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Hast thou no pity? None? Thou drivest

me

To fiendish doubts: Thou, Jesus' messenger!

"Con. This to your master! "Eliz.

This to any one Who dares to part me from my love. "Con.

"Tis well; In pity to your weakness I must deign To do what ne'er I did-excuse myself."

This act, in which the interest is sustained with great power, concludes with a most striking chorus of crusaders, marching by the castle, to sail for the Holy Land.

The woman's heart begins to break : "I needed weaning

me.

From sense and earthly joys," sighs the innocent victim. Perhaps stripes and nightly vigils upon freezing stones may so chasten the rebellious flesh that God will bring him back to If not, his will be done. His will is done, and Lewis is slain in Palestine. His mother, "made of hard light stuff," tells Elizabeth the dreary tidings, and resolves that Lewis's brother, and not his son-Elizabeth's son-shall succeed him. Elizabeth rushes wildly out, and, after a paroxysm of passionate remembrance and love, the poor heart breaks. Turned out into the world, with her children, she finds no charity at the convent doors-for convents are sternly conservative, and quote Scripture for the powers that be-and a rough baron shelters her. But, treated like an idiot and slave, she takes to the world again, finding comfort in prayer: "Guta.

Oh! prayer, to her rapt soul, Is like the drunkenness of the autumn bee, Who, scent-enchanted, on the latest flower, Heedless of cold, will linger listless on, And freeze in odorous dreams."

Pitiless human meanness does not spare her. Is she not training for a saint? "Eliz. You know the stepping-stones across the ford:

There as I passed, a certain aged crone, Whom I had fed, and nursed, year after year,

Met me mid-stream-thrust past me stoutly

on

And rolled me headlong in the freezing mire. There as I lay and weltered-Take that, madam,

For all your selfish hypocritic pride
Which thought it such a vast humility

To wash us poor folks' feet, and use our bodies

For staves to build withal your Jacob's-ladder.

What! you would mount to heaven upon our backs?

The ass has thrown his rider?'"

She reaches, at length, the palace of her uncle, the Bishop of Bamberg, so far toward a saint, as to say of her children, with anguish :

"What are they, darlings, But snares to keep me from my heavenly spouse,

By picturing the spouse I must forget?"

The Bishop of Bamberg is what the profane call, an easy old soul, who, being comfortable, wishes that people would be quiet, and behave decently. What should a young widow complain of?

"Why not marry some honest man? You may have your choice of kings and princes; and if you have been happy with one gentle man, Mass! say I, why can't you be happy with another? What saith the Scripture? I will that the younger widows marry, bear children," not run after monks, and what not

What's good for the filly, is good for the mare, say I. "Eliz. Uncle, I soar now at a higher pitchTo be henceforth the bride of Christ alone.

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Bishop. Ahem!-a pious notion-in moderation. We must be moderate, my child, moderate: I hate overdoing anything-especially religion."

Conrad, the monk, now shows the bishop how much it will redound to his individual fame to have one of his family a saint-to say nothing of the lands of minors, which might fall to his farming. But, before going to Marpurg, where she is to be fully completed a saint, Lewis is buried from Bamberg cathedral. The skeptics and the bigots gossip about her; but she bows in abject grief.

"Thou hast him, Lord, Thou hast him; Do with us what Thou wilt! If at the price Of this one silly hair, in spite of Thee,

I could reclothe these wan bones with his manhood,

And clasp to my shrunk heart my hero's self--

I would not give it !"

The husband is dead, and the children must now be renounced. The wife has yielded to the terrible logic of superstition and to the mistaken self-sacrifice of a noble heart, and the mother must soon follow. With tears, and sharp struggles, and prayers, and shivering doubts, the mother also submits:

"All worldly goods and wealth, which once I loved,

I now do count but dross; and my beloved,
The children of my womb, I now regard
As if they were another's; God is witness,
My pride is to despise myself; my joy
All insults, sneers, and slanders of mankind;
No creature now I love, but God alone.

