Chapter IV: The Explanation (1)

It was natural that those good ecclesiastics who composed the chapter of St. Mark's should feel an interest in their youthful acquaintance. His having accidentally, as it seemed, but really providentially, strolled into their church at such a time, with so singular a bond of sympathy with its sacred offices that day, necessarily drew them in kindness toward him. His ingenuous piety and vivid faith gained their hearts.

In the conversation which followed, it was discovered that all his tastes and feelings led him to love and visit the religious monuments of Rome; but that he had no guide or companion to make his wanderings among them as useful and agreeable as they might be made. It was good-naturedly and kindly suggested to him to come from time to time to the church, when some one of the canons would take him with him on his _ventidue ore_ walk after vespers, and act the _cicerone_ to him, if they should visit some interesting religious object. This offer he readily accepted, and the intelligent youth and his reverend guides enjoyed pleasant afternoons together. At last one pleasanter than all occurred, when in company with Monsignor B.

Their ramble that evening led them out of the Porta Portuensis, among the hills of Monte Verde, between it and the gate of St. Pancratius-- perhaps for the purpose of visiting that interesting basilica. Be it as it may, suddenly, while traversing a vineyard, the young man stopped.

"Here," he exclaimed, "on this very spot, I was standing when my miraculous deliverance took place."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite. If I lived a hundred years, I could never forget it. It is the very spot."

"Then stand still a moment," rejoined the prelate; "we are very near the entrance to the cemetery of Pontianus. I wish to measure the distance."

He did so by pacing it.

"Now," he said, "come down into the catacomb, and observe the direction from where you stand to the door." The key was soon procured.

They accordingly went down, proceeded as near as they could judge toward the point marked over-head, measured the distance paced above, and found themselves standing before the memorial of Sts. Abdon and Sennen.

"There," said the canon to his young friend; "you did not know that, when you were invoking your holy patrons, you were standing immediately over their tomb."

The young officer's emotion may be better conceived than described on discovering this new and unexpected coincidence in the history of his successful application to the intercession of ancient saints.

SANCTI ABDON ET SENNEN, ORATE PRO NOBIS.

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{24}

From The Lamp.

A PILGRIMAGE TO ARS.

I went to Lyons for the express purpose of visiting the tomb of the Cure of Ars; for I knew the village of Ars was not very far from that city, though I had but a vague idea as to where it was situated or how it was to be reached. I trusted, however, to obtaining all needful information from the people at the hotel where I was to pass the night; and I was not mistaken in my expectations; but I must confess, to my sorrow, that I felt for a moment a very English sort of shamefacedness about making the inquiry. Put to the waiter of an English hotel, such a question would simply have produced a stare of astonishment or a smile of pity. A visit to the tomb of the Duke of Wellington at St. Paul's, or a descent into kingly vaults for the wise purpose of beholding Prince Albert's coffin, with its wreaths of flowers laid there by royal and loving hands these things he would have sympathized with and understood. But a pilgrimage to the last resting-place of a man who, even admitting he were at that moment a saint in heaven, had been but a simple parish-priest upon earth, would have been a proceeding utterly beyond his capacity to comprehend, and he would undoubtedly have pronounced it either an act of insanity or one of superstition, or something partaking of the nature of the two. I forgot, for a moment, that I was in a Catholic country, and inquired my way to Ars with an uncomfortable expectation of a sneering answer in return. Once, however, that the question was fairly put, there was nothing left for me but to be ashamed of my own misgivings.

"Madame wished to visit the tomb of the sainted Cure?--_mais oui_. It was the easiest thing in the world. Only an hour's railway from Lyons to Villefranche; and an omnibus at the latter station, which had been established for the express purpose of accommodating the pilgrims, who still flocked to Ars from every quarter of the Catholic world."

I listened, and my way seemed suddenly to become smooth before me. Later on in the evening, I found that the housemaid of the hotel had been there often; and two or three times at least during the lifetime of the Cure. I asked her for what purpose she had gone there; whether to be cured of bodily ailments or to consult him on spiritual matters? "For neither one nor the other," she answered, with great simplicity; "but she had had a great grief, and her mother had taken her to him to be comforted." There was something to me singularly lovely in this answer, and in the insight which it gave me into the nature of that mission, so human, and yet so divine, which the Cure had accomplished in his lifetime. God had placed him there, like another John the Baptist, to announce penance to the world. He preached to thousands--he converted thousands--he penetrated into the hidden consciences of thousands, and laid his finger, as if by intuition, upon the hidden sore that kept the soul from God. Men, great by wealth and station, came to him and laid their burden of sin and misery at his feet. Men, greater still by intellect, and prouder and more difficult of conversion (as sins of the intellect ever make men), left his presence simple, loving, and believing as little children. For these he had lightning glances and words of fire; these by turns he reprimanded, exhorted, and encouraged; but when the weak and sorrowful of God's flock came to him, he paused in his apostolic task to weep over them and console them. And so it was with {25} Jesus. The great and wealthy of the earth came to him for relief, and he never refused their prayers; but how many instances do we find in the gospel of the gift of health bestowed, unasked and unexpected, upon some poor wanderer by the wayside, or the yet greater boon of comfort given to some poor suffering heart, for no other reason that we know of than that it suffered and had need of comfort! The cripple by the pool of Bethsaida received his cure at the very moment when he was heartsick with hope deferred at finding no man to carry him down to the waters; and the widow of Nain found her son suddenly restored to life because, as the gospel expressly tells us, he was "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow."

