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This, indeed, may be so. And yet there are moneyed men who are learned men; and devotees of fashionable society whose culture is no veneer; and so the Epicurean theory sinks helpless in the tangles of its own woof. The easy way men have ever followed; not inevitably the primrose path of dalliance, but none the less the facile road. And the avenues to the higher life of the spirit and the intellect lie not amid the flowers and the pleasant fountains and the sound of singing voices. Upward to the hills the way is hard and thorny, and full of tortuous mazes; but at the end of the road there is green verdure, and rippling waters, and the trilling of birds, and ever a blue, blue sky.

As one contemplates the mile-posts that mark the wayfarer's progress toward the end of the journey, one may well wonder if my little friend of twelve will pass the outmost barriers and step into the fields of joy. Will she grow weary by the wayside, and be satisfied with something short of the full glory, something less than the sum of life's beauty, something that only resembles in a close kinship the complete awakening to the sunny day? It is possible. But whether she climb the topmost ascent, or linger doubtfully on the way, the desire of attainment will redeem her of failure; and although not blessed with the plenitude of riches and the fine quintessence of the life of the soul, she will live her years a being of refinement, a fair and precious spirit, with her eyes ever turned toward the heights and her heart all aglow from the wonder quest.

But we must leave her, and we must leave one another; we each have work to do, and plans to formulate, and dreams to weave; and we all have different ways of constructing our schemes of success and of planning our impress on the generation in which we live. Labors will never be achieved through vicarious hands, nor will visions be beheld through the soul of another. And so let each of us bravely take his way along the lane of life whithersoever the voices call and the finger of destiny beckons. On every pathway there will be the song that each can understand, and there will be the laughter that each is seeking, and there will be to each the merriment of playtime; but we shall find sorrow, too, and dirge, and the dolorous tears for mortal woe; and out of them all, out of the toiling and the rest, out of the gayety and the grief, out of the song and the funeral, we shall hope to distill the real reason of life and come each of us a bit closer to the mysteries of God's time.

New Books.

PIONEER LAYMEN OF NORTH AMERICA. Volume II. Volume II. By Rev. T. J. Campbell, S.J. New York: The America Press. $1.75.

Father Campbell is an acknowledged authority on the subject of the settlement and evangelization of Canada; not only concerning the great missionaries who sacrificed all earthly joys to extend the kingdom of Christ, but also concerning those other heroes who were sharers of their courage and magnanimity. Such were the captains and leaders of the various expeditions sent out from France, and the author calls them the "Pioneer Laymen" of North America. A previous volume has told of the distinguished men of earlier date. This second one continues the tale with the names of Frontenac; several members of the heroic and devoted Le Moyne family whose generations have been so closely identified with Canadian history; also Nicolas Perrot, de Verendrye and La Salle. All these are Frenchmen, but although valorous enemies of our colonies, their labors explored and settled much of the territory now included within the limits of the United States.

The volume closes with the story of one whose work was performed later, nay almost in our own times, for his death occurred as late as 1857. The historian Bancroft calls him the "Father of Oregon," and one "of an altogether different order of humanity from any who had hitherto appeared on these shores." Indeed, John McLoughlin even in personal appearance was a man amongst men, a veritable lion. Of all those, whose stories the book contains, McLoughlin, as Father Campbell hints, is the least known, but not the least interesting or worthy of study.

The entire volume is full of adventure of romance, of hairbreadth escapes, which if they appeared in a novel would be quickly voted improbable. The recital records heroic courage, endurance, generosity and perseverance almost beyond belief; but it also shows that amid the meaner characteristics of our poor human nature, there is nothing meaner than the ingratitude and indifference of governments to some of their best and noblest servants.

THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.

By Cardinal Newman. New

York: John Lane Co. $1.25 net.

This great classic, by John Henry Newman, is here presented in a gift-book edition. An introduction by Gordon Tidy is a welcome addition, giving a history of the poem from its inception, and disposing of various popular but untrue legends of its adventures before publication, with quotation of much testimony to the high place immediately accorded to it in the esteem of the great author's contemporaries.

The edition has been prepared with care and taste; its size is not too great for convenience, and it is well printed on good paper. It is doubtful whether the ten illustrations by Stella Langdale will be generally regarded as acquisitions. Readers whose appreciation of the masterpiece is keenest, will probably prefer that it should be given without attempt at visualization of its awe and mystery; nevertheless, the artist has displayed throughout a deeply reverential spirit, and the last two pictures are very impressive.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TENNYSON. From 1809 to 1850. By Thomas R. Lounsbury, LL.D. New York: Yale University Press. $2.50 net.

