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higher even than Puseyism. He pines after the universality of Catholicity, he longs for the union of all sects into one universal church, in short, he wishes for all the truth, and grandeur, and beauty, and unity he has abandoned, without the resolution to retrace his steps and become the Catholic that he was. Is this Mr. Longfellow's case? Is Kavanagh to have a sequel? The author wished to represent a fusion of Catholicity with Protestantism - let him mix the clouds and the sun. The Church of God is not compound; it can have no union with error; it is pure, unchangeable, complete; the gentleness of John is hers just as well as the zeal of Peter.

We must now conlude. The faults in Kavanagh resemble those in Evangeline, — both proceeding from a severe strain after originality resulting in deformity. For instance :—“The setting sun stretched his celestial rods of light across the level. landscape, and, like the Hebrew in Egypt, smote the rivers and the brooks and the ponds, and they became as blood." There is sublimity in that, however. But this is inexcusable: -"And on the threshold stood, with his legs apart, like a miniature colossus, a lovely, golden boy." But, not to multiply instances, worse than all is Mrs. Churchill showering kisses, like roses, on her husband's forehead and cheeks, "as he passed beneath the triumphal archway of her arms, trying in vain to articulate, My dearest Lilawati, what is the whole number of the geese?"

But there are other faults from which Evangeline is free. The description of H. Adolphus Hawkins and Sally Manchester is too evidently Dickens; and though much of the imitation is successful, there is some of it singularly unhappy. Mr. Churchill's dream smacks too strongly of Hans Christian Andersen, and in many passages there is a vein of Goethe. Still, we read and remember these volumes with pleasure, and as we recall their many beauties, their brevity, and their purity, are proud in feeling that this product of our own country is so much superior to all the imported fabric of Bulwer, James, Sue, Dumas, or even the authoress of The Neighbours. It has removed our antipathy to American literature, an antipathy generated, perhaps, by old-fashioned prejudices, and an early, exclusive, and jealous devotion to the older English writers.

We have done Mr. Longfellow great injustice in abridging his narratives, and laid a severe stress upon the patience of our readers; but we could not do otherwise. We have had two objects in view. One, to show the Catholic reader how easy

it is for genius to mould the simplest elements of Catholic life into a story full of instruction and beauty, without cramming it full of inconsequent controversy and questionable theology. How easy it would be for a pious Catholic, even of inferior genius, to present a still more charming picture, and introduce portraits of more real and solid excellence than either Evangeline or Father Felician! No one is fit to write fiction, unless endowed with imagination; and it is the province of imagination not to convince the reason, but to attract the heart. If our religious novelists could get Protestants to feel the beauty of Catholic customs and Catholic life, they would accomplish much in thus removing a load of prejudice that impairs the proper exercise of reason. This is their legitimate sphere, and more than this they cannot effect. An acquaintance with the interior loveliness of Catholic life may remove the bigotry of Protestants, but reason, prayer, and the grace of God can alone convert them to Catholicity.

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Our other object, however imperfectly pursued, has been to caution our author against the originality of extravagance and distortion; to stimulate him to higher things, yet confine him where he is truly excellent and original, in the delineation of pastoral simplicity, and in the masterly use of action by which the most delicate shades of thought and feeling become visible; to protest against introducing characters, as he does over and over again in Kavanagh, merely as the media of some of the author's opinions utterly apart from the purpose of his work, — excrescences, digressions, patchwork, matter made up and laid by long ago,- old cloth fringed with new lace. There is little incident in his books, we care not for that; so much the better, though the taste of the age covets it, but what incident there is should have regularity, proportion, and unity. We saw that all most beautiful, holy, and pure in these volumes emanated from an acquaintance, however imperfect, with Catholic life and feeling, and we had a faint hope, an earnest ambition, of inducing him to study more closely a Church to whose truth and splendor he is not insensible. Then would he discover beauty and majesty, purity and truth, far beyond a poet's conception; then would he discover that her ornaments, her music, her painting, her statues, her aisles, and her bells, are but the offerings of piety and genius which she alone can inspire, — that she is not dependent on them, but they on her, that all that is noblest in man must surround her, because she is invested with eternal beauty, that she cannot avoid what Protestantism

never can attain, for they follow and cling to her like verdure and lilies and date-trees over the Nile, as, scattering blessings, she rolls steadily along in majesty and usefulness, adorning and redeeming the desert of life. Then would he find the true application of the Shawnee's legend, that Protestantism is Mowis;

"Mowis, the bridegroom of snow, who won and wedded a maiden, But, when the morning came, arose and passed from the wigwam, Fading and melting away and dissolving into the sunshine,

Till she beheld him no more, though she followed far into the forest."

And when he has found that, let him apply to himself the farewell warning he gives to Churchill:

"Stay, stay the present instant!