The heart of the Cure of Ars seems to have been only less tender than that of his divine Master; and in the midst of the sublime occupation of converting souls to God, he never disdained the humble task of healing the stricken spirit, and leading it to peace and joy.

"My husband died suddenly," the young woman went on to say, in answer to my further questions; "and from affluence I found myself at once reduced to poverty. I was stunned by the blow; but my mother took me to the cure; and almost before he had said a word, I felt not only consoled, but satisfied with the lot which God had assigned me." And so indeed she must have been. When I saw her, she was still poor, and earning her bread by the worst of all servitude, the daily and nightly servitude of a crowded inn; but gentle, placid, and smiling, as became one who had seen and been comforted by a saint. She evidently felt that she had been permitted to approach very near to God in the person of God's servant, and every word she uttered was so full of love and confidence in the sainted cure that it increased (if that were possible) my desire to kneel at his tomb, since the happiness of approaching his living person had been denied me.

The next morning I set off for Villefranche. It is on the direct line to Paris, and at about an hour's railroad journey from Lyons. When I reached it, I found three omnibuses waiting at the station, and I believe they were all there for the sole purpose of conveying pilgrims to Ars. One of the conductors tried every mode of persuasion--and there are not a few in the vocabulary of a Frenchman--to inveigle me into his omnibus. "I should be at Ars in half an hour, and could return at two, three, four o'clock--in short, at any hour of the night or day that might please me best." It was with some difficulty I resisted the torrent of eloquence he poured out upon me; but, in the first place, I felt that he was promising what he himself would have called "the impossible," since a public conveyance must necessarily regulate its movements by the wishes of the majority of its passengers; and in the next, I had a very strong desire to be alone in body as well as in mind during the few hours that I was to spend at Ars.

At last I found an omnibus destined solely for visitors to Villefranche itself, and the conductor promised that he would provide me a private carriage to Ars if I would consent to drive first to his hotel. Cabaret he might have called it with perfect truth, for cabaret it was, and nothing more--a regular French specimen of the article, with a great public kitchen, where half the workmen of the town assembled for their meals, and a small cupboard sort of closet opening into it for the accommodation of more aristocratic guests. Into this, _bon gre, mal gre_, they wished to thrust me, but I violently repelled the threatened honor, and with some difficulty carrying my point, succeeded in being permitted to remain in the larger and cooler space of the open kitchen until my promised vehicle should appear. It came at last, a sort of half-cab, half-gig, without a hood, but with a curiously contrived harness of loose ropes, and looking altogether {26} dangerously likely to come to pieces on the road. Luckily, I am not naturally nervous in such matters, and, consoling myself with the thought that if we did get into grief the "_bon cure_" was bound to come to my assistance, seeing I had incurred it solely for the sake of visiting his tomb, I was soon settled as comfortably as circumstances would permit, and we set off at a brisk pace.

The country around Villefranche is truly neither pretty nor picturesque; and though we were not really an hour on the road, the drive seemed tedious. Our Jehu also, as it turned out, had never been at Ars before; so that he had not only to stop more than once to inquire the way, but actually contrived at the very last to miss it. He soon discovered the mistake, however, and retracing his steps, a very few minutes brought us to the spot where the saint had lived forty years, and where he now sleeps in death. His house stands beside the church, but a little in the rear, so it does not immediately catch the eye; and the church, where his real life was spent, is separated from the road by a small enclosure, railed off, and approached by a few steps. We looked around for some person to conduct us, but there was no one to be seen; so, after a moment's hesitation, we ascended the steps and entered the church. If you wish to know what kind of church it is, I cannot tell you. I do not know, in fact, whether it is Greek or Gothic, or of no particular architecture at all; I do not know even if it is in good taste or in bad taste. The soul was so filled with a sense of the presence of the dead saint that it left no room for the outer sense to take note of the accidents amid which he had lived. There are two or three small chapels--a Lady chapel, one dedicated to the Sacred Heart, and another to St. John the Baptist. There is also the chapel of St. Philomena, with a large lifelike image of the "_bonne petite sainte_" to whom he loved to attribute every miracle charity compelled him to perform; and there is the confessional, where for forty years he worked far greater wonders on the soul than any of the more obvious ones he accomplished on the body. All, or most of all, this I saw in a vague sort of way, as one who saw not; but the whole church was filled with such an aroma of holiness, there was such a sense of the actual presence of the man who had converted it into a very tabernacle in the wilderness--a true Holy of Holies, where, in the midst of infidel France, God had descended and conversed almost visibly with his people--that I had neither the will nor the power to condescend to particulars, and examine it in detail.

