Chapter II: Part 2

There were no roses till the first child died,
No violets, no balmy-breathed heartsease,—
No heliotrope, nor buds so dear to bees,
The honey-hearted suckle, no gold-eyed
And lowly dandelion, nor, stretching wide
Clover and cowslip cups, like rival seas,
Meeting and parting, as the young spring breeze
Runs giddy races, playing seek and hide.
For all Flowers died when Eve left Paradise,
And all the world was flowerless awhile,
Until a little child was laid in earth.
Then, from its grave grew violets for its eyes,
And from its lips rose-petals for its smile;
And so all flowers from that child’s death took birth.

To those who have lovingly lingered over the pages of Maurice de Guerin, pages that breathe the old Greek world of thought, the following sonnet, that paints that modern Grecian with a few masterly strokes, will be keenly relished. It is the fine implications of these lines that is the life of our hope for the poet and the future.

MAURICE DE GUERIN.

The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes
Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair,
Unseen by others; to him maiden-hair
And waxen lilacs and those birds that rise
A-sudden from tall reeds, at slight surprise,
Brought charmed thoughts; and in earth everywhere,
He, like sad Jacques, found a music, rare
As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise.
A Pagan heart, a Christian soul, had he,
He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed,
Till earth and heaven met within his breast!
As if Theocritus, in Sicily,
Had come upon the Figure crucified,
And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest.

As an essayist, Mr. Egan has touched many subjects, and always in an entertaining vein. Some of his essays are remarkable for their plain speaking. He has studied his race in their new surroundings, knows equally well their virtues and failings. If he can take an honest delight in the virtues, he is capable of writing with no uncertain sound on the failings, failings that have been so mercilessly used by the vulgarly comic school of American playwrights. His essays are corrective and should find their way into every Irish-American home. They would tend to correct many abuses and aid in the detection of those bunions so sacredly kept on the feet of the Irish race—last relic of the Penal times. A recent essay throws a series of blue lights—the color so well liked by Carlyle—on our shallow collegiate system. Will it be read by our Catholic educators? That is a question that time will answer. If they read it aright they will be apt to change their system of teaching the classics parrot-like, an empty word translation. They will transport their pupils from the bare class-room to the sunny skies of Greece and Rome, and under these skies see the religious dogmas, the philosophical systems, the fine arts, the entire civilization of those ancient thought giving nations. “What professor,” says de Guerin, “reading Virgil and Homer to his pupils, has developed the poetry of the Iliad or Æneid by the poetry of nature under the Grecian and Italian skies. Who has dreamt of showing the reciprocal relation of the poets to the philosophers, the philosophers to the poets, and these in turn to the artists—Plato to Homer, Homer to Phidias? It is a want of this that makes the classics so dull to youth, so useless to manhood.”

Mr. Egan, as a novelist, has written many books, dealing mostly with Irish-American life. These novels are filled with strong, manly feeling, and Catholic pictures beautiful enough to arrest the attention of the most fastidious. In these days of romance readers such books must serve as an antidote to the subtle poison that permeates the fictive art. They are pleasant and instructive, and that is a high tribute in these days of dulness and spiced immorality. Take him all in all, perhaps the most acceptable tribute is, that whatever may be his gifts in the various rôles he has essayed, heavy or slight, they have been ungrudgingly used for his race and religion.

JOHN B. TABB.

A friend once wrote to me: “What do you know about a poet who signs his name John B. Tabb, his poems are delicious?” My answer was, that I knew nothing of his personal history, but that his poems had found their way into my aristocratic scrap-book. Here I might pause to whisper that the adjective aristocratic, in my sense, has nothing haughty about it. When joined to the noun scrap-book, a good commentator—they are scarce—would freely translate the phrase the indwelling of good poetry. Since then my personal knowledge of the poet has grown slowly, a slight stock and no leaves. Even that, like my old coat, is second-handed. Such material, no matter how highly recommended by the keepers of the golden balls, is usually found to be a poor bargain. But here it is, keeping in mind that rags are better than no clothing, and that older proverb—half a loaf is better than no bread.

“John B. Tabb, (I quote) was born in Virginia, when or where I know not. Becoming a Catholic he studied for the priesthood and was ordained.” Here my data fails me. At present he is the professor of literature in St. Charles’ College, Maryland. It is something in his favor, this scanty biographical fare. Where the biography is long, laudatory, and in rounded periods, it is approached as one would a snake in the grass, with a kind of fear that in the end you may be bitten. “May I be skinned alive,” said that master of word-selection and phrase-juggler, Flaubert, “before I ever turn my private feelings to literary account.” And the reader, with the stench of recent keyhole biography in his nostrils, shouts “bravo.” Flaubert’s phrase might easily have hung on the pen of the retiring worshipper of the beautiful, “the Roman Catholic priest, who drudges through a daily round of pedagogical duties in St. Charles’ College.” This quoted phrase may stand. Pedagogy, at best, is a dull pursuit for a poet. It is not congenial, and I have held an odd idea that whatever was not congenial, disguise it as you may, is drudgery. And all this by way of propping the quoted sentence. The strange thing is that in the midst of this daily round of drudgery the poet finds time to produce what a recent critic well calls “verse-gems of thought.” These verse-gems, if judged by intrinsic evidence, would argue an environment other than a drudgery habitation. In truth, it is hard to desecrate them by predicating of them any environment other than a spiritual one.

