explanation. Rome was the spiritual head of Christendom, but she was also a great temporal power, and to a great extent the social metropolis of the world. This character necessarily involved a vast deal of magnificent corruption.

In the course of the Middle Ages it is apparent that the clergy not only continued to possess their share of the general unchastity, but to carry it to excesses by which they alone were distinguished. The amount of legislation bearing on this subject, recorded by Mr. Lea with immense patience and care, is such as to defy memory and imagination, and almost to challenge belief. There can be assuredly no better proof of the very imperfect observation of the canons than this unceasing repetition of them. By the time the Middle Ages had passed away, and the masses had emerged into the comparatively brilliant light of the Renaissance, sacerdotal unchastity had grown into an enormous evil. The disparity between the theory of the priestlycharacter and its actual form had become too flagrant to be endured. Popular protests accordingly became frequent. The abuse of those intimate relations into which the priest is brought with the life of families, and that of the confessional more especially, acquires horrible proportions. And as the question grows more complex on the side of the people, so it grows more complex with regard to the general government of the Church. This government had long since made up its mind, with a firmness destined to be proof against even the most formidable remonstrance, that, whatever might be the manners of its servants, they were to remain inviolably single. The mere ascetic and sentimental reason for celibacy had long been supplanted by good logical and material reasons. A wife and children were speedily found to be incompatible with the exclusive service of the Church. To it alone, if the ambition of its great rulers was to be fulfilled, its ministers were to be devoted. When, with the development of the feudal system, the transmission of property and of functions from father to sons became the groundwork of social order, ecclesiastical benefices were disposed of in the same way as manors and baronies, to the utter prejudice of the temporality of the Church. With this tendency the Church waged a long and violent contest, in which she was finally victorious. But she purchased her victory only at the price of the most scandalous concessions; and by the system of immorality reared upon these concessions she found her hands almost fatally entangled at the Reformation. Dispensation to unchastity in her ministers had become a prominent feature among those various indulgences against which the consciences of the early Reformers rose in wrath. In every country in Europe the people had grown weary of crying out for the abolition of these dispensations, and the reintroduction of marriage. In Germany, accordingly, the marriage of apostate monks and priests was among the foremost measures of the more ardent Reformers. Luther, whose discretion was as great as his courage, was content to wait; but he, too, finally gave in, and united himself with a nun. It is characteristic of the English people, that the monarchs under whose guidance they embraced the Reformation should have shown in this particular more than the hesitation of Luther. Henry VIII. broke short off with Rome, overturned the monasteries, and filled the land with the beggared servants of the old ecclesiastical order, but he would not hear of the marriage of the Reformed clergy. It was certainly not from a general disapproval of the institution. Under Edward, the old restrictions on this matter were done away; but under Mary they were of course restored with a high hand. With Elizabeth they were eventually removed forever; but it is known that the measure had very little sympathy from the queen, and that her assent was grudgingly bestowed.

The Council of Trent was expected to do great things toward the pacification of the Reformers and the healing of the great schism, and among others to pave the way for the gradual abolition of clerical celibacy. The measure had the approval of Charles the Fifth, and of Ferdinand and Maximilian, his successors. The Council of Trent did very little that was expected of it, however, and least of all did it accomplish this. It contented itself with a reenactment of certain obsolete and threadbare canons in favor of chastity, and launched an anathema against all those who affirmed the validity of such marriages as had been made or should yet be made by the apostate clergy. This was the last word of the Catholic Church for some time to come upon this important subject. Animated with a new vitality by the great Jesuit reaction, she had no apprehension that her hour had come, and that she was brought so low as to be compelled to belie the sagacity of her great founders and lawgivers. For the past three hundred years she has firmly adhered to the principle of celibacy, and assuredly with incontestable wisdom. With the universal elevation of the moral tone throughout Europe, she has been less frequently mortified by having to look with indulgence upon the licentious manners of her priests.

It seems to us that this rapid survey of the immense subject treated by Mr. Lea is calculated to confirm rather than to enfeeble an unprejudiced reader's sense of the marvellous achievements of the Church. The enumeration, made in the volume before us, of its enactments with regard to celibacy and chastity, constitutes a chapter in its internal history. This is, to our perception, the worst that can be said of them and of the state of things which they reveal. If the Catholic Church is to be pronounced an institution of the past, a mockery, a delusion, and a snare, it is not on thesegrounds alone, or on any exclusive grounds, but from a broadly comprehensive point of view. Every human institution has a private history which is very different from its public one. In some respects the former is the more, in others the less, admirable of the two. In the present case, the element in the picture which appeals to our admiration is the heroic patience and perseverance, the fortitude, the tact, and the courage with which the Church applied herself to the healing of her internal wounds when they were curable, and to the enduring of them when they were not, in order that, at any cost, she might produce upon the world the impression of unity, sanity, and strength.

Ten Months in Brazil; with Incidents of Voyages and Travels, Descriptions of Scenery and Character, Notices of Commerce and Productions, etc.ByJohn Codman. Boston: Lee and Shepard.