My one thought as I entered the church was, to go and pray upon his tomb; but in the first moment of doubt and confusion I could not remember, if indeed I had been told, the exact spot where he was buried. The chapel of St. Philomena was the first to attract my notice, and feeling that I could not be far wrong while keeping close to his dear little patroness, I knelt down there to collect my ideas.

The stillness of the church made itself felt. There were indeed many persons praying in it, but they prayed in that profound silence which spoke to the heart, and penetrated it in a way no words could have ever done.

I was thirsting, however, to approach the tomb of the saint, and at last ventured to whisper the question to a person near me. She pointed to a large black slab nearly in the centre of the church, and told me that he lay beneath it. Yes, he was there, in the very midst of his people, not far from the chapel of St. Philomena, and opposite to the altar whence he had so many thousands of times distributed the bread of life to the famishing souls who, like the multitude of old, had come into the desert, and needed to be fed ere they departed to their homes. Yes, he was there; and with a strange mingling of joy and sorrow in the thought I went and knelt down beside him.

{27}

Had I gone to Ars but a few years before, I might have found him in his living person; might have thrown myself at his feet, and poured out my whole soul before him. Now I knelt indeed beside him, but beside his body only, and the soul that would have addressed itself to mine was far away in the bosom of its God. Humanly speaking, the difference seemed against me, and yet, in a more spiritual point of view, it might perhaps be said to be in my favor.

The graces which he obtained for mortals here he obtained by more than mortal suffering and endurance--by tears, by fastings, and nightly and daily impetrations;--now, with his head resting, like another St. John, on the bosom of his divine Lord, surely he has but to wish in order to draw down whole fountains of love and tenderness on his weeping flock below. And certainly it would seem so; for however numerous the miracles accomplished in his lifetime, they have been multiplied beyond all power of calculation since his death.

Later on in the day, when the present cure showed me a room nearly half full of crutches and other mementos of cures wrought--"These are only the ones left there during his lifetime," he observed, in a tone which told at once how much more numerous were those which cure had made useless to their owners since his death.

I had not been many minutes kneeling before his tomb, when the lady who had pointed it out to me asked if I would like to see the house which he had inhabited in his lifetime. On my answering gladly in the affirmative, she made me follow her through a side-door and across a sort of court to the house inhabited by the present cure. This house had never been the abode of M. Vianney, but had been allotted to the priests who assisted him in his missions. The one which he actually inhabited is now a sort of sanctuary, where every relic and recollection of him is carefully preserved for the veneration of the faithful. We were shown into a sort of _salle a manger_, sufficiently poor to make us feel we were in the habitation of men brought up in the school of a saint, and almost immediately afterward the present cure entered. He had been for many years the zealous assistant of the late cure; and, in trying to give me an idea of the influx of strangers into Ars, he told me that, while M. Vianney spent habitually from fifteen to seventeen hours in the confessional, he and his brother priest were usually occupied at least twelve hours out of the twenty-four in a similar manner. Even this was probably barely sufficient for the wants of the mission, for the number of strangers who came annually to Ars during the latter years of the cure's life was reckoned at about 80,000, and few, if any, of these went away without having made a general confession, either to M. Vianney himself, or, if that were not possible, to one or other of the assisting clergy.