This brings us to write of Fr. Tabb’s poetry that it is elusive, from a critical point of view. When you bring your preconceived literary canons to bear upon it, they are found wanting—too clumsy to test the delicacy, fineness of touch, and the permeated spiritualism embodied in the verse-gem. It is well summarized in the saying that “it possesses to the full a white estate of virginal prayerful art.” One might define it by negatives, such as the contrary of passion poetry. The point of view most likely to give the clearest conception would be found in the sentence: an evocation from within by a highly spiritualized intelligence. The poet has caught the higher music, the music of a soul in which dwell order and method. In other words, he has assiduously cultivated to its fullest development both the spiritual sense and the moral sense.

It is easy to trace in Fr. Tabb’s poetry the influence of Sidney Lanier. It has been asserted, and with much truth, that Lanier’s influence has strangely fascinated the younger school of Southern poets. Sladen, in his book on Younger American Poets, tells us that “Lanier differs from the other dead poets included in his book, in that he was not only a poet but the founder of a school of poetry.” To his school belongs Fr. Tabb, a school following the founder whose aim is to depict

“All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark mottlings, fibre spiralings,
Fern wavings and leaf flickerings.

Yea, all fair forms and sounds and lights,
And warmths and mysteries and mights,
Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights.”

The defects of this school are best seen in the founder. He was a musician before a poet, and helplessly strove to catch shades by words that can only be rendered by music. Fr. Tabb has learned this limitation of his school. For the glowing semi-pantheism of Lanier he has substituted the true and no less beautiful doctrine of Christianity. All his verse-gems are redolent of his faith. They are religious in the sense that they are begotten by faith and breathe the air of the sanctuary. To read them is to leave the hum and pain of life behind, and enter the cloister where all is silent and peaceful, where dwelleth the spirit of God. Of them it is safe to assert that their white estate of virginal, prayerful art shall constitute their immortality. Fr. Tabb has not, as yet, thought fit to give them a more permanent form than they have in the current magazines. Catholic literature, and especially poetry, is so meagre that when a true singer touches the lyre it is not to be wondered at that those of his household should desire to possess his songs in a more worthy dwelling than that of an ephemeral magazine. In the absence of the coming charming volume I quote from my scrap-book a few of the verse-gems, thereby trusting to widen the poet’s audience and in an humble way gain lovers for his long-promised volume.

What could illustrate the peculiar genius of our poet better than the delicious gem that he has called

“THE WHITE JESSAMINE.”

I knew she lay above me,
Where the casement all the night
Shone, softened with a phosphor glow
Of sympathetic light,
And that her fledgling spirit pure
Was pluming fast for flight.

Each tendril throbbed and quickened
As I nightly climbed apace,
And could scarce restrain the blossoms
When, anear the destined place,
Her gentle whisper thrilled me
Ere I gazed upon her face.

I waited, darkling, till the dawn
Should touch me into bloom,
While all my being panted
To outpour its first perfume,
When, lo! a paler flower than mine
Had blossomed in the gloom!

“Content” is another gem of exquisite thought and workmanship.

CONTENT.

Were all the heavens an overladen bough
Of ripened benediction lowered above me,
What could I crave, soul-satisfied as now,
That thou dost love me?

The door is shut. To each unsheltered blessing
Henceforth I say, “Depart! What wouldst thou of me?”
Beggared I am of want, this boon possessing,
That thou dost love me.

“Photographed” may well make the trio in the more fully illustrating his genius:—

PHOTOGRAPHED.

For years, an ever-shifting shade
The sunshine of thy visage made;
Then, spider-like, the captive caught
In meshes of immortal thought.

E’en so, with half-averted eye,
Day after day I passed thee by,
Till, suddenly, a subtler art
Enshrined thee in my heart of heart.

“Not even the infinite surfeit of Columbus literature of the last six months can deprive Fr. Tabb’s tribute in Lippincott’s of its sweetness and light,” says the _Review of Reviews_:

With faith unshadowed by the night,
Undazzled by the day,
With hope that plumed thee for the flight
And courage to assay,
God sent thee from the crowded ark,
Christ bearer, like the dove,
To find, o’er sundering waters dark,
New lands for conquering love.

As a final selection, we may well conclude these brief notes on a poet with staying powers by quoting a poem, contributed to the _Cosmopolitan_, called “Silence;” a poem permeated with his fine spiritual sense:

Temple of God, from all eternity
Alone like Him without beginning found;
Of time, and space, and solitude the bound,
Yet in thyself of all communion free.
Is, then, the temple holier than he
That dwells therein? Must reverence surround
With barriers the portal, lest a sound
Profane it? Nay; behold a mystery!

