in a particular way, the very difference whole country round. Smiling meadows, of character being useful—created little neat houses, productive fields, healthy surprise. Ernest had learned that mere peasantry, the absence of any glaring personal sympathy with the ignorance or cases of poverty, considerable elevation misery of our fellow-creatures is of little of mind, above that which is the ordiuse, if we do not raise our hands and nary lot of the agricultural laborer, are arms to do something; and that the the practical results of this happy distrue friends of humanity are those who position of mind, which makes the richdo their utmost to diffuse knowledge, est propriètaire of Laboudie consider to widen the circle of man's utility, all around him as his children, to whom and who, by example and practice, lead he owes a fair share of his time and the march of civilization. Every man thoughts. They are intensely beloved, may thus do his part in the great work and there are many yet unborn who will of human progress. All that is wanted yet live to bless the pleasing union in is the will to be useful. Ernest and Ernest and Louise of the hand and the Louise Delavigne were a blessing to the heart.

THE PLOUGH.

God speed the ploughshare! Tell me not
Disgrace attends the toil

Of those who plough the dark green sod,
Or till the fruitful soil.

Why should the honest ploughman shrink
From mingling in the van

Of learning and of wisdom, since

'Tis mind that makes the man?

God speed the ploughshare, and the hands

That till the fruitful earth,

For there is in this world, so wide,

No gem like honest worth.

And though the hands are dark with toil,

And flushed the manly brow,

It matters not, for God will bless

The labors of the plough.

A CATHOLIC POET'S LATEST POEM.

Aubrey de Vere may be said to hardly any of the common materials of occupy a leading position among the dramatic interest, without any story of poets of our time, and any production love that is not of the slightest kind from his pen will well repay the student and absolutely subordinate to religious. of literature. We think many of our or political obligations, with nothing readers will be pleased to read the but the tale of heroic ambition for the following review, from The Spectator, chief subject of the tragedy, Mr. de of his last work-" Alexander the Vere has yet not only riveted our inGreat, a Dramatic Poem "-: terest on his drama from the very beginning, but deepened that interest with every Act and almost every Scene up to the truly tragic, and yet, in the truest sense, satisfying, close. To give so profound an interest to the chronicle of even so mighty a cataract of ambition as Alexander's, would have been difficult, if not impossible, but for the lights and shadows of the religious ideas which Mr. de Vere has blended with the picture of the great conqueror's career. He has taken some pains to depict not merely the growth of the insatiable pride of his hero, but the reciprocal influence on each other of that insatiable pride, and of his changing estimate of the great religions he enAnd by making the char

"This is a poem which ought to make a reputation. It will compare with Sir Henry Taylor's fine drama of Philip van Arteveldt, as well in general power as in the delicacy of the minuter elements of its workmanship. Yet, at first sight, it looks almost a hopeless endeavor to weave the rather irregular leaps of Alexander's meteoric career into a single drama. A ten years' war, in which the field of interest was always military or political and always changing, and which carried the conqueror through Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, then across Persia into India, and which, after the return to Persia, finally ended in Babylon, hardly seems to furnish the materials for the sort of countered. poem that we connect with the drama. acter of Hephestion, the one friend But the apparent difficulty of the enter- whom he passionately loved, and at prise is, when surmounted, a measure whose death his grief was almost a madof the skill and imaginative insight of ness, a striking contrast to his own the poet; and certainly in this case character of over-mastering pride, Mr. the enterprise appears to us to have de Vere has contrived to provide us a been singularly successful. With standard with which to compare the

'I sometimes think

That I am less a person than a power,
Some engine in the right hand of the gods;
Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness
Knows this-its work; but not that work's
rolling,

far scope.

Hephestion, what is life? My life, since
boyhood,

Hath been an agony of means to ends:
An ultimate end I find not. For that cause,

On-reeling in the oppression of a void,
At times I welcome what I once scarce
brook'd,

The opprobrium of blank sleep.'

dwindling awe of Alexander's mind and us, is hardly made a visible thread in the growing moral recklessness of his the character of the conqueror. We keen and politic sagacity. Of course are told enough about it, but hardly the success or failure of a great drama- made to see how it belongs to the tic conception of this kind depends character itself. In a very fine conwholly on the workmanship, and Mr. versation, the last which takes place de Vere's workmanship is at once between Alexander and the friend who delicate in execution and large in plan. is to him what Patroclus was to AchilHe has got a most vivid and powerful les, Alexander confesses,conception of his hero,-whether true or false, it is, except on certain questions of external policy, now of course impossible to say,—and he has shown us this character maturing before our eyes in verse of beautiful rhythm, and often of very high imaginative power. To speak frankly, we had no conception, from our knowledge of Mr. de Vere's former poems, that so much poetic power lay in him as this drama shows. It is terse as well as full of beauty, nervous as well as rich in thought. The character of Alexander grows "That, no doubt, is meant to be the upon us as we read, till it fascinates us picture rather of what Alexander had by the force of the almost unerring yet become, than of what he was at first. half-animal intellect, and that imperi- The 'person' in him had shrunk, the ous self-will which it displays. The fateful instrument in him had grown. only thing we miss that ought to be in Of the ends of life and empire, of the poem, is a fuller delineation of the which he had some vague and awepassionate and single devotion to his struck conception at the opening of the friend, Hephestion, which is the key poem, he has less and less, as pride to the drama, and yet rather assumed swells and reverence dwindles. But in it than painted. The picture ac- still, what he is at the close completely, tually painted is rather that of an he is at least in tendency at the openAlexander in whom no such intense ing; and this so much so in Mr. de personal devotion to a friend would Vere's picture, that we are hardly have been possible. We know that helped to understand the passionate that devotion was a matter of history; love for Hephestion of which we are on its intensity depends an essential informed. We think this a real defect and critical element of the drama; and in the scene in which Alexander and the violent passion resulting from the Hephestion visit the mounds over the wound inflicted by death on that over- tombs of Achilles and Patroclus, at weening devotion is very finely painted; Troy. There, at least, at the very but the devotion itself is not shown to outset of his career, Alexander should