It was pleasant to talk with one who had been living in constant communication with a saint; and I felt as if something of the spirit of M. Vianney himself had taken possession of the good and gentle man with whom I was conversing. Among other things, he told me that the devout wish of the saint had of late years been the erection of a new church to St. Philomena; and he gave me a fac-simile of his handwriting in which he had promised to pray especially for any one aiding him in the work. The surest way, therefore, I should imagine, to interest him in our necessities--now that he is in heaven--would be to aid in the undertaking which he had in mind and heart while yet dwelling on earth. Even in his lifetime there had been a lottery got up for raising funds; and as money is still coming in from all quarters, his wish will doubtless soon be accomplished. I saw a very handsome altar which has been already presented, and which has been put aside in one of the rooms of the cure until the church, for which it is {28} intended, shall have been completed. M. le cure showed me one or two small photographs, which had been taken without his knowledge during the lifetime of the saint; and also a little carved image, which he said was a wonderful likeness, and far better than any of the portraits. Afterward he pointed out another photograph, as large as life, and suspended against the wall, which had been procured after death. It was calm and holy, as the face of a saint in death should be, and I liked it still better in its placid peace than the smile of the living photograph. Even the smile seemed to tell of tears. You know that he who smiles is still doing battle--cheerfully and successfully indeed, but still doing battle with the enemies of his soul; while the grave calmness of the dead face tells you at once that all is over--the fight is fought, the crown is won; eternity has set its seal on the good works of time, and all is safe for ever.

I could have looked at that photograph a long time, and said my prayers before it--it seemed to repose in such an atmosphere of sanctity and peace--but the hours were passing quickly, and there was still much to see and hear concerning the dead saint. I took leave, therefore, of the good priest who had been my cicerone so far, and sought the old housekeeper, who was in readiness to show me the house where M. Vianney had lived. We crossed a sort of court, which led us to a door opposite the church. When this was opened, I found myself in a sort of half-garden, half-yard, in the centre of which the old house was standing.

It is hard to put upon paper the feelings with which a spot the habitation of a saint just dead is visited. The spirit of love and charity and peace which animated the living man still seems brooding over the spot where his life was passed, and you feel intensely that the true beauty of the Lord's house was here, and that this has been the place where his glory hath delighted to dwell. The first room I entered was one in which the crutches left there by invalids had been deposited. It was a sight to see. The crutches were piled as close as they could be against the wall, and yet the room was almost half full. The persons who used those crutches must have been carried hither, lame and suffering, and helpless as young children; and they walked away strong men and cured. Truly "the lame walk and the blind see;" and the Lord hath visited his people in the person of his servant.

My next visit was made to the _salle a manger_, where M. Vianney had always taken the one scanty meal which was his sole support during his twenty-four hours of almost unbroken labor. It was poverty in very deed--poverty plain, unvarnished, and unadorned--such poverty as an Irish cabin might have rivalled, but could scarcely have surpassed. The walls were bare and whitewashed; the roof was merely raftered; and the floor, which had once been paved with large round stones, such as are used for the pavement of a street, was broken here and there into deep holes by the removal of the stones. During his forty years' residence at Ars, M. Vianney had probably never spent a single sou upon any article which could contribute to his own comfort or convenience; and this room bore witness to the fact. How, indeed, should he buy anything for himself, who gave even that which was given to him away, until his best friends grew well-nigh weary of bestowing presents, which they felt would pass almost at the same instant out of his own possession into the hands of any one whom he fancied to be in greater want of them than he was? I stood in that bare and desolate apartment, and felt as if earth and heaven in their widest extremes, their most startling contrasts, were there in type and reality before me. All that earth has of poor and miserable and unsightly was present to the eyes of the body; all that heaven has of bright {29} and beautiful and glorious was just as present, just as visible, to the vision of the soul. It was the very reverse of the fable of the fairy treasures, which vanish into dust when tested by reality. All that you saw was dust and ashes, but dust and ashes which, tried by the touchstone of eternity, would, you knew, prove brighter than the brightest gold, fairer than the fairest silver that earth ever yielded to set in the diadem of her kings! My reflections were cut short by the entrance of one of the priests, who invited us to come up stairs and inspect the vestments which had belonged to the late cure, and which were kept, I think, apart from those in ordinary use in the church. There was a great quantity of them, and they were all in curious contrast with everything else we had seen belonging to M. Vianney. Nothing too good for God; nothing too mean and miserable for himself--that had been the motto of his life; and the worm-eaten furniture of the dining-room, the gold and velvet of the embroidered vestments, alike bore witness to the fidelity with which he had acted on it. The vestments were more than handsome--some of them were magnificent. One set I remember in particular which was very beautiful. It had been given, with canopy for the blessed sacrament and banners for processions, by the present Marquis D'Ars, the chief of that beloved family, who, after the death of Mdlle. D'Ars, became M. Vianney's most efficient aid in all his works of charity. The priest who showed them to us, and who had also been one of the late cure's missionaries, told us that M. Vianney was absolutely enchanted with joy when the vestments arrived, and that he instantly organized an expedition to Lyons in order to express his gratitude at the altar of Notre Dame de Fourriere. The whole parish attended on this occasion. They went down the river in boats provided for the purpose, and with banners flying and music playing, marched in solemn procession through the streets of Lyons, and up the steep sides of Fourriere, until they reached the church of Notre Dame. There the whole multitude fell on their knees, and M. Vianney himself prayed, no doubt long and earnestly, before the miraculous image of Our Lady, seeking through her intercession to obtain some especial favor for the man who, out of his own abundance, had brought gifts of gold and silver to the altar of his God.