What was, remains; what is, has ever been:
The lowliest the loftiest sustains.
A silence, by no breath of utterance stirred—
Virginity in motherhood—remains,
Clear, midst a cloud of all-pervading sin,
The voice of Love’s unutterable word.

JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE.

In this age of rondeaus and other feats in rhyme, it is pleasant to meet with a little book that abhors all verse tricks of the fin-de-siècle poets, and judiciously follows the old masters. Such a little book peeps at me from a corner in my library, marked in capitals, “Poems Worth Reading.” It was given to me years ago by its author, and as a remembrance, a few lines from the poem that appealed most to my intellect in those days, was written on its fly-leaf. It was its author’s first book, and was put forth with that shrinking modesty that has heralded all meritorious work. Of preface, that relic of egotism, there was none.

It was dedicated to one who was close to his heart, to

“JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY,

My very dear friend, and an honorable gentleman.”

It had O’Reilly’s warm word to speed and gain it a hearing, a word that would have remained unwritten were it not that the little volume, of its own worth, demanded that the word but expressed its merit. Since those days, it has travelled and found a ready home. Its gentle humor has made it quotable in the fashionable salons, its quaintness tickled the lonely scholar, stinging notes against wrong and its brilliant biting to the very core of silk-dressed sham, bespoke a hearty welcome in the haunts of the poor and oppressed.

The volume was one of promise and large hope. Of it O’Reilly wrote: “Not for years has such a first book as this appeared in America.” This recognition was but a truth. The author is a true poet, not a rhyme trickster or a cherry-stone filer, that brood so thoroughly detested by O’Reilly. He has something to say, a genuine, poetical impression to give in each poem. His genius, as that of most poets of Celtic blood, is essentially dramatic. This may best be seen in that fine, man-loving poem, “Netchaieff.” Netchaieff, a Russian Nihilist, was condemned to prison for life. Deprived of writing materials, he allowed his fingernail to grow until he fashioned it into a pen. With this he wrote, in his blood, on the margin of a book, the story of his sufferings. Almost his last entry was a note that his jailer had just boarded up the solitary pane which admitted a little light into his cell. The “letter written in blood” was smuggled out of prison and published, and Netchaieff died very soon after. The poet’s opening lines, relating to the Czar, Netchaieff’s death in prison, show that the human interest of this poet swallows up all other interests. The human alone can heat his blood and rouse in impassioned verse his indignation. How finely conceived is the satire in these lines:

“Netchaieff is dead, your Majesty.
You knew him not. He was a common hind,
Who lived ten years in hell, and then he died—
To seek another hell, as we must think,
Since he was rebel to your Majesty.”

There are many startling lines in this poem, lines that would give our fairy-airy school of poets material for a dozen sonnets. “For the People” is another poem that shows the ink was not watered. It is full of truth, unpleasant to the ears of the well-fed and easy living, but truth nevertheless, painted with a bold and masterly hand. It is the critic’s way to call poems of this kind passionate unreasonableness, while an irregular ode to a cat or a ballade of the shepherdess is filled with passionate reasonableness. All which proves that these amusing gentlemen are unconsciously sitting by the volcano’s side. They have eyes and they see not; they have ears and they hear not. The prophetic voice of the poets who will sing from their inner seeing, caring not whether the age listens or hurries on, is lost on these so-called literary interpreters. The tocsin blast dies on the breeze, or speaks to a few lonely thinkers who catch its notes for future warning; the reed’s soft sensuous music is hugged and repeated by the critics and the commonplace. When the lava tumbles forth, then the singer whose songs were a part of him, passionate, conceived in the white heat of truth, may have the diviner’s crown. The critics and commonplace, in their suffering, remember the warning in these burning lines:

“There’s a serf whose chains are of paper; there’s a king with
a parchment crown,
There are robber knights and brigands in factory, field and town;
But the vassal pays his tribute to a lord of wage rent;
And the baron’s toll is Shylock’s, with a flesh and blood per cent.

“The seamstress bends to her labor all night in a narrow room,
The child, defrauded of childhood, tiptoes all day at the loom,
The soul must starve, for the body can barely on husks be fed;
And the loaded dice of a gambler settle the price of bread.

“Ye have shorn and bound the Samson, and robbed him of learning’s
light;
But his sluggish brain is moving, his sinews have all their might,
Look well to your gates of Gaza, your privilege, pride and caste!
The Giant is blind and thinking, and his locks are growing fast.”

