templation of that mighty deep, on whose broad surging bosom, ten thousand engines, on destruction bent, might toss, being but toys at the mercy of the swelling billows! Here is height of artistic skill so happily hidden that we perceive the power only by the methods adopted to hide its gigantic display. In poetry as in painting, the perfection of art is the closest possible approach to the purely natural. Faber's "God of my Childhood" is so perfect a type of its kind, because while making the boy address the Divinity, he still allows us to hear the boy's falling marbles while prayers proceed; and we detect the top's whir, while listening to the drone of family prayers! So with Browning's "Pied Piper": for, while he takes us away from home, while following the enchanted rodents, we still retain enough of this homesensation, to make each one feel that he is glad to have met the musician, and that he has added another to the list of friends, and a true delineator of boyhood's experiences. Shall we conclude, thence, that poetry having had its existence, as a possibility, long before the poet, just as gold had its existence long before the bankers had given it monetary value and form, and that poetry being the verbal expression of spontaneous emotion or sentiments, does not require a special study of any of these subjects upon which the poet is called to declare his faith and to explain his convictions? On the contrary, there is no duty more sacred than that which requires that the poet, thinking the thoughts, seeing with the eyes of the masses, shall so master his themes, so illustrate his assertions, so display his convictions, founded as they must be, on learning, as to leave no room for cavil. In no department of human intercourse are we more fully reminded of the poet's power for good or evil, than in the paraphrasing of abstruse dogma, religious or secular, in the simple lines he is obliged to use in telling the masses what they should believe, and in the selection of the still simpler poetic language he employs, to superinduce conviction. To those who remember the late lamented Rev. Doctor Cummings, who was so highly gifted, whose vast erudition, wonderful power and extraordinary facility for impart ing instruction were all combined and shown in a tiny volume summarizing the truths of holy mother Church, he will be best recalled by the fact that this one little pamphlet is a masterpiece of colossal erudition, joined with childlike simplicity. Is not our late political campaign another illustration? How have abstruse political questions, difficult financial problems, been made relatively plain? Has it not been through the rhymed reasoning of the ballad singer, the measured lines of the campaign stanza, as opposed to the thousand-and-one catechisms of political and financial economy? The vocal band,-like its predecessor, the "Little German" aggregation, will gather thousands of willing listeners, when mere argument will fail to bring a handful to hear any orator, however eloquent! Let not the balladist imagine however, that he may sing or recite political heresy, as he understands it,-for the masses are not as ignorant as supposed! The very regularity of utterance makes the ear detect falsehood more easily and accurately. The seeming facility with which the orator holds forth enables the listener to pay more attention to the thoughts he is asked to dwell upon, and to detect more easily, any flaw in logic into which political poets are likely to fall. The poet who would become a public instructor cannot afford to forget that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Says Says a learned, discriminating, critic: "The Hebrew prophets, the heathen poets, the Italian minstrels, Homer, Moses, Tasso, Dante, reverberate in every page of Milton,-yet they only add volume to the English voice. Shakespeare catches cries from all the poetic voices of Europe, daringly translating into his own phraseology the visions of other and smaller singers, and mellowing his blank verse by the study even of contemporaries." How deep the research, how varied the learning, how wide the range of literary resource shown by Tennyson in his ARTHURIAN LEGENDS! And what shall we say of the literary learning of the author of "LALLAH ROOKH?" What extensive reading, which could make critics declare that the author of the volume had traveled over every spot described, and that he had seen every episode there narrated. Such men are thus a credit to their class, and their profession. To exactitude of statement, depending more or less on personal research, or personal ability, must be added a higher form of accuracy, the outcome of personal integrity, the result of individual love for, and adherence to truth. Without this intellectual and moral truthfulness, genuine poetry of a high intellectual order is impossible. On this point, Emerson has these striking words, "A man's power to connect his thought with its symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. THE COR RUPTION OF MAN IS FOLLOWED BY THE CORRUPTION OF LANGUAGE. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of right of pleasure, of power and of praise, and duplicity and falsehood take the place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost." Another clever critic says, "He, the real poet, is the man of truth, who cannot disturb the order and inference of things, however much he may upset the order of idealists. He will admit of no prevarication, no tawdry insincerities, he is largely sane and beautiful." To the veritable child of song, sincerity verges upon self-conceit, yet is absolutely separated from it, for in his highest, truest flights, his passages of pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes; his sublime pas sages overawe no soul so imperiously as his own; his humor draws no laughter so rich or so deep as that stirred within his own breast. . . . Sincerity and Conscience enable the poet "to see that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil, unless it is in the deepest and highest sense, good, unless it comes linking us all together by closer bonds. of sympathy and pity, strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even nature, the mother who bore us, sometimes seems in league,-to see with Milton that the high quality of man's soul which in English is expressed by the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized, greater than all the rhymes of all the tongues that have been spoken since Babel,-and to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley, that the high passion, which in Engfish is called love, is lovelier than all art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries 'that await the chisel of the sculptor, in all the marble hills'..." Surely, the critic who would tolerate the idea that any truly great poet may, even temporarily, become a juggler with words does him no common injury, offers him no common insult! The world is largely made up of children of an older growth. No crime greater than deliberate deception of childhood can well be imagined. The poet speaks the language of children to the nations; well may deception in such case be one of the things that are an abomination in the sight of the All-Seeing! Morever, the true poet is careful to distinguish between states and conditions, and their accidental surroundings. "Poems," says a witty writer, "are photographs, not pictures. The poet derives his force from the vivid ness of the feelings awakened by his subject, or by his meditations," whereas, the mere rhyme ringer "Describes every cranny of a cottage, every cable, every crack in the wall, every kitchen utensil, when his story concerns the soul of the inmate. ... There is no glamour in his eye when he looks on death, he is noting the bedroom furniture and the dirty sheets." "Wherever there is insincerity in a book, there can be no morality, and whenever there is morality, but without art, ........ there is no literature." And literature, to be true, need not be pedantic, farfetched; on the contrary, the simpler the theme, the better, if it be handled in a simple, straight-forward manner. Let it be elevated, if you will, but let the elevation be one of mind, soul, resolve: not merely of imagination. "The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, is it not, of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet? I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic, what is doing in Arabia or in Italy, what is Greek art, or provincial minstrelsy. I embrace the common, I explore, and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and the future worlds." So says Emerson, once more half-right-agreeing with his fellow-New-Englander Longfellow, whose motto was, as ours must be, "To live, live in the mighty present if we would have an abiding rest in the infinite hereafter." "Conscience, not Cant," must be the poet's life-rule! It was this thought of the activities, the possibilities of today that made Newman a power, for his motto was the enjoyment of the poetry of to-day as a rehearsal for the unheard, but certain music of to-mor row. 'Twas this power to find harmony in to-day's struggles that made Father Faber able to hear angelic voices in the muttered prayers of little children, and that enabled Southwell, in a convict cell, to pen lines that seem like the warblings of some Heavenly songster momentarily held in bondage, but made more winning in tone by the caged condition of the victim. Here, indeed, the cellar's dampness makes mellow the poetic wine poured out on the altar-stone of genius. The genuine poet finds "Sermons in stones, books in brooks, good in everything." This brings us to the close of this necessarily discursive paper, in which we have endeavored to show the necessity of a larger allotment of study to be devoted to a branch of language so widely prevalent in the external expression of social progress. We have endeavored to show that to learning, as universal as the subjects offered to the treatment of his muse, the poet must add moral worth of no mean order; that, finally, in a land like ours, where reading is so universally diffused, it is of the highest importance that a correct standard of taste be established, and only that class of poetry be encouraged and patronized that will make men look upward, move forward, and stop not stepping on our march till "EXCELSIOR," the true land of song e'erlasting, and Truth all-enduring be If the cursory thoughts here express- BROTHER NOAH OF THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS. The subject of this brief notice was born in Montreal, March 8th, 1846. At an early age, he believed himself called to serve God in some religious society; and after careful deliberation, entered the preparatory novitiate of the Christian Brothers in his native city. There are several among his brethren who well remember Frank Curran as he was in the early sixties: they speak of his love of books and ardor for permitted sports, his versatility of mind and kindness of heart. in Quebec, and though entrusted with His first years as teacher were spent cordingly, Brother Noah got together ed C m m his scanty impedimenta and in the summer of 1875 went, for the first time, on board an ocean greyhound. France was his destination, and no heavier task was imposed upon him than that of endeavoring to improve the colloquial English of his French colleagues at Rheims, Lyons, or Bordeaux. To this congenial work, he gave himself up with the zeal and tenacity that characterized him. In good health or in bad, he could not resign himself to Capuan leisure. He often tried to justify himself to his critics by repeating the couplet Absence of occupation is not rest; A mind quite vacant, is a mind distressed. However, when fading color or failing appetite was noticed, he knew that he was in for some sort of Capuan leisure either a belle promenade mid the vineslopes of La Champagne, or some gentle mountaineering round Notre Dame de Fourvières; or, best of all, a sniff of Atlantic breezes at Arcachon. With returning strength, came an irrepressible desire to share anew in the active work of his society. This laudable craving of his generous nature was finally gratified, and he was sent across the channel in the beginning of 1877 to help his Brothers of the English province. The Normal College at Liverpool was his new home. Here his ripe experience and numerous accomplishments proved to be of special benefit to the young teachers who formed the College classes. He soon felt that he could enlarge his sphere of usefulness by taking the Teachers' Examination provided he could get a diploma of the First Class. The earliest opportunity of submitting to the ordeal occurred eight months later, in the middle of Decem ber. Being free to select the center at which he would present himself, he chose Caernarvon, in Wales. The writer of these lines has not forgotten the evening of Brother Noah's departure from London. His socius was Brother Azarias, and the two young travelers left Paddington station with all the light-hearted gaiety of students going off for their holidays. And well they might; for one of them was going merely to try the efficacy of Welsh air in clearing out British Museum dust from his lungs, while the other disclosed to his friends that he was more concerned about seeing Yuletide in the land of the bards than about the test which awaited him. This parting at Paddington station reminds the writer mutatis mutandis of another parting that occurred at the end of the Summer School session of '93. The same three met again; this time in the Hotel Champlain. One of them, Brother Azarias, was lying on his death-bed, surrounded by a ministering brother and by sorrowing sisters. His supreme hour had come; it was his turn to leave his life-long friends, to depart . |