I asked the priest for some information about the granary which was said to have been miraculously filled with corn. He told me he had been at Ars at the time, and that there could be no doubt that the granary had been quite empty the night before. It was, I think, a time of scarcity, and the grain had been set aside for the use of the poor. M. Vianney went to bed miserable at the failure of his supplies; but when he visited the granary again early the next morning, he found it full. It was at the top of his own house, I believe, and was kept, of course, carefully locked. Nobody knew how it had been filled, or by whom. In fact, it seemed absolutely impossible that any one could have carted the quantity of grain needed for the purpose and carried it up stairs without being detected in the act. The priest made no comment on the matter; indeed, he seemed anything but inclined to enlarge upon it, though he made no secret of his own opinion as to the miraculous nature of the occurrence. As soon as he had answered my inquiries, he led us to the room which had been the holy cure's own personal apartment. It was, as well as I can remember, the one over the dining-room. No apostle ever lived and died in an abode more entirely destitute of all human riches. It was kept exactly in the same state in which it had been during his lifetime--a few poor-looking books still on the small book-shelf, a wooden table and a chair, and the little bed in the corner, smoothed and laid down, as if only waiting his return from the confessional for the {30} few short hours he gave to slumber--if, indeed, he did give them; for no one ever penetrated into the mystery of those hours, or knew how much of the time set apart apparently for his own repose was dedicated to God, or employed in supplicating God's mercies on his creatures.

The history of that room was the history of the saint. A book-shelf filled with works of piety and devotion; a stove, left doubtless because it had been originally built into the room, but left without use or purpose (for who ever heard of his indulging in a fire?); a table and a chair--that was all; but it was enough, and more than enough, to fill the mind with thought, and to crowd all the memories of that holy life into the few short moments that I knelt there. How often had he come back to that poor apartment, his body exhausted by fasting, and cramped by long confinement in the confessional, and his heart steeped (nay, drowned, as he himself most eloquently expressed it) in bitterness and sorrow by the long histories of sins to which he had been compelled to listen--sins committed against that God whom he loved far more tenderly than he loved himself! How often, in the silence and darkness of the night, has he poured forth his soul, now in tender commiseration over Jesus crucified by shiners, now over the sinners by whom Jesus had been crucified! How often has he (perhaps) called on God to remove him from a world where God was so offended; and yet, moved by the charity of his tender human heart, has besought, almost in the same breath, for the conversion of those sinners whose deeds he was deploring--the cure of their diseases and the removal or consolation of their sorrows! Like a mother who, finding her children at discord, now prays to one to pardon, now to another to submit and be reconciled, so was that loving, pitying heart ever as it were in contradiction with itself--weeping still with Jesus, and yet still pleading for his foes.

The mere action of such thoughts upon the human frame would make continued life a marvel; but when to this long history of mental woe we add the hardships of his material life--the fifteen or seventeen hours passed in the confessional, in heat and cold, in winter as in summer; the one scanty meal taken at mid-day; the four hours of sleep, robbed often and often of half their number for the sake of quiet prayer--when we think of these things, there is surely more of miracle in this life of forty years' duration than in the mere fact that it won miracles at last from heaven, and that God, seeing how faithfully this his servant did his will here on earth, complied in turn with his, and granted his desires.