“Netchaieff” and “For the People” are poems with a meaning. Their author is a thinker, a keen student of the social problems that convulse our every-day life. He walks the city’s streets, and sees sights and hears ominous murmuring. He uses the poet’s right to translate these scenes and sights into his own impassioned verse. This done, his duty done. The Creator must give brains to the reader. If that has been done, the poet’s lines will fall fresh and thought-provoking on his ears. It will take him from Mittens, Marjorie’s Kisses, April Maids and the school of fantastic littleness, to man’s inhumanity to man, the burning wrong of our day. An Adirondack climb, but then the point of view repays the exertion. It is generally written that the author of Songs and Satires is a comic poet. A half-way truth is expressed. If by comic is meant humor, yes; all poets who are worth looking into have in a greater or less degree that precious gift. It is a distinct gain if the author is an artist and knows how to use it, dangerous to the commonplace, who put it on with a white-wash brush. It is a nice line that divides humor from buffoonery. Our author is a humorist of that school whose genius has been used to alleviate human suffering. Its shafts are not forged by the hammer of spleen on the anvil of malice, but the workmanship of love mourning for misery. His spirit is akin to Hood’s. His touch is light, but his poniard is a Damascene blade well pointed. Cant has no foil to set it off. “A Concord Love Song” is a charming bit of satire. I can well remember the effect it had on a teacher of mine, a proud sage of that school of word-twisting and transcendental gush. He sniffed and pawed viciously, a sure sign that the poet’s dart was safely lodged in the bull’s eye. Those who have, as a sleep seducer, read some of the Concord fraternity’s vapid musings on the pensive Here and the doubtful Yonder, will deliciously relish such lines as these:

“Ah, the joyless fleeting
Of our primal meeting,
And the fateful greeting
Of the How and Why!
Ah, the Thingness flying
From the Hereness, sighing
For a love undying
That fain would die.

“Ah, the Ifness sadd’ning,
The Whichness madd’ning,
And the But ungladd’ning
That lie behind!
When the signless token
Of love is broken
In the speech unspoken,
Of mind to mind.”

It is to his later and serious poems that the critic must go to find the poet at his best. “At Sea” is a poem with a memory, inasmuch as it is the “embodiment of as beautiful a story of brotherly love as the world makes record.” The poet’s brother, Mr. John Roche, pay-clerk in the United States Navy, died a hero’s death in the Samoan disaster of March, 1889. Doubtless it was from this loved brother that the poet took his love for the sea, and the gallant deeds of our young navy. Here he is in his own field. “The Fight of the Armstrong Privateer” shows genuine inspiration. It has color and passion. The reader feels the swing of the graphic lines and a quickness in his own blood, while the tale of daring rapidly and gracefully unfolds itself.

James Jeffrey Roche was born at Mount Mellick, Queens county, Ireland, forty-six years ago. His father was a schoolmaster, and to him the poet is indebted for his early education. At a suitable age he entered St. Dunstan’s College, Charlottetown, Prince Edward’s Island, the family having emigrated there in the poet’s infancy. Here he finished his classics and showed his literary bent by the publishing of a college journal. Having the valedictory assigned to him, he hopelessly broke down. The present year he returned to St. Dunstan’s the orator of Commencement day, as he wittily remarked, to finish the valedictory that had overtaxed his strength as a small boy. After leaving college the poet came to Boston, entered commercial life, remaining in that hardly genial business for sixteen years. During these years his pen was busy at the real vocation of his life. He was for several years the Boston correspondent of the _Detroit Free Press_, and had been long an editorial contributor to the _Pilot_, before he took the position of assistant editor on it, in 1883. As a journalist Mr. Roche has few equals. His keen mind easily grapples the questions of the day, while his good sense in their discussion never deserts him. In a few lines he goes to the core. If his trenchant sarcasm punctures the bubble, his humor will not fail to make it ridiculous. It is not the windy editorial in our day that tortures the quacks, but the bright, pointed dart of a paragraph. It is so easy to remember, may be stored in the reader’s brain so readily, and used with deadly effect at any moment. A writer who knows him well has this to say: “As a journalist he combines two qualities not often found together, discretion and brilliancy. The former quality was well exemplified in his editorial course during the recent crisis in the history of the Irish National movement. He handles political topics ably, and in the treatment of the still broader social and economic questions, writes with the strength and spirit worthy of the associate and successor of that apostle of human liberty and human brotherhood, John Boyle O’Reilly.”

In truth, the one thing most essentially felt in this writer, whether in prose or poetry, is his sanity. There is no buncombe in the former, no mawkishness nor pedantic prettiness in the latter. His genius has no pose. So much the better for his fame and future. Mr. Roche’s prose works are: “The Story of the Filibusters,” a subject dear to a poet’s heart, and the “Life of John Boyle O’Reilly,” his chief and friend. This volume was the work of ten weeks, and that in the hours free from his editorial charge. It was a feat that few men could so successfully achieve. It had to be done. No sacrifice was too great for Roche to make for his dead friend. That his health did not give way after the sleeplessness, work and worry of those ten weeks, is the wonder of those who stood near to him. Despite the limited time allowed to Mr. Roche, his biography shows few signs of haste. It is well and interestingly written, a lasting memorial and a deep tribute of affection to one of the most lovable characters of the century. O’Reilly rises from this book as he was. Friendship, while giving what was his due, restrains all affections that might mar the truth of the portrait. His stature was felt to be large enough, without any additions that crumble to time.

