an absurdity; for what interest can endure beyond the tomb? Yet how often has martyrdom been the initiation of progress, the baptism of a world!

Faith, which is intellect, energy, and love, will put an end to the discords existing in a society which has neither church nor leaders; which invokes a new world, but forgets to ask its secret, its Word, from God.

With faith will revive poetry, rendered fruitful by the breath of God and by a holy creed. Poetry, exiled now from a world a prey to anarchy; poetry, the flower of the angels, nourished by the blood of martyrs and watered by the tears of mothers, blossoming often among ruins but ever colored by the rays of dawn; poetry, a language prophetic of humanity, European in essence and national in form,- will make known to us the fatherland of all the nations hitherto; translate the religious and social synthesis through art; and render still lovelier by its light, Woman, an angel, fallen, it is true, but yet nearer heaven than we, and hasten her redemption by restoring her to her mission of inspiration, prayer, and pity, so divinely symbolized by Christianity in Mary.

The soul of man had fled; the senses reigned alone. The multitude demanded bread and the sports of the circus. Philosophy had sunk first into skepticism, then into epicureanism, then into subtlety and words. Poetry was transformed into satire.

Yet there were moments when men were terror-struck at the solitude around them, and trembled at their isolation. They ran to embrace the cold and naked statues of their once venerated gods; to implore of them a spark of moral life, a ray of faith, even an illusion! They departed, their prayers unheard, with despair in their hearts and blasphemy upon their lips. Such were the times; they resembled our own.

Yet this was not the death agony of the world. It was the conclusion of one evolution of the world which had reached its ultimate expression. A great epoch was exhausted, and passing away to give place to another, the first utterances of which had already been heard in the north, and which awaited but the Initiator to be revealed.

He came, the soul the most full of love, the most sacredly virtuous, the most deeply inspired by God and the future that men have yet seen on earth,-Jesus. He bent over the corpse of the dead world, and whispered a word of faith. Over the clay that had lost all of man but the movement and the form, he

uttered words until then unknown,-love, sacrifice, a heavenly origin. And the dead arose. A new life circulated through the clay, which philosophy had tried in vain to reanimate. From that corpse arose the Christian world, the world of liberty and equality. From that clay arose the true man, the image of God, the precursor of humanity.

THOUGHTS ADDRESSED TO THE POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

T

From Giovine Italia'

HE future is humanity. The world of individuality, the world of the Middle Ages, is exhausted and consumed. The modern era of the social world is now in the dawn of its development; and genius is possessed by the consciousness of this coming world.

Napoleon and Byron represented, summed up, and concluded the epoch of individuality: the one the monarch of the kingdom of battle, the other the monarch of the realm of imagination; the poetry of action, the poetry of thought.

Created by nature deeply to feel, and identify himself with the first sublime image offered to his sight, Byron gazed around upon the world and found it not.

Religion was no more. An altar was yet standing, but broken and profaned: a temple silent and destitute of all noble and elevating emotion, and converted into a fortress of despotism; in it a neglected cross. Around him a world given up to materialism, which had descended from the rank of philosophical opinion to the need of practical egotism, and the relics of a superstition which had become deformed and ridiculous since the progress of civilization had forbidden it to be cruel. Cant was all that was left in England, frivolity in France, and inertia in Italy. generous sympathy, no pure enthusiasm, no religion, no earnest desire, no aspiration visible in the masses.

Whence could the soul of Byron draw inspiration? where find a symbol for the immense poetry that burned within him? Despairing of the world around him, he took refuge in his own heart, and dived into the inmost depths of his own soul. It was indeed a whole world, a volcano, a chaos of raging and tumultuous passions, a cry of war against society such as tyranny had made it; against religion such as the pope and the craft of priests

had made it; and against mankind as he saw them,-isolated, degraded, and deformed.

The result was a form of poetry purely individual,— all of individual sensation and images; a poetry having no basis in humanity, nor in any universal faith; a poetry over which, with all its infinity of accessories drawn from nature and the material world, there broods the image of Prometheus bound down to earth and cursing the earth, an image of individual will striving to substitute itself by violence for the universal will and universal right.

Napoleon fell; Byron fell. The tombs of St. Helena and Missolonghi contain the relics of an entire world.