No one, I think, can visit that spot, or hear the history of that life, as it is told by those who knew him as it were but yesterday, without an increase of love, an accession of faith, a more vivid sense of the presence of God in the midst of his creatures, and a more real comprehension of the extent and meaning of those words, "the communion of saints," which every one repeats in the creed, and yet which few take sufficiently to their heart of hearts to make it really a portion of their spiritual being--a means of working out their own salvation by constant and loving communication with those who have attained to it already. Thousands will seek the living saint for the eloquence of his words, the sublimity, of his counsels, the unction of his consolations; but, once departed out of this life, who visits him in his tomb? who turns to him for aid? who lift their eyes to heaven, to ask for his assistance thence, with the same undoubting confidence with which they would have sought it had he been still in the flesh beside them? In one sense of the word, many; and yet few indeed compared to the number of those to whom "the communion of saints" is an article of faith, or ought at least to be so, in something more than the mere service of the lip. It was amid some such {31} thoughts as these that I left the town of Ars, grieved indeed that I had not seen the holy cure in his lifetime, and yet feeling that, if I had but faith enough, I was in reality rather a gainer than a loser by his death. He who would have prayed for me on earth would now pray for me in heaven. He who would have dived into my conscience and brought its hidden sins to light, would obtain wisdom and grace for another to put his finger on the sore spot and give it healing. He who would perhaps have cured me of my bodily infirmities, could do so (if it were for the good of my soul) not less efficiently now that he was resting on the heart of his divine Lord. God had granted his prayers while he was yet upon earth--a saint indeed, and yet liable at any moment to fall into sin--would he refuse to hear him now that he had received him into his kingdom, and so rendered him for ever incapable of offending? I hoped not, I felt not; and in this certainty I went on my way rejoicing, feeling that it was well for this sinful world that it had yet one more advocate at the throne of its future Judge, and well especially for France that, in this our nineteenth century, she had given a saint to God who would have been the glory of the first. For truly the arm of the Lord is not shortened. What he has done before, he can do again; and, therefore, we need not wonder if the miracles of the Apostles are still renewed at the tomb of this simple and unlettered, priest, who taught their doctrines for forty years in the unknown and far-off village of which Providence had made him pastor.

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From Once A Week.

THE THREE WISHES.

The Eastern origin of this tale seems evident; had it been originally composed in a Northern land, it is probable that the king would have been represented as dethroned by means of bribes obtained from his own treasury. In an Eastern country the story-teller who invented such a just termination of his narrative would, most likely, have experienced the fate intended for his hero, as a warning to others how they suggested such treasonable ideas. Herr Simrock, however, says it is a German tale; but it may have had its origin in the East for all that. Nothing is more difficult, indeed, than to trace a popular tale to its source. Cinderella, for example, belongs to nearly all nations; even among the Chinese, a people so different to all European nations, there is a popular story which reads almost exactly like it. Here is the tale of the Three Wishes.

There was once a wise emperor who made a law that to every stranger who came to his court a fried fish should be served. The servants were directed to take notice if, when the stranger had eaten the fish to the bone on one side, he turned it over and began on the other side. If he did, he was to be immediately seized, and on the third day thereafter he was to be put to death. But, by a great stretch of imperial clemency, the culprit was permitted to utter one wish each day, which the emperor pledged himself to grant, provided it was not to spare his life. Many had already perished in consequence of this edict, when, one day, a count and his young son presented themselves at court. The fish was served as usual, and when the {32} count had removed all the fish from one side, he turned it over, and was about to commence on the other, when he was suddenly seized and thrown into prison, and was told of his approaching doom. Sorrow-stricken, the count's young son besought the emperor to allow him to die in the room of his father; a favor which the monarch was pleased to accord him. The count was accordingly released from prison, and his son was thrown into his cell in his stead. As soon as this had been done, the young man said to his gaolers--"You know I have the right to make three demands before I die; go and tell the emperor to send me his daughter, and a priest to marry us." This first demand was not much to the emperor's taste, nevertheless he felt bound to keep his word, and he therefore complied with the request, to which the princess had no kind of objection. This occurred in the times when kings kept their treasures in a cave, or in a tower set apart for the purpose, like the Emperor of Morocco in these days; and on the second day of his imprisonment the young man demanded the king's treasures. If his first demand was a bold one, the second was not less so; still, an emperor's word is sacred, and having made the promise, he was forced to keep it; and the treasures of gold and silver and jewels were placed at the prisoner's disposal. On getting possession of them, he distributed them profusely among the courtiers, and soon he had made a host of friends by his liberality.

The emperor began now to feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Unable to sleep, he rose early on the third morning and went, with fear in his heart, to the prison to hear what the third wish was to be.

"Now," said he to his prisoner, "tell me what your third demand is, that it may be granted at once, and you may be hung out of hand, for I am tired of your demands."

"Sire," answered his prisoner, "I have but one more favor to request of your majesty, which, when you have granted, I shall die content. It is merely that you will cause the eyes of those who saw my father turn the fish over to be put out."

"Very good," replied the emperor, "your demand is but natural, and springs from a good heart. Let the chamberlain be seized," he continued, turning to his guards.

"I, sire!" cried the chamberlain; "I did not see anything--it was the steward."

"Let the steward be seized, then," said the king.

But the steward protested with tears in his eyes that he had not witnessed anything of what had been reported, and said it was the butler. The butler declared that he had seen nothing of the matter, and that it must have been one of the valets. But they protested that they were utterly ignorant of what had been charged against the count; in short, it turned out that nobody could be found who had seen the count commit the offence, upon which the princess said:

"I appeal to you, my father, as to another Solomon. If nobody saw the offence committed, the count cannot be guilty, and my husband is innocent."