There are those of us who hope that the poet, with greater leisure, will give to O’Reilly’s race a monograph to be treasured and read by each household, a monograph where the best in O’Reilly’s character shall be emphasized, and so lovingly set that those who read shall take heed and learn, while blessing him who gave the setting. The book as it is costs too much and is hardly compact enough for those who need the strong lessons of such a life as O’Reilly’s. In a smaller compass and at less cost, done in that delightful way so thoroughly shown in his art of paragraphing, the little book would be a guide-post to many a struggling lad and lass. And to the young of our race must we look and to the exiled part for the full flowering. As the poet, so is the man, cheery, unaffected, kindly and man-loving. He has no airs, lacks the melodramatic of the airy-fairy school. He does not pretend that the gift of prophecy is his, nor hint that it sleeps amid verbal ingenuities. He has a song to sing, a tale to tell, and he does it with all the craft that is in him. In person Mr. Roche is of the medium height, well-built, rather dark complexioned, with abundant jet-black hair and brilliant hazel eyes.

In concluding this sketch of a genuine man and true poet, I am tempted to quote the little poem he so graciously wrote in the fly-leaf of his “Songs and Satires:”

“They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone;
The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own;
The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone,
Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her,
Ye left her there alone!

“My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain;
The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the main;
But lo! a light is breaking, of hope for thee again;
’Tis Perseus’ sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming,
Across the Western main.
O Ireland! O my country! he comes to break thy chain.”

GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.

In the footsore journey through Mexico, when dinner gladdened our vision, poor Read would solemnly remark, “dinners are reverent things.” Society accepted this definition. I use society in the sense that Emerson would. “When one meets his mate,” writes the Concord sage, “society begins.” Read was mine, and to-day his quaint remark haunts me with melancholy force. Thoughts of a dinner with the subject of this sketch, George Parsons Lathrop, and one whose fair and forceful life has been quenched, flit through my mind. It was but yesterday that I bade the gentle scholar farewell, unconsciously a long farewell, for Azarias has fled from the haunts of mortality.

“This is the burden of the heart,
The burden that it always bore;
We live to love, we meet to part,
And part to meet on earth no more.”

Colonel Johnson had read one of his charming essays. Brother Azarias and George Parsons Lathrop had listened with rapt attention to the most loveable writer of the New South. After the lecture I was asked to join them, for, as the author of Lucille asks, “where is the man that can live without dining?” That dinner, now that one lies dead, enters my memory as reverent and makes of Read’s remark a truth. Men may or may not appear best at dinner. Circumstances lord over most dinners. As it was the only opportunity I had to snap my kodak, you must accept my picture or seek a better artist. Kodak-pictures, when taken by amateurs, are generally blurred. And now to mine.

A man of medium height, strongly built, broad shouldered, the whole frame betokening agility; face somewhat rounded giving it a pleasant plumpness, with eyes quick, nervous and snappy, lighting up a more than ordinary dark complexion—such is Parsons Lathrop, as caught by my camera. His voice was soft, clear as a bell-note, and, when heard in a lecture hall, charming; a slight hesitancy but adds to the pleasure of the listener. In reading he affects none of the dramatic poses and Delsarte movements that makes unconscious comedians of our tragic-readers. It is pleasant to listen to such a man, having no fear that in some moving passage, carried away by some quasi-involuntary elocutionary movement, he might find himself a wreck among the audience. The lines of Wordsworth are an apt description of him:

“Yet he was a man
Whom no one could have passed without remark,
Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs,
And his whole figure, breathed intelligence.”

Mr. Lathrop was born in Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, August 25, 1851. It was a fit place for a poet’s birthplace, “those gardens in perfect bloom, girded about with creaming waves.” He came of Puritan stock, the founder of his family being the Rev. John Lathrop, a Separatist minister, who came to Massachusetts in 1634. Some of his kinsmen have borne a noble part in the creation of an American literature, notably the historian of the Dutch and the genial autocrat, Wendell Holmes. His primary education was had in the public schools of New York; from thence he went to Dresden, Germany, returning in 1870 to study law at Columbia College. Law was little to his liking. The dry and musty tomes, wherein is written some truth and not a little error, sanctioned by one generation of wiseacres to be whittled past recognition by another generation of the same species, could hardly hope to hold in thraldom a mind that had from boyhood browsed in the royal demesne of literature. Law and literature, despite the smart sayings of a few will not run in the same rut. In abandoning law for literature, he but followed the law of his being. What law lost literature gained. On a trip abroad a year later he met Rose Hawthorne, the second daughter of the great Nathaniel, wooed, and won her. This marriage was by far the happiest event in his life, the crowning glory of his manhood, a fountain of bliss to sustain his after life. Years later, in a little poem entitled, “Love that Lives,” referring to the woman that was his all, he addresses her in words that needed no coaxing by the muses, but had long been distilled by his heart, ready for his pen to give them a setting and larger life.

