"Eliz.

Tell him-tell him-God! Have I grown mad, or a child within the moment?

The earth has lost her gray sad hue, and blazes

With her old life-light; hark! yon wind's a song

Those clouds are angels' robes.-That fiery west

Is paved with smiling faces.-I am a woman,
And all things bid me love! my dignity
Is thus to cast my virgin pride away,
And find my strength in weakness. Busy
brain!

Thou keep'st pace with my heart; old lore, old fancies,

Buried for years, leap from their tombs, and proffer

Their magic service to my new-born spirit.
I'll go I am not mistress of myself-
Send for him-bring him to me-he is
mine!"

The bridal feast follows, with a chant of monks and a fool's song, recurring at each pause of the festal chorus.

With the next act begins the struggle of the woman's heart, divided by two loves which it has been taught to believe incompatible-the love of God, and the love of man. Elizabeth is sitting on the floor by her husband's bed.

I envy for its strength; his fiery boldness
I call the carnestness which dares not trifle
With life's huge stake; his coldness but the
calm

Of one who long hath found, and keeps unwavering,

Clear purpose still; he hath the gift which speaks

The deepest things most simply; in his eye
I dare be happy-weak I dare not be.
With such a guide to save this little heart-
The burden of self-rule-Oh-half my work
Were eased, and I could live for thee and
thine,

And take no thought of self. Oh, be not jealous,

Mine own, mine idol! For thy sake I ask itI would but be a mate and help more meet For all thy knightly virtues."

Poor Lewis cries amen, feels his inferior force, abdicates his headship as husband, and declares that she must lead him. The shrewd Walter holds another theory of the monk.

"A shallow, stony, steadfast eye; that looks at neither man nor beast in the face, but at something invisible a yard before him, through you and past you, at a fascination, a ghost of fixed purposes that haunts him, from which neither reason nor pity will turn. I have seen such an eye in men possessed-with devils, or with self: sleek, passionless men, who are too refined to be manly, and measure their grace by their effeminacy; crooked vermin, who swarm up in pious times, being drowned out of their earthy haunts by the spring-tide of religion; and so, making a gain of godliness, swim upon the first of the flood, till it cast them ashore on the firm beach of wealth and station. I always mistrust those wall-eyed saints."

Elizabeth surrenders herself to Conrad's absolute spiritual guidance, and

he assumes" the training of her sainthood." Her nurse warns her that she will repent. Alas! sweet lady, all a woman and noble in her errors, she replies:

"I do repent, even now. Therefore I'll

swear

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 garments,

Self-willed humilities, 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 whe 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 a y 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 widowhood!

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: "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

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.

"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, with out 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

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