ON CARLYLE

WR

From the Essays'

E ALL seek God; but we know that here below we can neither attain unto him, nor comprehend him, nor contemplate him: the absorption into God of some of the Brahminical religions, of Plato, and of some modern ascetics, is an illusion that cannot be realized. Our aim is to approach God: this we can do by our works alone. To incarnate as far as possible his word; to translate, to realize his thought,-is our charge here below. It is not by contemplating his works. that we can fulfill our mission upon earth; it is by devoting ourselves to our share in the evolution of his work, without interruption, without end. The earth and man touch at all points. on the infinite: this we know well, but is it enough to know this? have we not to march onwards, to advance into this infinite? But can the individual finite creature of a day do this if he relies only upon his own powers? It is precisely from having found themselves for an instant face to face with infinity, without calculating upon other faculties, upon other powers, than their own, that some of the greatest intellects of the day have been led astray into skepticism or misanthropy. Not identifying themselves sufficiently with humanity, and startled at the disproportion between the object and the means, they have ended by seeing naught but death and annihilation on every side, and have no longer had courage for the conflict. The ideal has appeared to them like a tremendous irony.

In truth, human life, regarded from a merely individual point of view, is deeply sad. Glory, power, grandeur, all perish,playthings of a day, broken at night. The mothers who loved us, whom we love, are snatched away; friendships die, and we survive them. The phantom of death watches by the pillow of those dear to us. The strongest and purest love would be the bitterest irony, were it not a promise for the future; and this promise itself is but imperfectly felt by us, such as we are at the present day. The intellectual adoration of truth without hope of realization is sterile: there is a larger void in our souls, a yearning for more truth than we can realize during our short terrestrial existence.

Sadness, unending sadness, discordance between the will and the power, disenchantment, discouragement-such is human life, when looked at only from the individual point of view. A few rare intellects escape the common law and attain calmness: but it is the calm of inaction, of contemplation; and contemplation here on earth is the selfishness of genius.

I repeat, Mr. Carlyle has instinctively all the presentiments of the new epoch; but following the teachings of his intellect rather than his heart, and rejecting the idea of the collective life, it is absolutely impossible for him to find the means of their realization. A perpetual antagonism prevails throughout all he does; his instincts drive him to action, his theory to contemplation. Faith and discouragement alternate in his works, as they must in his soul. He weaves and unweaves his web, like Penelope; he preaches by turns life and nothingness; he wearies out the powers of his readers by continually carrying them from heaven to hell, from hell to heaven. Ardent, and almost menacing, upon the ground of ideas, he becomes timid and skeptical as soon as he is engaged on that of their application. I may agree with him with respect to the aim, I cannot respecting the means: he rejects them all, but he proposes no others. He desires progress, but shows hostility to all who strive to progress; he foresees, he announces as inevitable, great changes or revolutions in the religious, social, political order, but it is on condition that the revolutionists take no part in them; he has written many admirable pages on Knox and Cromwell, but the chances are that he would have written them as admirably, although less truly, against them had he lived at the commencement of their struggles.

What is meant by "reorganizing labor" but bringing back the dignity of labor? What is a new form but the case or the symbol of a new idea? We perhaps have had a glimpse of the ideal in all its purity; we feel ourselves capable of soaring into the invisible regions of the spirit. But are we, on this account, to isolate ourselves from the movement which is going on among our brethren beneath us? Must we be told, "You profane the sanctity of the idea," because the men into whom we seek to instill it are flesh and blood, and we are obliged to speak to their senses? Condemn all action, then; for action is only a form given to thought-its application, practice. "The end of man is an action and not a thought." Mr. Carlyle himself repeats this in his 'Sartor Resartus'; and yet the spirit which pervades his works seems to me too often of a nature to make his readers forget it.

It has been asked, what is at the present day the duty of which we have spoken so much? A complete reply would require a volume, but I may suggest it in a few words. Duty consists of that love of God and man which renders the life of the individual the representation and expression of all that he believes to be the truth, absolute or relative. Duty is progressive, as the evolution of truth; it is modified and enlarged with the ages; it changes its manifestations according to the requirement of times and circumstances. There are times in which we must be able to die like Socrates; there are others in which we must be able to struggle like Washington: one period claims the pen of the sage, another requires the sword of the hero. But here and everywhere the source of this duty is God and his law; its object, humanity; its guarantee, the mutual responsibility of men; its measure, the intellect of the individual and the demands of the period; its limit, power.

Study the universal tradition of humanity, with all the faculties, with all the disinterestedness, with all the comprehensiveness of which God has made you capable: where you find the general permanent voice of humanity agreeing with the voice of your conscience, be sure that you hold in your grasp something of absolute truth-gained, and forever yours. Study also with interest, attention, and comprehensiveness, the tradition of your epoch and of your nation-the idea, the want, which ferments. within them: where you find that your conscience sympathizes with the general aspiration, you are sure of possessing the relative truth. Your life must embody both these truths, must