“Dear face—bright, glinting hair—
Dear life, whose heart is mine—
The thought of you is prayer,
The love of you divine.

In starlight, or in rain;
In the sunset’s shrouded glow;
Ever, with joy or pain,
To you my quick thoughts go.”

And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is the

“Love that lives;
Its spring-time blossoms blow
’Mid the fruit that autumn gives;
And its life outlasts the snow.”

In 1875 he became assistant editor of that staid and stately magazine the _Atlantic Monthly_, thereby adding to his fame, while it brought him into intimate relationship with the best current thought of the time. Few American literary men have not, at some time of their career, been closely allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has been no exception. For two years, from ’77 to ’79, his brilliant pen guided the destinies of the _Boston Courier_. In 1879 he purchased Hawthorne’s old home, “The Wayside,” in Concord, Mass., making it his home until his removal to New York in 1883. His present residence is at New London, Conn., where a beautiful home, with its every nook consecrated to books and paintings, tells of an ideal literary life and companionship. Mr. Lathrop’s genius is many sided. This is often a sign of strength. Men, says a recent critic, with a great and vague sense of power in them are always doubtful whether they have reached the limits of that power, and naturally incline to test this in the field in which they feel they have fewer rather than more numerous auguries of success. Into many fields this brilliant writer has gone, and with success. In some he has sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. He was a pioneer in that movement which rightfully held that an author had something to do with his brain-work. It seems strange that in this nineteenth century such a proposition should demand a defender. Sanity, however, is not so widespread as the optimists tell. The contention of those that denied copyright was, “Ideas are common property.” So they are, says our author, but granting this, don’t think you have bagged your game? How about the form in which those ideas are presented? Is not the author’s own work, wrought out with toil, sweat and privation—is not the labor bestowed upon that form as worthy of proper wage as the manual skill devoted to the making of a jumping jack? Yet no one has denied that jumping-jacks must be paid for. This was sound reasoning and would have had immediate effect, had Congress possessed a ha’penny worth of logic. As it was, years were wasted agitating for a self-evident right, men’s energies spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly given.

In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed, that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present, and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as American art.

It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders. This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense. The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our _fin de siècle_ novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say; none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,” “Dreams and Days,” a critic writes:

“There are poems in tenderer vein which appeal to many hearts, and others wrought out of the joys and sorrows of the poet’s own life, which draw hearts to him, as “May Rose” and the “Child’s Wish Granted” and “The Flown Soul,” the last two referring to his only son, whose death in early childhood has been the supreme grief of his life. The same critic notes the exquisite purity and delicacy of these poems, and that “in a day when the delusion is unfortunately widespread that these cannot co-exist with poetic fervor and strength.”

In March of 1891 Mr. Lathrop, after weary years of aimless wandering in the barren fields of sectarianism found, as Newman and Brownson had found, that peace which a warring world cannot give, in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Where Emerson halted, shackled by Puritanism and its traditional prejudice towards Catholicism, Lathrop, as Brownson, in quest of new worlds of thought, critically examined the old church and her teachings, finding therein the truth that makes men free. This step of Lathrop’s, inexplicable to many of his friends, is explained in his own way, in the manly letter that concludes this sketch. Such a letter must, by its truthfulness, have held his friends. “May we not,” says Kegan Paul, “carry with us loving and tender memories of men from whom we learn much, even while we differ and criticise?”

“Humanly speaking, I entered into Catholicity as a result of long thought and meditation upon religion, continuing through a number of years. But there must have been a deeper force at work, that of the Holy Spirit, by means of what we call grace, for a longer time than I suspected. Certainly I was not attracted by ‘the fascinations of Rome,’ that are so glibly talked about, but which no one has ever been able to define to me. Perhaps those that use the phrase refer to the outward symbols of ritual, that are simply the expressive adornment of the inner meaning—the flower of it. I, at any rate, never went to Mass but once with any comprehension of it, before my conversion, and had seldom even witnessed Catholic services anywhere; although now, with knowledge and experience, I recognize the Mass—which even that arch, unorthodox author, Thomas Carlyle, called ‘the only genuine thing of our times’—as the greatest action in the world. Many Catholics had been known to me, of varying merit; and some of them were valued friends. But none of these ever urged or advised or even hinted that I should come into the Church. The best of them had (as large numbers of my fellow-Catholics have to-day) that same modesty and reverence toward the sacred mysteries that caused the early Christians also to be slow in leading catechumens—or those not yet fully prepared for belief—into the great truths of faith. My observations of life, however, increasingly convinced me that a vital, central, unchanging principle in religion was necessary, together with one great association of Christians in place of endless divisions—if the promise made to men was to be fulfilled, or really had been fulfilled. When I began to ask questions, I found Catholics quite ready to answer everything with entire straightforwardness, gentle good-will, yet firmness. Neither they nor the Church evaded anything. They presented and defended the teaching of Christ in its entirety, unexaggerated and undiminished; the complete faith, without haggling or qualification or that queer, loose assent to every sort of individual exception and denial that is allowed in other organizations. I may say here, too, that the Church, instead of being narrow or pitiless toward those not of her communion, as she is often mistakenly said to be, is the most comprehensive of all in her interpretation of God’s mercy as well as of his justice. And, instead of slighting the Bible, she uses it more incessantly than any of the Protestant bodies; at the same time shedding upon it a clear, deep light that is the only one that ever enabled me to see its full meaning and coherence. The fact is, those outside of the Church nowadays are engaged in talking so noisily and at such a rate, on their own hook, that they seldom pause to hear what the Church really says, or to understand what she is. Once convinced of the true faith, intellectually and spiritually, I could not let anything stand in the way of affirming my loyalty to it.”