The emperor frowned, and forthwith the courtiers began to murmur; then he smiled, and immediately their visages became radiant.

"Let it be so," said his majesty; "let him live, though I have put many a man to death for a lighter offence than his. But if he is not hung, he is married. Justice has been done."

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------

From The Month.

EX HUMO.

BY BARRY CORNWALL.

Should you dream ever of the days departed--
Of youth and morning, no more to return--
Forget not me, so fond and passionate-hearted;
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.

There, where the fretful lake in stormy weather
Comes circling round the reddening churchyard pines,
Rest, and call back the hours we lost together,
Talking of hope, and soaring
Beyond poor earth's confines.

If, for those heavenly dreams too dimly sighted,
You became false--why, 'tis a story old:
_I_, overcome by pain, and unrequited,
Faded at last, and slumber
Under the autumn mould.

Farewell, farewell! No longer plighted lovers,
Doomed for a day to sigh for sweet return:
One lives, indeed; one heart the green earth covers--
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.

------

From The Dublin Review.

THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA.

_S. Clementis Alexandrini Opera Omnia_. Lutetiae. 1629.

_Geschichte der Christlicher Philosophie, von_ Dr. Heinrich Ritter. Hamburg: Perthes. 1841.

If any country under the sun bears the spell of fascination in its very name, that country is Egypt. The land of the Nile and the pyramids, of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies--the land where art and science had mysterious beginnings before the dawn of history, where powerful dynasties held sway for long generations over the fertile river-valley, and built for themselves mighty cities--Thebes, the hundred-gated, Memphis, with its palaces, Heliopolis, with its temples-- and left memorials of themselves that are attracting men at this very day to Luxor and Carnak, to the avenue of sphynxes and the pyramids-- Egypt, where learning

Uttered its oracles sublime
Before the Olympiads, in the dew
And dusk of early time--

the land where,

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Northward from its Nubian springs,
The Nile, for ever new and old,
Among the living and the dead
Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled--

Egypt seems destined to be associated with all the signal events of every age of the world. Israel's going into and going out of Egypt is one of the epic pages of Holy Scripture; Sesostris, King of Egypt, left his name written over half of Asia; Alexander, the greatest of the Greeks, laid in Egypt the foundation of a new empire; Cleopatra, the captive and the captor of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, killed herself as the old land passed away for ever from the race of Ptolemy; Clement and Origen, Porphyry and Plotinus, have left Egypt the classic land of the Church's battle against the purest form of heathen philosophy; St. Louis of France has made Egypt the scene of a glorious drama of heroism and devotion; the pyramids have lent their name to swell the list of Napoleon's triumphs; and the Nile is linked for ever with the deathless fame of Nelson.

In the last decade of the second century, about the time when the pagan virtues of Marcus Aurelius had left the Roman empire to the worse than pagan vices of his son Commodus, Egypt, to the learned and wealthy, meant Alexandria. What Tyre had been in the time of Solomon, what Sidon was in the days of which Homer wrote, that was Alexandria from the reign of Ptolemy Soter to the days of Mahomet. In external aspect it was in every way worthy to bear the name of him who drew its plans with his own hands. Its magnificent double harbor, of which the Great Port had a quay-side six miles in length, was the common rendezvous for merchant ships from every part of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and its communications with the Red Sea and the Nile brought to the warehouses that overlooked its quay the riches of Arabia and India, and the corn and flax of the country of which it was the capital. The modern traveller, who finds Alexandria a prosperous commercial town, with an appearance half European, half Turkish, learns with wonder that its 60,000 inhabitants find room on what was little more than the mole that divided the Great Port from the Eunostos. But it should be borne in mind that old Alexandria numbered 300,000 free citizens. The mosques, the warehouses, and the private dwellings of the present town are built of the fragments of the grand city of Alexander. The great conqueror designed to make Alexandria the capital of the world. He chose a situation the advantages of which a glance at the map will show; and if any other proof were needed, it may be found in the fact that, since 1801, the population of the modern town has increased at the rate of one thousand a year. He planned his city on such vast proportions as might be looked for from the conqueror of Darius. Parallel streets crossed other streets, and divided the city into square blocks. Right through its whole length, from East to West--that is, parallel with the sea-front--one magnificent street, two hundred feet wide and four miles in length, ran from the Canopic gate to the Necropolis. A similar street, shorter, but of equal breadth, crossed this at right angles, and came out upon the great quay directly opposite the mole that joined the city with the island of Pharos. This was the famous Heptastadion, or Street of the Seven Stadia, and at its South end was the Sun-gate; at its North, where it opened on the harbor, the gate of the Moon. To the right, as you passed through the Moon-gate on to the broad quay, was the exchange, where merchants from all lands met each other, in sight of the white Pharos and the crowded shipping of the Great Port. A little back from the gate, in the Heptastadion, was the Caesareum, or temple of the deified Caesars, afterward a Christian church. Near it was the Museum, the university of Alexandria. Long marble colonnades connected the {35} university with the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. On the opposite side of the great street was the Serapeion, the magnificent temple of Serapis, with its four hundred columns, of which Pompey's Pillar is, perhaps, all that is left. And then there was the mausoleum of Alexander, there were the courts of justice, the theatres, the baths, the temples, the lines of shops and houses--all on a scale of grandeur and completeness which has never been surpassed by any city of the world. Such a city necessarily attracted men. Alexandria was fitly called the "many-peopled," whether the epithet referred to the actual number of citizens or to the varieties of tongue, complexion, and costume that thronged its streets. The Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Jews, each had their separate quarter; but there were constant streams of foreigners from the remote India, from the lands beyond the black rocks that bound the Nile-valley, and from the Ethiopic races to which St. Matthew preached, where the Red Sea becomes the Indian Ocean. At the time we speak of, these discordant elements were held in subjection by the Roman conquerors, whose legionaries trod the streets of the voluptuous city with stern and resolute step, and were not without occasion, oftentimes, for a display of all the sternness and resolution which their bearing augured.