Oh to be clear, clear, clear, of all but Him! Lo, here I strip me of all earthly helps--[Tearing off her clothes. Naked and barefoot through the world to follow

My naked Lord."

Elizabeth retires to a miserable hovel, which is visited by her old friend, Count Walter, who, meeting Conrad, denounces him, with manly indignation.

"C. Wal. Go to-go to. I have watched you and your crew, how you preach up selfish ambition for divine charity, and call prurient longings celestial love, while you blaspheme that very marriage from whose mysteries you borrow all your cant. The day will come when every husband and father will hunt you down like vermin; and may I live to see it!"

The stern monk is stung with rage; but, bent upon his great purpose of making a saint, will not touch the count, unless he stays him in his life-purpose, and will then fell him as God's foe. Elizabeth's father in vain sends to recall her, and implores, by his gray hairs, her return. She will win the quires of heaven to love and honor him. The wife and mother, and now the daughter, submit, and the tragedy of making a woman a Romish saint hurries, through horrors, to the end. Coarse women live with her, to destroy the luxury of sleep, and scourge her, and torment her, in order, probably, that, having tasted hell upon earth, she may be admitted, without purgatory, to heaven.

Elizabeth dies, and Conrad, in long harangues to the people, tells the story of her heavenly and patient life. His work is done. The wife, mother, and daughter is, at last, Diva Elizabeth :

"And I have trained one saint before I die! Yet now 'tis done, is't well done? On my lips

Is triumph; but what echo in my heart?
Alas! the inner voice is sad and dull,
Even at the crown and shout of victory.
Oh! I had hugged this purpose to my heart,
Cast by for it all ruth, all pride, all scruples;
Yet now its face, that seemed as pure as
crystal,

Shows fleshly, foul, and stained with tears and gore!

We make, and moil, like children in their gardens,

And spoil, with dabbled hands, our flowers i' the planting.

And yet a saint is made! Alas, those children!

Was there no gentler way? I know not any; I plucked the gay moth from the spider's web;

What if my hasty hand have smirched its feathers !

Sure, if the whole be good, each several part

May for its private blots forgiveness gain, As in man's tabernacle, vile elements

Unite to one fair stature. Who'll gainsay it?

The whole is good; another saint in heaven; Another bride within the Bridegroom's

arms;

And she will pray for me!---And yet what matter?

Better that I, this paltry sinful unit,

Fall fighting, crushed into the nether pit,
If my dead corpse may bridge the path to
Heaven,

And damn itself to save the souls of others.
A noble ruin; yet small comfort in it;
In it, or in aught else-

Conrad, in the moment of victory, shocked at its cost, feels a fearful revulsion of the heart, and the darkest doubts of our mighty mother, Holy Church," and a secret conviction and joy that his own end approaches. He rides forth, and encounters a multitude, among whom is a gentleman, whose wife has been burned, in order to extend the area of Conrad's church. He, with the mob, surround the priest, and with his death the drama ends.

"The Saint's Tragedy" is a poem of very great power and significance. Its grand theme, the conflict of a true human heart between its God-implanted affections and its confused and sophisticated sense of religious duty, is one of the saddest and most frequent spectacles of history; and its grand moral shines like the sun, that such an effort is, when honestly practiced, the most tragical mistake, and when dishonestly or selfishly urged, the basest of crimes; and that, therefore, any institution which organizes that effort as the fundamental law of Christianity, is thoroughly ignorant of the sublime significance of Christianity, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men; and, as a permanent and pernicious blasphemy, should be destroyed at all hazards.