REV. BROTHER AZARIAS.

It is delicious in this age of hurried bookmaking, to run across a thinker. It gives one the same kind of sensation that comes to the sportsman, when a monarch of the glen crosses his path. Bookmakers are as many as leaves of the Adirondacks after the hasty gallop of a mountain storm; thinkers are scarce. When, then, amid the leafy mass, one discovers the rare bird hiding from vulgar gaze, an irresistible desire to find his lurking place seizes the observer. This lurking place may be old to many; it was only the other day that I discovered it,—when a friend placed in my hands “Phases of Thought and Criticism,” by Brother Azarias. This book, the sale of which has been greater in England than on this side of the water, is one of suggestive criticism—a criticism founded on faith. The author holds with another thinker, that “Religion is man’s first and deepest concern. To be indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.” Each chapter of his book expresses a distinct social and intellectual force. Each embodies a verifying ideal; for, continues the author, “the criticism that busies itself with the literary form is superficial, for food it gives husks.”

While the author will not concede that mere literary form is the all in all that our modern masters claim, yet he would not be found in the ranks of M. de Bonniers, who declares that an author need not trouble himself about his grammar; let him have original ideas and a certain style, and the rest is of no consequence. The author of “Phases of Thought,” believes first in the possession of ideas, for without them an author is a sorry spectacle. He also believes that an attractive style will materially aid in the diffusion of these ideas. Many good books fall still-born from the press, for no other reasons than their slovenly style. Readers now-a-days will not plod along poor roads, when a turnpike leads to the same destination. The grammar marks the parting of ways. Brother Azarias rightfully holds that good grammar is an essential part of every great writer’s style. Classics are so, by correct grammar as well as by original ideas. This easy dictum of the slipshod writers—that if an idea takes you off your feet you must not trouble yourself about the grammar that wraps it, is but a specious pleading for their ignorance of what they pretend to despise.

The great difference between this book and the many on similar subjects is in the manner of treatment. It starts from a solid basis; that basis the creed of the Catholic Church. The superstructure of lofty thought reared on this basis is in a style at once pellucid and crisp. The author is not only a thinker rare and original; he is a scholar broad and masterly.

Believing that his Church holds the keys of the “kingdom come,” and as a consequence, a key to all problems moral and social that can move modern society, he grapples with them, after the manner of a knight of old, courteously but convincingly. His teaching is that, outside the bosom of the Catholic Church jostle the warring elements of confusion and uncertainty. In her fold can man find that rest, that sweet peace promised by the Redeemer. Her philosophy is the wisdom worth cherishing, the curing balm that philosophers vainly seek outside her pale. To the weary and thought-stricken would this great writer bring his often and beautifully taught lesson, that the things of this world are not the puppets of chance, nor lots of the pantheistic whole, but parts of a well-ordered system, governed by a paternal being, whom we, His children, address in that touching prayer, “Father, who art in Heaven.” From that Father came a Son, not mere man, not only a great prophet, not only a law-giver, but the true Son of God, equal to the Father, from all eternity, whose mission was, to teach all men that would listen, the way that leads to light. That this identical mission is, and will be continued to the consummation of the ages by the Catholic Church. That in the truth of these things, all men, who lovingly seek, will be confirmed, not that mere intellect alone could be the harbinger of such truths, for, as he has so well put it:—“Human reason and human knowledge, whether considered individually or collectively in the race are limited to the natural. Knowledge of the supernatural can come only from a Divine Teacher.”

One may be convinced of every truth of revealed religion, and yet not possess the gift of faith. That gift is purely gratuitous. If, however, the seeker humbly and honestly desires the acquisition of these truths, and knocks, the door of the chamber of truth shall be opened unto him, for this has the Saviour promised. That door once opened, the Spirit of God breathes on the seeker, it opens the eyes of the soul, it reveals beyond all power of doubt or cavil, or contradiction, the supernatural as a fact, solemn, universal, constant throughout the vicissitudes of the age. While the author fashions these lofty truths on the anvil of modern scholarship, the reader finds himself, like the school children, in Longfellow’s poem, looking in through the artist’s open door full of admiration, fascinated by burning sparks. Pages have been written about the ideal, defining it, in verbiage fatiguing and elusive.

It is a trick of pretended scholarship, to hide thought with massive word-boulders. What a difference in the process of this rare scholar?