Alexandria, however, in addition to the busy life of commerce and pleasure that went on among Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Africans, was the home of another kind of life, still more interesting to us. Ptolemy Soter, who carried out Alexander's plans, was a man of no common foresight and strength of character. He was not content with building a city. He performed, in addition, two exploits, either of which, from modern experience, we should be inclined to consider a title to immortality. He invented a new god, and established a university. The god was Serapis, whom he imported from Pergamus, and who soon became popular. The university was the Museum, in which lived and taught Demetrius of Phalerus, Euclid, Stilpo of Megara, Philetas of Cos, Apelles the painter, Callimachus, Theocritus, Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, and a host of others in philosophy, poetry, geometry, astronomy, and the arts. Here, under successive Ptolemies, professors lectured in splendid halls, amid honored affluence. All that we have of the Greek classics we owe to the learned men of the Museum. Poetry bloomed sweetly and luxuriantly in the gardens of the Ptolemies; though, it must be confessed, not vigorously, not as on Ionic coast-lands, nor as in the earnest life of Athenian freedom--save when some Theocritus appeared, with his broad Doric, fresh from the sheep-covered downs of Sicily. The name of Euclid suggests that geometry was cared for at the Museum; Eratosthenes, with his voluminous writings, all of which have perished, and his one or two discoveries, which will never die, may stand for the type of geography, the science for which he lived; and Hipparchus, astronomer and inventor of trigonometry, may remind us how they taught at the Museum that the earth was the centre of the universe, and yet, notwithstanding, could foretell an eclipse almost as well as the astronomer royal. In philosophy, the university of Alexandria has played a peculiar part. As long as the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt, the Museum could boast of no philosophy save commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, consisting, in great measure, of subtle obscurities to which the darkest quiddities of the deepest scholastic would appear to have been light reading. But when the Roman came in, there sprang up a school of thought that has done more than any other thing to hand down the fame of Ptolemy's university to succeeding ages. Alexandria was the birthplace of Neo-Platonism, and, whatever we may think of the philosophy itself, we must allow it has bestowed fame on its alma {36} mater. At the dawn of the Christian era, Philon the Jew was already ransacking the great library to collect matter that should enable him to prove a common origin for the books of Plato and of Moses. Two hundred years afterward--that is, just at the time of which we speak-- Plotinus was listening to Ammonius Saccas in the lecture-hall of the Museum, and thinking out the system of emanations, abysms, and depths of which he is the first and most famous expounder. Porphyry, the biographer and enthusiastic follower of Plotinus, was probably never at Alexandria in person; but his voluminous writings did much to make the Neo-Platonist system known to Athens and to the cities of Italy. In his youth he had listened to the lectures of Origen, and thus was in possession of the traditions both of the Christian and the heathen philosophy of Alexandria. But his Christian studies did not prevent him from being the author of that famous book, "Against the Christians," which drew upon him the denunciations of thirty-five Christian apologists, including such champions as St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The Neo-Platonist school culminated and expired in Proclus, the young prodigy of Alexandria, the ascetic teacher of Athens, the "inspired dogmatizer," the "heir of Plato." Proclus died in 485, and his chair at Athens was filled by his foolish biographer Marinus, after which Neo-Platonism never lifted up its head.