The delineation of Elizabeth's struggle is so delicate that, in the midst of the grossest spiritual error, she never, for a moment, loses our sympathy and compassion. For it is not the yielding of a weak mind to superstition, but the loyalty of a great soul, an imperial but mistaken sense of duty, seeing blindly and vaguely, and resolved to obey conscience to the end. Conrad himself is an inflexible man of spiritual sophistication. He is not a bad man, but almost worse-one of the medieval products, not yet entirely extinct, an ignorant, iron-willed bigot, who serves the devil with the words of God. He rep

resents the spirit which gave the Romish church the mastery of the world in a time of political confusion and religious darkness, and which will always give the principles of that church the power in any barbarous or half-civilized state of society. We do not recall so remarkable a picture of this subversion of the loveliest and holiest human instincts, to the most groveling selfishness, solemnly masking as religious humility and self-renunciation, as in the relation of Conrad to Elizabeth; and the whole drama is a comprehensive statement of the fatal operation of such a false principle. As a plea for religious liberty, the poem is most significant; and, as in Kingsley's novels, beyond all the splendor of description, vivid characterization, and merit of story, there is always the great and direct moral of human brotherhood, whether the scene be laid in Alexandria, in the fourth century, as in "Hypatia," or in England and the West Indies, in the six. teenth century, as in "Amyas Leigh," or in England in the nineteenth century, as in "Alton Locke;" so the "Saint's Tragedy" has a universal significance, showing us that princesses of Hungary, when there was a Hungary, were women still, and that their story and tragedy are the story and tragedy of woman and many a man since.

many

a

The direct moral purpose is too evident throughout, for the poem to be strictly a drama. And yet every detail of costume and character is rigidly observed, so that the picture of the time is perfect; and this not only externally but internally, for the intellectual state of the age and country is presented with equal fidelity. Kingsley has taken the lovely legend of Saint Elizabeth and treated it not as a Romish priest but a Christian man. He summons the world to see that, while Elizabeth was a noble woman, she was the dupe of a dreadful spiritual deceit, and that her loveliness was in the natural womanliness with which she endured her martyrdom, and not in the mistaken faith which imposed it. It is an improvement of the church tradition which the holy Romish See would hardly approve, but which every noble and thoughtful man, who loves God and his fellow-men must heartily hail.

If we turn to the remaining poems in the volume, we find that they have, through all their lyrical melody and

songful beauty, the same significance as the drama. There are several pure songs among them, like the following, which all our readers have probably read many times, and which they will be glad to read again:

1.

"O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee;'

The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam,

And all alone went she.

II.

"The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er the sand,

And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see.

The rolling mist came down and hid the land

And never home came she.

111.

"Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hairA tress o' golden hair,

A drowned maiden's hair
Above the nets at sea?

Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes on Dee.'

IV.

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam, The cruel crawling foam,

The cruel hungry foam

To her grave beside the sea:

But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle

home

Across the sands of Dee!"

Here is the song of hearts that believe in the loveliness and devotion of Elizabeth, and not in the impious bigotry of Conrad:

A MYTH.

I.

"A floating, a floating
Across the sleeping sea,
All night I heard a singing bird
Upon the topmost tree.

II.

"Oh came you from the isles of Greece,
Or from the banks of Seine;
Or off some tree in forests free,
Which fringe the western main?'

111.

"I came not off the Old World
Nor yet from off the New-
But I am one of the birds of God
Which sing the whole night through.'

IV.

"Oh sing and wake the dawningOh whistle for the wind;

The night is long, the current strong, My boat it lags behind.'

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The ballads are a series of half-dramatic lyrics, seven in number, having no titles but the date of the time of which they are illustrative. The first is a Saga of the Longbeards, “A. D. 415," and the last is "A. D. 1848," the ballad which was printed in "Yeast," and called “A Rough Rhyme on a Rough Matter," and which has no superior, in its way, anywhere. We like especially, also, "A. D. 1740," which is the ballad of an old mariner, who had been a buccaneer upon the Spanish main, and has now got back to starve in England. It is a very perfect ballad. The design of this series is admirable. They are social glimpses of the different epochs, and are profoundly suggestive.

The uneasy reader, who fears, in every new poet, an Alexander Smith, and in each new volume only more spasmodic obscurity, may take heart over this book. Every poem in it has the clearness of ripened thought, and the precision of thoughtful art. It is a book full of marrow, and will be sure, not only to win the admiration, but the hearty sympathy, of every intrepid intellect and loving heart.