A flying spark from his anvil lights up the dullest intellect. It is a stimulus to the weary brain, after wading through essays as to what constitutes an ideal, to have the gentle scholar, across the blazing pine logs, on a winter’s night, say: “A genius conceives and expresses a great thought. The conception so expressed delights. It enters men’s souls; it compels their admiration. They applaud and are rejoiced that another masterpiece has been brought into existence to grace the world of art and letters. The genius alone is dissatisfied. Where others see perfection, he perceives something unexpressed; beyond the reach of his art. Try as best he may, he cannot attain that indefinable something. Deep in his inner consciousness he sees a type so grand and perfect that his beautiful production appears to him but a faint and marred copy of that original. That original is the ideal; and the ideal it is that appeals to the aesthetic and calls forth men’s admiration.” What a divining power has this student, in plummeting the vagaries of modern culture!

“Every school of philosophy has its disciples, who repeat the sayings of their masters with implicit confidence, without ever stopping to question the principles from which those sayings arise or the results to which they lead.” These chattering disciples will affect to sneer at the Christian belief, while they lowly sit at the feet of one of their mud gods singing “thou art the infallible one.” They will not question their position simply because “these systems are accepted not so much for truth’s sake as because they are the intellectual fashions of the day.” Such men change their philosophy as quickly as a Parisian dressmaker his styles. It may yet be shown by some mighty Teuton that vagaries in philosophy and dress are closely allied, and that the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer is responsible for the coming of crinoline. What a delightful thrust at that school of criticism that singles out an author or a book as the very acme of perfection, seeing wisdom in absurdities and truth in commonplace fiction, is given in these lines: “Paint a daub and call it a Turner, and forthwith these critics will trace in it strokes of genius.” With a twinkle in his eye he asks, “Think you they understand the real principles of art criticism?” You will be easily able to answer that question when you have mastered this pithy definition of true criticism, be it of literature or of art, “that it is all-embracing.” It has no antagonism to science so long as she travels in her rightful domain. When “science has her superstitions and her romancings as unreal and shadowy as those of the most ephemeral literature, then it is the duty of criticism to administer the medicine of truth and purge the wayward jade of her humors.”

To such a mind as that of the author of “Phases of Thought,” with its thorough knowledge of the art of criticism and its perfect equipment, the separating of the chaff from the meal of an author becomes not only a pleasure but a duty. This is best seen by a perusal of Chapter III, dealing with Emerson and Newman as types. With a few masterly strokes the real Emerson, not the phantom or brain figment of Burroughs and Woodberry and the long line of fad disciples, passes before us. Not an inch is taken from his stature. His intellectual beauties and defects, so strongly drawn, but confirm the reader in the truth of the portraiture. One catches not only a glimpse of the man, but the springs of his soul-struggles. Emerson in his hungry quest for intellectual food, ranged through the philosophies of the east and west, purposely ignoring that of the Catholic Church. This sin cost him whole worlds of thought hidden from his vision. Newman had the same hunger to appease, but where Emerson turned away Newman, ever in search for truth, kept on, and found it in the Catholic Church. The analysis of these two minds is done in a masterly way. Azarias has no prejudices. If he puts his fingers on defects and descants on their nature and treatment, he will, no less, point out beauties and lovingly linger among them. He is a knight in the cause of truth, and would not herd with the carping critics. He will tell you that Emerson’s mind was like an Æolian harp. “It was awake to the most delicate impressions, and at every breath of thought it gave out a music all its own,” and that the reading of him with understanding “is a mental tonic bracing for the cultured intellect as is Alpine air for the mountaineer.” The pages of this book teem with thought clothed in language whose sparkling beauty is all the author’s own. From such a book it is difficult to select. Emerson has well said, “No one can select the beautiful passages of another for you. Do your own quarrying.” I abide by this quotation, and should ask every lover of the beautiful and true to buy this fecund book.

Patrick Francis Mullaney, better known as Brother Azarias, was born in Killenaule County, Tipperary, Ireland, June 29th, 1847. Like the majority of eminent men that his country has given birth to, he came of its noble peasantry. The old tale was here enacted. The parents left the land of their birth in search of a home in our better land. This found, Azarias joined them. At the age of fifteen he joined the Christian Brothers. That great Order gave free scope to his fine abilities. In 1866 he was chosen professor of mathematics and English literature at Rock Hill College, Maryland. He continued in this position for ten years. At the expiration of his professorship he travelled a year through Europe, collecting materials and writing his “Development of Old English Thought.” On his return he became president of Rock Hill College, holding that position until recalled to Paris by his Superior in 1866. After an absence of three years Brother Azarias returned to the States as professor of English literature at the De La Salle Institute, New York. This is not only an important position, but it gives leisure, and that ready access to the great libraries, so prized by literary men.

WOMEN.

KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY.

“Next room to that of Roche’s,” said the dear O’Reilly, showing me his nest of poets, “is a gentle poetess.”