Professor Lounsbury is well known for his scholarly studies on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cooper. The same thoroughness, fairness and humor that characterized these volumes are evident in his Life and Times of Tennyson. He died before he had completed his proposed literary biography of Tennyson, but his unfinished chapters were prepared for the press by Dr. Wilbur L. Cross, the editor of The Yale Review.

Professor Lounsbury shows from the literary history of the thirties, forties and fifties how strong a fight Tennyson had to wage to win recognition. All the great Reviews of England were emphatically hostile to him, and the dominant critics of the period, Christopher North, Lockhart and a host of minor writers, kept harping continually on Tennyson's affectation, obscurity, lack of reflectiveness and of strength, and his impotent straining after originality. His friends at Cambridge alone were loyal, and defended him from the very beginning against all adverse criticism.

Our author well says, apropos of the unjust criticism which was meted out to Tennyson for many a long year: "The truth of

Aristotle's dictum that the mass of men-he meant of course men cultivated and competent to form opinions of their own-were far better judges of poetry than any one man however eminent, has never been better illustrated than in the reception given to Tennyson's successive works. The critical estimate almost invariably lagged behind the estimate reached by the great body of intelligent readers. When the former was adverse-and in his case it often was adverse on the first publication of particular works— it was almost disdainfully set aside by the latter."

There are many delightful bits of humor scattered here and there throughout these entertaining pages. For example, he speaks of Taine's English Literature as "a book which would be as valuable as it is delightful, had it more frequently occurred to the author that it was desirable to read the works on which he set out to pass judgment." In speaking of the offer made of the Laureateship to Rogers by Prince Albert in 1850, our author writes: "One gets the impression that this action seems to have been taken not as a tribute to his poetic eminence, but rather as a recognition of his merit in having lived so long." Many have inaccurately stated that Tennyson changed line after line of his poems as the result to hostile criticism. Professor Lounsbury

proves conclusively that this is not the case. Discussing, for example, Lockhart's objection, he declares that "Tennyson showed the abjectness of his deference to the critic by repeating the line 'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die,' nineteen times in the revision of 1842."

The whole volume is delightful reading, and is an excellent proof of the fallibility of literary reviewers.

MRS. BALFAME. By Gertrude Atherton. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.35 net.

With all her usual merits and defects of literary manner and with even more than her usual cleverness, Mrs. Atherton has written a novel which cannot but cause something akin to consternation to thoughtful people with religious convictions.

Mrs. Balfame is a crystallization of the passive, insouciant godlessness peculiar to our day. David Balfame, a resident of Elsinore, a small town near New York, is mysteriously murdered. His widow is the town's acknowledged social leader, the object of much admiring devotion. Suspicion is directed toward her; she is arrested and tried for the crime. Her acquaintances and

fellow-townspeople are naturally of various types and degrees, yet there is tacitly developed among them a singular bond of unity in a phase of spiritual astigmatism-they see in the murder a crime but not a sin. At no time does any of them give the least indication of having ever heard of a Supreme Being, or of having given a passing thought to the destiny of the soul. Were it possible to find a quarter of the earth where God has not as yet chosen to reveal Himself, under any name or form, this book might have emanated thence. Though Mrs. Belfame's friends rally loyally to her, they are by no means convinced of her innocence; yet not even among the women does the nature of the crime inspire depth of emotion or sense of awe. There is shock, then curious speculation, then acceptance of the thought as a temptation common to humanity, and the unpleasant character of the murdered man is cited in tentative palliation. In their conversation there is no touch of artificiality or exaggeration, to isolate them as a group of aliens; they are ordinary, kindly human beings, and their easy, humorous, matter-of-fact chatter is such as, we are compelled to believe, might and would be heard wherever the conditions repeated themselves.

The last chapter contains material still more discouraging, for it is here that Mrs. Atherton portrays what she seems to regard as her heroine's spiritual awakening. Mrs. Balfame is freed, exonerated by the dying confession of the woman who committed the crime that her idolized friend might be released from a detested husband. By this, with another instance of self-sacrifice for her sake, Mrs. Balfame's cold heart is roused to a limited amount of self-knowledge: she sees herself as a selfish egotist, unworthy of the love she has received, her existence harmful to others. She will amend her life; she will cross the ocean and spend herself in nursing upon the battlefields. This is the whole extent of her new vision; it includes no hauntings of the murder of which she was guilty in intent and by attempt, no horror of the consuming hatred she had fed and cherished. The book concludes: "Mrs. Balfame was alone with the crushing burden of her soul;" but no ray of light reveals her to herself as alone with an estranged and offended God, and the burden, at its worst, is loss of self-esteem.

The novel is a concrete expression and reflection of a part of the public mind which, unrestrained by religion and unconsciously influenced by extreme theories of sociologists, grows daily more vague as to moral distinctions and indifferent to the sanctity of human life. Of the disturbed thoughts that follow its reading one

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