THE DEMON OF MUSIC.

HERE'S a demon in music,
Whatever its tone;

He dwells in the crowd

Of its voices alone:

He moans when they laugh,

He laughs when they moan.

This demon of music

Hath some way been crossed: He longs for what is not, Or was, and is lost:

That life is a torture

He knows, to his cost

O, demon of music!

I pity your pain; I have felt it myself

And shall feel it again : Tis the riddle of living This living in vain.

OUR RELATIONS WITH ENGLAND.

RUMORS of war with England befalling off disagreeable results, was not

the good people of the United States with about as much regularity as our learned friend, Mr. Meriam, brings on his "heated terms" in summer, and his "cold terms" in winter. They are periodical, and yet not of systematic periodicity; they come and go, like comets, whose orbits have not been precisely ascertained, rather than like planets, whose habitats, at all seasons, are well known. On this account, they always take us with somewhat of surprise. We are aware that once, at least, during every five years, or say during each new administration for precision's sake, everybody will be called upon to draw his sheathed sword, and furbish his rusty musket, preparatory to a defense of the land against a descent of the blood-thirsty Briton; but at what particular day or hour that duty is to be encountered, we are not aware, and so whenever the trumpets of alarm are blown, they are sure to find us quite unprepared. We are all pursuing our usual peaceful way, eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, when suddenly there is a grand flourish of drums, and a startling cry that the foe is coming!

It happened thus only a few months since, when, in the midst of our sweet dreams of increasing trade and cent. per cent., the London Times dropped a bomb-shell on our slumbers. All the world had gone quietly to sleep over night, not a man among them supposing but that he would wake in the morning to pleasant sunshine and an easy breakfast; but what was our astonishment, on taking up the early paper, to find that we were on the verge of a savage and sanguinary war with England. In vain we ran about and asked each other what it could mean; what had England done, or what had the United States done, that could not be reconciled, until they had taken each other by the throat, and strangled the life out of one or the other-never a man could tell and yet there stood the fact, in the fair round type of the Times, and who dared dispute such an authority? An immediate war was impending a war, too, provoked by the insolent audacity of the Yankees and which the adroitness of diplomacy, usually so effective in stav

likely to avert. Straightway, all the vehicles of opinion in both countries were set in motion; the journals of the metropolis groaned and hissed with terrible spite against the marauding republic, which knew no law and no shame; and the orators of Congress repelled the assault with all the blatant and fiery commonplaces for which congressional orators are famous, and which are so potent on such occasions.

War, however, did not come, and the Times was heartily laughed at; but it was laughed at rather prematurely: for, in the course of two or three months, after everything had settled down again into the humdrum status ante bellum, it appeared that there had been considerable excitement in the foreign bureaux; that Mr. Marcy and Mr. Buchanan, Lord Clarendon and Mr. Crampton had been busy writing to each other with ominous diligence, and that the English ambassador was about to be sent home, and our ambassador had asked his papers, while a formidable fleet was going to sail towards-the West Indies.

The publication of the diplomatic correspondence has put us in possession of the whole secret of these threatened hostilities. It seems that the governments disagree upon two simple points: first, as to the interpretation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which relates to certain parts of Central America; and, second, as to the kind and amount of reparation that Great Britain ought to offer for an attempt to infringe our municipal laws and sovereignty. No paramount interests are involved in either question; no strong popular feelings are likely to be aroused by either; and both are matters for diplomatic adjustment rather than national fisticuffs. We shall not discuss them, therefore, but leave them to the settlement of the officials who are appointed to that task. In themselves, they contain no war; and nothing but the most stupid bungling, on the part of the negotiators, or the most determined and malicious desire to go to war, on one side or the other, could extract a war out of such elements.

We have said that it was not our purpose to discuss these questions, and we shall not; but we cannot forbear one

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