And bind myself to that, which once being right,

Will not be less right, when I shrink from it.
No; if the end be gained-if I be raised
To freer, nobler use. I'll dare, I'll welcome
Him and his means, though they were racks
and flames."

The discipline begins. Not yet seventeen, and a queen, she goes about"Clad in rough sorge, and with her bare, soft palms

Wooing the ruthless flint."

She visits the widow and the fatherless, and is an angel of succor wherever there is suffering. She describes to her nurse the scenes with which she becomes familiar; and the reader of "Yeast" and "Alton Locke" recognizes again the human-hearted Christian, Kingsley. But while she thus obeys the impulse of her heart, and seeks, in a thousand engrossing duties, to smother the warm earthly passion for her husband, Conrad sternly rebukes her. The monk believes in the church, not in Christianity:

"What is here?

Think not that alms, or lowly-seeming gar

ments,

Self-willed humilitics, pride's decent mum

mers,

Can raise above obedience."

He tries to show her that her sense of humility probably poisons a simple piety:

"The knave who serves unto another's needs, Knows himself abler than the man who needs him.

And she who stoops will not forget that stooping

Implies a height to stoop from."

A series of lovely pictures of Elizabeth's charities follow. Then we have another aspect of the church of Rome militant in the Abbot, whose sentiments are not so old-fashioned as the date of the play. The Abbot and Count Walter are conversing :

"Abbot. Idleness, Sir, deceit, and immorality, are the three children of this same barbarous self-indulgence in alms giving. Leave the poor alone. Let want teach them the need of self exertion, and misery prove the foolishness of crime.

"C. Walter. How? Teach them to become men by leaving them brutes?

"Abbot. Oh, sir, there we step in, with the consolations and instructions of the faith."

This discourse is apropos of a famine, in which Elizabeth has so manifestly interfered with the will of divine Providence, which designed that the poor should perish-else why permit a famine?-that the Thuringians are angry and come to complain of her to Lewis. She pleads against them, that it was for her husband's honor as a ruler, that she dared not lose one of the sheep committed to him. The loving Lewis, proud of his spouse, dismisses the complaints.

But it is still a struggle in her heart; there is yet no victory. The loving woman in training for a saint yearns after her natural kind. She sits with Lewis singing:

"Oh! that we two were Maying

Down the stream of the soft spring breeze; Like children with violets playing

In the shade of the whispering trees.

Oh! that we two sat dreaming

On the sward of some sheep-trimmed down, Watching the white mist steaming

Over river and mead and town.

Oh! that we two lay sleeping

In our nest in the church-yard sod. With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast,

And our souls at home with God!"

At the moment in which she finds that she only loves him more than ever, she discovers that he, with holy zeal, has taken the vows of a crusader. This sharp sorrow gives her a vague fear and doubt. Lewis turns her over to Conrad for consolation, and the woman and wife welcomes him in these fiery words:

"Eliz. (Rising.) You know, Sir, that my husband has taken the cross? "Con. I do; all praise to God! "Eliz. But none to you: Hard-hearted! Am I not enough your slave? Can I obey you more when he is gone Than now I do? Wherein, pray, has he hindered

This holiness of mine, for which you make me Old ere my womanhood? [CONRAD offers to go.

Stay, Sir, and tell me

Is this the out-come of your "father's care?" Was it not enough to poison all my joys With foulest scruples-show me nameless sins,

Where I, unconscious babe, blessed God for all things,

But you must thus intrigue away my knight And plunge me down this gulf of widow hood!

And I not twenty yet-a girl-an orphanThat cannot stand alone! Was I too happy? Oh, God! what lawful bliss do I not buy And balance with the smart of some sharp penance?

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:

"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.

66

Bishop. Alem!-a pious notion--in moderation. We must be moderate, my child, moderate: I hate overdoing anythingpecially 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.

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 sixteenth 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 many a woman and many a man since.

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 wi̇ 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 salinon 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.

1.

"A floating, a floating Across the sleeping sea,

All night I heard a singing bird Upon the topmost tree.

11.

"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.'

V.

"The current sweeps the Old World,
The current sweeps the New;

The wind will blow, the dawn will glow,
Ere thou hast sailed them through."

Here is the song of the poet, who is also a faithful Christian minister.

THE DEAD CHURCH.

I.

"Wild, wild wind, wilt thou never cease thy sighing?

Dark, dark night, wilt thou never wear away?

Cold. cold church, in thy death-sleep lying, Thy Lent is past, thy Passion here, but not thine Easter-day.

11.

"Peace, faint heart, though the night be dark and sighing;

Rest, fair corpse, where thy Lord himself hath lain.

Weep, dear Lord where thy bride is lying: Thy tears shall wake her frozen limbs to life and health again."

And here the anti-strophe:

A PARABLE FROM LIEBIG.

I.

"The church bells were ringing, the devil sat singing

On the stump of a rotting old tree;

Oh faith, it grows cold, and the creeds they grow old,

And the world is nigh ready for me.'

11.

"The bells went on ringing, a spirit came singing,

And smiled as he crumbled the tree;

'Yon wood does but perish new seedlings to cherish.

And the world is to live yet for thee.'"

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.