The title of this book leaves its reviewer little to say in explanation of its purposes. It is a lively enough book, and a book well enough written, with a good deal of dash and piquancy in the style; and yet, like the blameless dinner to which Doctor Johnson objected that it was not a dinner to ask a man to, it is not a book to advise one to read. It does not appear to us, after reading it, that we are wiser concerning Brazil than before; even the facts in it we greeted, in many cases, with the warmth due to old statistical acquaintances. The philosophy of the author seems to be that the Brazilians are a bad set, and that they have become so mainly by mingling their blood with that of their negroes,—a race never so useful and happy as when in the discipline of slavery. Mr. Codman contrasts their hopeless state on the lands of a good-hearted Scotchman in Brazil, who intends to let them earn their freedom by working for him, with their condition on the neighboring estate of a sharp, slave-driving Yankee, who acquiesces unmurmuringly in the purposes of Providence; "his theory being, that, as labor is their condition, the greatest amount of work compatible with their health and fair endurance is to be got from them. With this end in view, there is a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments." Mr. Codman finds the charm of novelty in these just and simple ideas, but we think we have in past years met with the same ingenious reasoning in Southern speeches and newspapers; and we suspect the system was one commonly adopted in our slave States, where the occasional omission of punishments was economically made to represent the judicious distribution of rewards.

In fact, Mr. Codman seems to have travelled and written too late to benefit his generation. Six or seven happy years ago, an enlightened public sentiment would have received his views of slavery with acclaim; but we doubt if they would now sell a copy of his book even in Charleston.

A Story of Doom, and other Poems.ByJean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

People who remember things written as long ago as five years have a certain stiffness in their tastes which disqualifies them for the enjoyment of much contemporaneous achievement; and it is fortunate for the poets that it is the young who make reputations. Miss Ingelow's first volume, indeed, had something in it that could please not only the inexperience of youth, for which nothing like it existed, but even the knowledge of those arrived at the interrogation-point in life, who felt that here there was a movement toward originality in much familiar mannerism and uncertain purpose. If there was not a vast deal for enjoyment, there was a reason for hope. It was plain that the author's gift was not a great one, but it was also clear that she had a gift. She was a little tedious and diffuse; she was often too long in reaching a point, and sometimes she never reached it at all. But then she wrote "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," and the "Songs of Seven," and "Divided,"—none of them perfect poems, yet all very good and fresh,—and showed a true feeling for nature, and some knowledge of humanity as women see it. In this second volume, however, she abandons her maturer admirers to their fate, and seeks the favor of the young ladies and gentlemen who have begun to like verses since Mr. Tennyson's latest poems were written, and the old balladists and modern poetical archaists ceased to be read. In fact, it is amazing to see how this author, who had a talent of her own, has contentedly buried it, and gone to counterfeiting the talents of others. The "Story of Doom" here given is an unusually dreary copy of the unrealism of Mr. Tennyson's "Idylsof the King," and makes the history of Noah more than ever improbable; while "Laurance," mimicking all the well-known effects and smallest airs and movements of the laureate's poems of rustic life, is scarcely to be read without laughter. "Winstanley" presents an incident that, if told in simple contemporary English, would have made a thrilling ballad; but what with its quoth-he's, brave skippers, good master mayors, ladies gay, and red suns, it is factitious, and of the library only,—it came from Percy's "Reliques" and "The Ancient Mariner," not from the poet's heart. It seems worthy of the sentimental purpose with which it was written; but we doubt if any child in the National School in Dorsetshire learned it by heart as his forefathers did the old ballads.

In pleasant contrast with its affectations is the beautiful little song entitled "Apprenticed," which the author tells us is in the old English manner, but which we find full of a young feeling and tenderness belonging to all time, expressed in diction quite of our own. This, and that one of the Songs with Preludes entitled "Wedlock," seem to us the best, if not the only, poems in the book. Miss Ingelow's forte is not in single lines and detachable passages, and her efforts are apt to be altogether successful or unsuccessful. In the long rhyme called "Dreams that came True," there is but one inspired line, and that is merely descriptive,—

"In eddying rings the silence seemed to flow"

round him that waked suddenly from an awful dream. There is an inglorious ease in the sarcasm, but we must express our regret that Miss Ingelow did not leave this story in the prose which she says first received it.

We suppose we need scarcely call the reader's attention to the fact that certain faults of Miss Ingelow's first book are exaggerated in this. The rush of half-draped figures, and the pushing and crowding of weak and unruly fancies, are too obviously unpleasant for comment. Perhaps they are most unpleasant in the Song with a Prelude which opens with the bewildering statement that

"Yon mooréd mackerel fleetHangs thick as a swarm of bees,Or a clustering village streetFoundationless built on the seas."

Critical and Social Essays.Reprinted from the New York "Nation." New York: Leypoldt and Holt.

These brief papers very fairly represent the quality of the excellent journal from which they are taken, and treat subjects suggested by literary events and social characteristics with a bright intelligence and an artistic feeling only too uncommon in our journalism. All the essays are good, and several are of quite unique merit. The first in the volume, entitled "The Glut in the Fiction Market," is full of a felicitous badinage and an exquisite power of travesty, which we should not know how to match elsewhere. The author of this admirable paper wrote also, as we imagine, the essays on "Some of our Social Philosophers," "Critics and Criticism," and "Voyages and Travels," which are the best of the humorous articles in the volume. The graver essays are almost as good in their way as these, and we especially like "Why we have no Saturday Reviewers," "Popularizing Science," "Something about Monuments," and "American Ministers abroad." The paper on "The European and American Order of Thought" considers the subject with an originality and penetration which we would willingly have had applied in a more extended study of it.

In fine, we like all these articles from "The Nation," for the reasons that we like "The Nation" itself, which has been, in a degree singular among newspapers, conscientious and candid in literary matters; while in affairs of social and political interest it has shown itself friendly to everything that could advance civilization, and notably indifferent to the claims of persons and parties.

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