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II. THE PROBLEM.

I like a church, I like a cowl,

I love a prophet of the soul,

And on my heart monastic aisles

Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles,
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure?
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought ;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;

Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bibles old;
The litanies of nations came,

Like the volcano's tongue of flame.
Up from the burning core below,—
The canticles of love and woe.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome

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And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity,

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Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew,

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest
Of leaves and feathers from her breast;
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell;
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone;
And morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;

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O'er England's abbeys bends the sky
As on its friends with kindred eye;
For, out of Thought's interior sphere,
These wonders rose to upper air;
And nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass,
Art might obey but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand,

To the vast Soul that o'er him planned,

And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost

Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting quires,
And through the priest the mind inspires.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the Fathers wise,—
The book itself before me lies,—
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips' or mines,
Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines;
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowled portrait dear,
And yet, for all his faith could see,

I would not the good bishop be.

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Nathaniel Hawthooule.

CHARACTERIZATION BY GEORGE B. SMITH.'

1. The growth of the modern novel has been marked by many changes and developments, but it may be said that its psycholog ical interest was first exhibited in a very high degree by Haw

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thorne. His deep study of the soul had scarcely been equalled before by writers of fiction. His stories do not, of course, display all the gifts which we witness in profusion in such men as Fielding and Scott; but in their deep concentration of thought upon the motives and the spirit of man, they stand almost alone.

2. Compared with the writers of his own country, there is no difficulty in assigning his proper position as a novelist to this illustrious writer. He has no equal. It is rare to meet with his artistic qualities anywhere; it is rarer still to find them united to the earnestness which so distinguished him. Whether as the result of an inheritance of the old Puritan blood or not matters little, but in him there was apparently a sincerity truly refreshing among so many writers whose gifts have been vitiated by the lack thereof. Admirably did Russell Lowell depict him when he wrote the following lines in his Fable for Critics:

"There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,

So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet,

Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet:

'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood,

With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood,
Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe,

With a single anemone trembly and rathe.

His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,

That a suitable parallel sets one to seek.

He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck:
When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,

So, to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared.
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man."

3. That Hawthorne will ever be what we call a very popular novelist is open to much doubt. The habits of abstraction to which he was accustomed from his boyhood had their influence upon his thought, which is not always expressed in a manner adapted to the average reader. At times he appears to be living away from the world altogether; and society likes now what is concrete, something which it can handle and appraise, whether

in literature, science, or art. He had a shrinking from the lionizing which is done on trust, that unpleasant phase which has crept over society during the last few years. The principle of giving the highest praise to the man who can play the loudest on the big drum was a hateful one to him. A silent rebuke to the fussiness of the nineteenth century, and to its fulsome adulation of what is unworthy, may be traced in his pages. This man had a strong and fearless spirit, and though he discussed questions occasionally which have been found too high for settlement in all ages, he did so with humility and on reverent knee.

4. Hawthorne had unquestionably, moreover, a strong poetic element in his nature, sublimated by constant contact with the various forms of sorrow. Through worldly loss he came to an insight into spiritual truths to which he might otherwise have been a stranger. At times he appears almost to distrust men, but it is never really so; he laments man's indecision for the right, the evil growths which enwrap his soul, and that dark veil of sin which hides from him the smiling face of his Creator. "Poet let us call him," with Longfellow; but greater still, an interpreter, through whose allegories and awe-inspiring creations breathes the soul that longs after the accomplishment of the dream of unnumbered centuries, the brotherhood of man. The world has been enriched by his genius, which is as a flower whose fragrance is shed upon man, but whose roots rest with God.

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