Imprint the marks of wisdom on its wings!

O, let it not elude thy grasp, but, like

The good old patriarch upon record,

Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee !"

ART. IV. Conversations of an Old Man and his Young Friends. No. I.

F. I HAVE been told that your views on most subjects were not always what they now are. My father says he has known you when you boasted of being a liberalist in politics and in religion, when you professed yourself a firm believer in the progress of the race, and were really a man of the modern world, sympathizing with humanity, and foremost in the various socialist movements of the day.

B. I did not, as a young man, differ much from most young men of ardent temperaments, lively sensibilities, generous impulses, and little practical knowledge; I said and did a great many foolish things.

C. You will hardly persuade your young friends that it is foolish to sympathize with our kind, to feel that every man is our brother, to plead for the wronged, and to devote ourselves. heart and soul to the progress of liberty, and the meliora

tion of society, especially of the poorer and more numerous

classes.

B. We are, till after long and sometimes bitter experience, the dupes of words and phrases. It is not difficult to disguise mischievous purposes in fine words; it is also easy, in pursuing even a laudable object, to say and do a great many foolish things. It may be very laudable to fell a tree that cumbers the ground, or hides our prospect, but not very wise to attempt to do it by climbing up and beginning at the top. It is rather foolish to cut off the branch on which we must stand. We may fall and break our necks, and not accomplish our purpose after all.

G. By which you would admonish us that our ends are not necessarily good because we express them in fine phrases, and that even good ends are wisely sought only by appropriate and adequate means?

B. Precisely, my young friend. Schiller's Marquis of Posa bids us remember, when we are old, the dreams of our youth. Some follow his direction, and remain ignorant in spite of experience. Others do not. It is not, as you young

sters suppose, that we harden with age, grow cold and selfish, and cease to interest ourselves in the welfare of others; it is that we profit by experience, and that a wider survey of men and things, a deeper insight into the springs of human action, individual and social, enable us to see what we proposed in the ardor of youth is seldom desirable, and when desirable, seldom practicable. Youth deals mostly in generals, and rarely descends to particulars. The evils which afflict the individual and society spring chiefly from moral causes, from inordinate desires, and unrestrained passions. The methods of amelioration which our young enthusiasm proposes appeal exclusively to these for their support, and can only strengthen them, and aggravate the evils we seek to remove.

O. Pardon me, but I am a little impatient at the outcry which even you do not disdain to echo against human nature. I have never been able to see any truth or justice in this perpetual admonition to restrain our feelings and subdue our passions. The moralist seems to me to make himself the accomplice of the despot.

C. All our native instincts, unperverted feelings, and generous sentiments are for liberty. They lead us to resist the tyrant, and where they have free scope, tyranny can never gain a permanent establishment. The tyrant would repress them,

annihilate them, so that we may have no spirit or disposition to rebel against him. It is the fox preaching to the geese, the wolf to the lamb.

B. All very spiritedly said, my young friends; but it is nothing very novel. I have in the course of my life said as much, and a great deal more. All authority appears to us in youth very hateful. We see not its reason or necessity, and we fancy that it only creates the crimes that it punishes. I thought my mother was exceedingly tyrannical, when she gave me, then a boy some four or five years old, a severe whipping for telling a lie. I have lived long enough to thank her for that whipping over and over again; for it impressed indelibly upon my memory this important lesson, If you speak at all, speak the truth. Indeed, all authority that restrains us, or hinders us from doing whatever we wish, seems to us tyrannical. Tyranny is always odious, and so we conclude that we ought to be freed from all restraint, and at liberty to follow our inclinations. Since our inclinations, instincts, feelings, passions, resist whatever resists them, we conclude that they are intrinsically opposed to tyranny, and that whoever would restrain them is a tyrant, deserving of universal execration. God, indeed, gives us no faculties that it is unlawful to exercise-in a lawful manner, and he requires the physical destruction of no element of that nature which he has created. All the several elements of our nature may be exercised, but they are to be exercised in the order the Creator intended, in due subordination, the lower to the higher; or, in other words, order and harmony are to be maintained in the bosom of the individual, and between individual and individual, and you will need very little experience of practical life to learn that this is impossible without authority and self-denial. We see not this at first, but gradually it dawns on our minds, and by and by becomes clear to us, and from hot-headed radicals, clamoring for liberty, seeking the elevation of mankind and social progress by removing all restraints, and giving loose reins to appetite and passion, we become sober conservatives, insisting upon submission to authority, obedience to law, as the first lesson to be taught, and the first to be learned.

F. I do not object to all authority; for one needs not to have lived long to be aware that order is desirable, and that it is not possible, without authority of some sort, to maintain it. But I want order with liberty, not order without liberty.

0. The authority should be reasonable, and govern by

NEW SERIES.— VOL. IV. NO. I.

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