have been allowed to betray more of violence of the convulsive and insatihis true tenderness for his friend and able grief caused by Hephestion's the ground of it. If it were, as it well death would be even more natural and might have been, that Hephestion's intelligible, if depicted as the close of was the one mind which, while enter- a friendship which had been becoming ing completely and enthusiastically into more and more unchastened in characAlexander's grand conceptions, yet ter and unassimilated with the King's gave Alexander indirectly a glimpse of intellectual and political life up to the a world of sympathies and insights, end, than it is in this play, where we into the finer shades of which he him- are not made to see that Alexander had self had no power to pierce, then this been in any way conscious of drifting sense of dependence on his friend for away from his former sympathy with access to a delicate human sphere, other- Hephestion, as, in consistency with this wise inaccessible to him, might have picture, he must really have been, been here delineated, and the source though of course without losing his of an almost inexplicable devotion so love for him. This is, perhaps, the one revealed. As it is, Alexander from defect of the drama, that the link of the very first is so much less a per- human sympathy between Alexander son than a power,' that one is a little puzzled by the one thread in his character which shows him to the last not merely a power but a person. We think Mr. de Vere would have added a fresh touch to the beauty of a noble der's own character. In the very openplay if he had painted Alexander's need of Hephestion more carefully in the opening scenes, and let us see the subsidence of this tender and influencing for war and its wonderful command of human love into a mere imperious and exclusive devotion, as the play drew on. At the close of one of the later scenes to which we have already referred, Hephestion says of Alexander that the King truly knew him never;' and that is natural, for he is made too human in every way to be understood by a great, living organon of conquest and empire like Alexander. But we think there should have been in Alexander a greater sense of what he might gain by knowing Hephestion, a greater

and his higher-natured friend is not carefully enough painted, while the contrast between them is very finely painted. But we must turn away from this minute criticism to the fine picture of Alexan

ing of the play, the old General, who had trained him from his childhood, thus describes the young man's genius

detail:

'PTOLEMY.

He owes you much.

PARMENIO.

A realm his father owed me,

And knew it well. The son is reverent too,
But with a difference, sir. In Philip's time
My voice was Delphic on the battle-field:
This young man taps the springs of my
experience

As though with water to allay his wine
of keener inspirations: "Speak thy thought,
Parmenio !" Ere my words are half-way out
He nods approval, or he smiles dissent.

Still, there is like him none! I marvell'd oft

knowledge of the deficiency in his Own To see him breast that tempest from the mind which Hephestion could supply, at the opening than at the close.

north,

The Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave.

The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers;

If distant, guess'd their whereabout-how lay

The intermediate tract-if fordable

"How this 'zigzag lightning in his brain' leads Alexander with unerring precision to all that concerns the command of armies and States, all that

The streams—the vales accessible to horse affects man in the average, whether

'Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.'

that be the heroic in character or that "agony of means to ends" which helps "Note the last line. That almost him to master so completely the milianimal power of intellect in a man who tary details of a battle or a campaign, had singularly little of animal passion, or the policy to be pursued towards a is one of the notes which run through vanquished people, and yet utterly fails the character. It is still more finely to guide him in that region where brought out in the scene in which something higher than political or Parmenio's son, Philotas, tries to per- military sagacity holds sway, somesuade his father to raise the standard thing that overrules statecraft and disof revolt against Alexander, on the solves the power of armies, is very ground of the madness of his ambitious finely brought out in one scene after schemes: another. Take this outbreak of the never-ending issue between Church and State, as showing Mr. de Vere's conception of the point where Alexander's political sagacity fell short of true spiritual wisdom. Alexander had been developing his scheme for making Asiatics and Greeks truly equal in his Empire, and had maintained, with the practised intellect educated by Aristotle, that this rule would give its full influence to the keen Greek brain :'HEPHESTION.

'PHILOTAS.

I grant his greatness were his godship sane! But note his brow; 'tis Thought's least earthly temple:

Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,

Still glowing like a panther's! In his body
No passion dwells; but all his mind is
passion,

Wild intellectual appetite and instinct
That works without a law.

PARMENIO.

But half you know him.

There is a zigzag lightning in his brain

That flies in random flashes, yet not errs :

Greek and Asian equall'd,

Chances his victories seem; but link those The Greek supremacy has died at birth.

years,

Like elemental gods with nature blent,
Yet not in nature merged.'

"To this Hephestion urges that the

From Athos westward to the Illyrian coasts, Persian faith is higher than the Greek,

Ere yet she learn'd to love me. He too

loves me !

Though jealous of my fame.'.

and yet that Alexander is not willing to give it its equal chance :