out by quenchless sorrow.

The story of it is dedicated,

properly enough, to Leopardi, and in his Proem the poet

utters its Apologia.

"Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden,

And wail life's discords into careless ears?

"Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles

To show the bitter, old, and wrinkled truth

Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,

False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth; Because it gives some sense of power and passion

In helpless impotence to try to fashion

Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth."

The traveler enters the City, and passes up and down its streets, following one who seems intent on some sad errand. This proves to be a pilgrimage to the ruined shrines of Faith, Love, and Hope. Here Faith was poisoned, there Love died by violence, and yonder Hope starved. The seeming despair of his guide moves him to question:

"When Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed?
"As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,

Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.
"He circled thus forever tracing out

The series of the fraction left of life;
Perpetual recurrence in the scope

Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope." This last reference is, of course, to the fantastic mathematical formula of pessimism, obtained by dividing threescore and ten by the persistently recurring Three; that is by 33.3, representing the years of a generation, or by 333, representing, as in the poem, dead Faith, Hope, and Love, the quotient in either case resulting in an infinitely repeating series of the figures 2, 1, 0.

The City lays its charm upon its visitor:

"Poor wretch! who once hath paced that dolent city
Shall pace it often doomed beyond all pity,
With horror ever deepening from the first."

All this, however, is but the outward seeming of the City's life. The visitor soon becomes aware of a throng in the streets pressing toward what appears to be a cathedral. And there he hears its philosophy expounded. The great church is a splendid habitation of gloom, wherein a vast multitude hang wistfully upon an earnest preacher's lips, if haply he will show them any good. This is his introduction:

"O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark.

O battling in black floods without an ark!
O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
With bitter blood-drops running down like tears;

O dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light."

Then follows the doctrine:

"And now at last authentic word I bring,

Witnessed by every dead and living thing;

Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no fend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being's gall.

"I find no hint throughout the universe
Of good or ill, of blessings or of curse;
I find alone Necessity supreme;
With infinite mystery, abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark

For us the flitting shadows of a dream."

And here is his application:

"O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;

A few short years must bring us all relief;

Can we not bear these years of laboring breath?

But if you would not this poor life fulfill,

Lo you are free to end it when you will,

Without the fear of waking after death."

I wish that space sufficed to tell how a lamentable voice was raised from among the congregation in confirmation of the preacher's message, although between the words of

every sentence of it there sounded the inappeasable human It closes thus:—

desire for comfort.

"Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,

Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair?

Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:

Hush and be mute, envisaging despair."

And this the preacher in his turn reaffirms:-
"My Brothers, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
This life holds nothing good for us,

But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:

I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me."

This is the philosophy of the City of Dreadful Night, and the poem leaves us without the city gates, beside the giant statue of its genius, Melancholia.

"The moving sun and stars from east to west

Circle before her in the sea of air;

Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.

Her subjects often gaze upon her there:

The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance

And confirmation of the old despair."

Perhaps we may be permitted to set beside this Apocalypse of the nineteenth-century seer, the highly poetic picture of another city, drawn from quite a different source.

"And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

Before we leave Thomson, it is worth while to notice the resultant attitude of his philosophy toward Nature. One

passage in the poem called "Vane's Story" will illustrate

my meaning, although due allowance must be made for its jocose bitterness. Vane speaks:

The same old stolid hills and leas,
The same old stupid, patient trees,
The same old ocean blue and green,
The same sky, cloudy or serene;
The old two-dozen hours to run
Between the settings of the sun,
The same three hundred sixty-five
Dull days to every year alive;

Old stingy measure, weight, and rule,
No margin left to play the fool;
The same old way of getting born

Into it, naked and forlorn;

The same old way of creeping out

Through death's low door, for lean and stout."

I have felt justified in giving this important place to Thomson, because scarce any one else has so eloquently expressed the philosophical conclusion of a pure Necessitarianism, when once its debilitating influences have oozed down into the stratum of life's commonplace.

An interesting variant of the same general type is to be found in John Davidson's recent "Ballad in Blank Verse," which portrays the experience of a rather sensual young Scotsman whose parents are deeply concerned for his spiritual welfare, and who plead with him. His father speaks :"My son, reject not Christ; he pleads through me;

The Holy Spirit uses my poor words.

How would it fill your mother's heart and mine

And God's great heart with joy unspeakable,

Were you, a helpless sinner, now to cry,

'Lord, I believe: help thou my unbelief.'

But the boy, whose blood.

"fulfilled

Of brine, of sunset, and his dreams, exhaled
A vision,"

would not hear. He broke his mother's heart, and then to please his father, and if possible to atone for the past, professed conversion and came to the Lord's Table with him. We cannot follow the tragedy in detail. He finds

"like husks of corn

The bread, like vitriol the sip of wine!

I eat and drink damnation to myself

To give my father's troubled spirit peace."

Of course he ends by renouncing all that he has confessed, shouting forth in one breath his determination to have no creed, and in the next his acceptance of a creed compact of pantheism and positivism, and concludes with the determination to be a poet, finding comfort and inspiration in Nature.

"No creed for me! I am a man apart:

A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world.
A soulless life that angels may possess

Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things
May loll at ease beside the loveliest;

A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion."

This "Ballad in Blank Verse" is less logically complete than the "City of Dreadful Night." It states the premises, but forbears to draw Thomson's bitter conclusion. One feels in reading it, however, that hopelessness waits at the end of the story, even though the concluding chapters be yet unwritten.

men.

The literature of the last half-century is filled with intimations of the fact that it takes time for a philosophy to work out its legitimate conclusions among the mass of We have good reason to believe, for instance, that the back of pessimism as a philosophy of life is pretty effectually broken. That was a foregone conclusion' when it appeared that there was, if possible, a larger place for teleology in an evolutionary than in a cataclysmic scheme of creation. But in spite of that fact, it is at least possible that the practical effects of a pessimistic scheme of thought