do not involve sin on our part, are God's will in our regard, and we must accept them as such. Deus vult. This was the warcry of the Crusaders of old, and it must be the warcry of our daily lives. We must hold aloft the standard of the Cross and try to establish the kingdom of Christ solidly in at least one heart-our own. There is a special difficulty when our troubles and trials come from the sin or at least the fault of others. What happens through our own fault or comes more directly from the hand of God Himself-that it may be possible to bear with resignation; but sin is contrary to the Divine will, and how can the sinful wrong done to us by our fellow-creature be indeed the will of God? God wills these things, not as sins for the doers of them, but as sources of merit for us. If ever injustice was done on earth, it was the death of the Just One; yet during the night before He suffered, when He bade St. Peter sheath his sword, He asked: "Will you not let Me drink the chalice my Father has given me?" He did not say "the chalice which Judas or Pilate or the Jews have prepared for Me"; for, as He said to Pilate the next morning (John xix. ii.) “Thou wouldst not have any power over me unless it were given thee from above." Any poor little attempt that any of us may ever have the opportunity of making to imitate this meekness of the Sacred Heart of Jesus must needs be by comparison so trivial and so childish that it may well remind us of what one may imagine happening in a household where a very young boy (for instance) is ill of fever, which makes him fretful, peevish, selfishly exacting, and all this is borne sweetly by his elder sister who nurses her little brother devotedly. The mother looking on rejoices at her daughter's sweetness and unselfishness, though they are called forth by the frowardness of her son. And him she forgives, for he is but a baby and he is sick. So can our heavenly Father turn the faults of some of His poor creatures to His greater glory and our greater good. The subject may now be handed over to the more practical applications of each of us after we have perhaps fixed in our memory a saying and an aspiration, either of which might well serve as the tessera of a meditation on conformity to the will of God." There are no disappointments for those whose This is a saying of wills are buried in the will of God." Father Faber's. God Himself can never be disappointed. He is infinite wisdom, infinite power; and if we resolutely strive to bend our will to His, to make our will one with His, our will must be achieved, we must always be on the winning side, we can never fail, we can never be disappointed. The ejaculation is this, and many of us have it off by heart already: Fiat laudetur, atque in aeternum superexaltetur justissima, altissima, et amabilissima Voluntas Dei in omnibus. May the most just, the most high, and the most amiable will of God be in all things done, praised, and exalted over all for ever!" Pius the Seventh had gone through a course of events well suited to try his conformity to the will of God and the worst of his troubles were over when on the 10th of May, 1818, he granted to the faithful for saying this ejaculation an indulgence of 100 days once a day, and a plenary indulgence on the usual conditions once a year on any day of their own choosing for those who should say it every day for a year. Finally-and finally, too, in another sense-this holy Pope granted a plenary indulgence in articulo mortis to those who, having repeated this aspiration frequently in the course of their life, and being worthily disposed at the last, should accept death with resignation from the hands of God. M. R. IN MEMORY OF FATHER MATTHEW RUSSELL, S.J. The day he died, we felt a change And looking o'er the landscape wide The day he died, a red leaf fell From out the elm tree's lofty crest, And all the flowers within the dell No longer looked so gaily dressed. The green leaves whispered low and sighed, The day he died, we thought we heard As if the soul of him we loved Were carried past to God his King. MARY E. DUFFY. POETRY AND THE REVERSE "W BY THE REV. GEORGE O'NEILL, S.J. PART IV.-THE REVERSE 'HEN is poetry not poetry ?"-would seem to be a not unfair variant of our heading on the present occasion. We are entering a vaguely-negative region which assumes under our gaze a bewildering number of aspects. Here is found everything which though claiming to be poetry yet is in conflict with the ideals and notions of poetic art and success which we have been endeavouring to establish. (1) Here is to be found a lamentably large number of types, from creeping commonplace up to the false sublime, from inane feebleness to the violence which falls over the verge of the ridiculous. To sample, not to exhaust, its products will take up all the time the subject deserves, and will probably be quite enough for the reader's wants or wishes. With deliberate parody of poetry we shall not deal. It is a realm apart, and, unlike that of bad poetry, is a pleasant and profitable one to stray into. It is excluded from our scope, because parody does not aim at being poetical. It is, as someone has said, "a department of pure criticism," and criticism (pace Mr. Pope and his Essay) is something inconsistent with poetry; something that ought never to try to be poetry, but represent a quite opposite frame of mind from the poetical. The parodist-critic takes up the characteristic manner and peculiarities of a true poet (for whom perhaps he has a great respect) and employs them on such themes or in such a way as to produce an effect just the opposite of that intended and achieved by his original. He cunningly analyses, cunningly steals, cunningly creates in his turn-a caricature. Akin to parody is the suggestive and entertaining nonsense written by Lewis Carroll and some other moderns of similar 'See "Irish Monthly" for May, June, and July, 1915. trend. Who would reject with scorn as mere nonsense that of the "Jabberwock verses, or the best parts of "The Hunting of the Snark ?" "And hast thou slain the jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! Such nonsense as this is sometimes so full of suggestion that it steps over the border-line into poetry. Very different is the nonsense of one who fails to get hold of any idea or of any true and telling expression for an idea, but merely simulates the capture while it throws word after word, rhyme after rhyme. This great class of non-poetry has been satirized by Aristophanes, by Persius, by Pope: the latter's "Song by a Person of Quality" is the first explicit caricature of it that I know of in English. It has flourished in the libretti of operas and in the popular songs of the concert-room and drawing-room. We are familiar with this sort of ditty: or this: I bring thee red, red roses, With all their blue and white, The night with all its light; Though we meet to part for ever, But there's moonlight on the sea. Music, however, must be conceded a certain capacity for making nonsense tolerable. It does this not merely by whatever of charm it may itself contain, but by its power of intensifying the suggestiveness of mere words. Something of the same kind may be said of the marvellous verbal artistry (I had at first written jugglery) of certain poets of no small repute. They hypnotize (as it were) our mental faculties. with the chiming play of rhyme, rhythm and cunning iteration, until we almost cease to know or heed whether there is any meaning at all in the glittering and undulating stream of words that courses through our brain. Illustrative examples would be (from the nature of the case) too long to quote here; but they may be found abundantly and in their most fascinating form in the works of Swinburne-whose |