This one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan's despite, be spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence of the Spirit's own eternal joy." And Professor James, writing in much the same spirit, says: "God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this." On the lips of Mr. Moody's Raphael, the archangelic lover of mankind, this philosophy is given melodious utterance.

"Darkly, but oh, for good, for good,

The spirit infinite

Was throned upon the perishable blood;

To moan and to be abject at the neap,

To ride portentous on the shrieking scud

Of the aroused flood,

And halcyon hours to preen and prate in the boon Tropical afternoon.

"Not in vain, not in vain,

The spirit hath its sanguine stain,

And from its senses five doth peer

As a fawn from the green windows of a wood;
Slave of the panic woodland fear,
Boon-fellow in the game of blood and lust
That fills with tragic mirth the woodland year;
Searched with starry agonies

Through the breast and through the reins,
Maddened and led by lone moon-wandering cries.
Dust unto dust complains,

Dust laugheth out to dust,

Sod unto sod moves fellowship,

And the soul utters, as she must,

Her meanings with a loose and carnal lip;

But deep in her ambiguous eyes

Forever shine and slip

Quenchless expectancies,

And in a far-off day she seems to put her trust."

Again, and in still clearer language, the archangel declares the glory of man's passionate self-contradictions:

"I have walked

The rings of planets where strange-colored moons
Hung thick as dew, in ocean orchards feared
The glaucous tremble of the living boughs
Whose fruit hath life and purpose; but nowhere
Found any law but this: Passion is power,
And, kindly tempered, saves. All things declare
Struggle hath deeper peace than sleep can bring:
The restlessness that put creation forth
Impure and violent, held holier calm

Than that Nirvana whence it wakened Him."

Thus the way is prepared for the Divine Tragedy. God, having created the race of men, and having sought to save man from himself by the mystery of the Incarnation, determines at last to destroy the impious brood.

"What if they rendered up their wills to His?
Hushed and subdued their personality?

Became as members of the living tree?"

To Raphael, thus musing, the Angel of the Pale Horse makes reply:

"A whisper grows, various from tongue to tongue,
That so He will attempt. Those who consent
To render up their clamorous wills to Him,
To merge their fretful being in His peace

He will accept: the rest He will destroy."

In the fulness of time, the Day of Judgment dawns, and "God's vengeance is full wrought " upon the wicked. The following wonderful lyric is sung by the redeemed spirits on their upward flight:

"In the wilds of life astray,
Held far from our delight,
Following the cloud by day
And the fire by night,
Came we a desert way.
O Lord, with apples feed us,
With flagons stay!

By Thy still waters lead us!

"As bird torn from the breast
Of mother-cherishings,

Far from the swaying nest
Dies for the mother wings,
So did the birth-hour wrest
From Thy sweet will and word
Our souls distressed.

Open Thy breast, thou Bird!"

Yet Raphael, who alone of the celestial hosts has understood the heart of man, and whose imagination has foreshadowed the consequences of his destruction, remains disconsolate.

"Never again! never again for me!
Never again the lily souls that live

Along the margin of the streams, shall grow
More candid at my coming. Never more
God's birds above the bearers of the Ark
Shall make a wood of implicated wings,
Swept by the wind of slow ecstatic song.
Thy youths shall hold their summer cenacles;
I am not of their fellowship, it seems.

God's ancient peace shall feed them, as it feeds
These yet uplifted hills. I would I knew
Where bubbled that insistent spring. To drink
Deep, and forget what I have seen to-day."

But the destruction of mankind is only the beginning of the Tragedy. When that awful fiat went forth, God likewise accomplished His own doom. To be dethroned and destroyed by the forces of His own creation is the fate that awaits Him, as it awaited the God of Scandinavian myth in the day of Ragnarök, as it awaited the God of Greek myth in Shelley's treatment of the tale of Prometheus. The instrument of His undoing is the Worm that Dieth not, His own monstrous miscreation, who, having swept mankind from the face of earth at the behest of his Creator, mounts upward to commit violent assault upon the hosts of Heaven.

To nerve each member of His mighty frame
Man, beast, and tree, and all the shapes of will
That dream their darling ends in clod and star-
To everlasting conflict, wringing peace
From struggle, and from struggle peace again,
Higher and sweeter and more passionate

With every danger passed! Would He had spared

That dark Antagonist whose enmity

Gave Him reioicing sinews, for of Him

His foe was flesh of flesh and bone of bone,

With suicidal hand He smote him down,

And now indeed His lethal pangs begin.

FIRST LAMP (to Uriel).

Brother, what lies beyond this trouble? Death?

URIEL.

All live in Him, with Him shall all things die. SECOND LAMP.

And the snake reign, coiled on the holy hill? URIEL.

Sorrow dies with the heart it feeds upon.

RAPHAEL.

Look, where the red volcano of the fight
Hath burst, and down the violated hills
Pours ruin and repulse, a thousand streams
Choked with the pomp and furniture of Heaven.
In vain the Lion ramps against the tide,
In vain from slope to slope the giant Wraths
Rally but to be broken. Dwindling dim
Across the blackened pampas of the wind
The routed Horses flee with hoof and wing,
Till their trine light is one, and now is quenched.]
URIEL.

The spirits fugitive from Heaven's brink
Put off their substance of ethereal fire
And mourn phantasmal on the phantom Alps.
FOURTH LAMP.

Mourn, sisters! For our light is fading too.
Thou of the topaz heart, thou of the jade,
And thou sweet trembling opal - ye are grown
Grey things, and aged as God's sorrowing eyes.
FIRST LAMP.

My wick burns blue and dim.

SECOND LAMP.

My oil is spent.
RAPHAEL.

The moon smoulders; and naked from their seats The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait."

We have endeavored to give, in the preceding analysis, some idea of the fashion in which Mr. Moody has dealt with his grandiose conception of the Creation, the Christian Mystery, and the Judgment. He has shown it possible to make in our own day a very noble poem, as Milton did, out of the Biblical Mythology, and as Shelley did, out of the most subtle spiritual symbolism. The poem is not without minor faults, and criticism of the microscopic sort might easily detect flaws here and there, words inaccurately used or inadequate as vehicles of their intention, forced imagery and moments of flagging imagination. We are content to leave to others this thankless task, feeling that the superb merits of the work make its occasional crudities quite insignificant. We have quoted many of its finest passages, but have reserved for the last the finest of them all— this glorious apostrophe to mankind :

"O Dreamer! O Desirer! Goer down
Unto untravelled seas in untried ships!
O crusher of the unimagined grape
On unconceived lips!

O player upon a lordly instrument

No man or god hath had in mind to invent;
O cunning how to shape

Effulgent Heaven and scoop out bitter Hell
From the little shine and saltness of a tear;
Sieger and harrier,

Beyond the moon, of thine own builded town,
Each morning won, each eve impregnable,
Each noon evanished sheer!"

We should not know where in recent poetry to look for the match to this melodious and sympathetic portrayal of "life's wild and various bloom" of passion and aspiration, of alternating defeat and victory, of the commingling of sense and spirit that makes of our existence so confused a web of self-contradictions, yet somehow suggests a harmony of design that must be apparent to the transcendental vision.

It is clear that the poet of "The Masque of Judgment" is no partisan of the ascetic ideal. His plea is for the richness of life, for the legitimate claims of sense no less than of spirit, for the working out of one's salvation by means that leave no human instinct athirst. Nor is his ideal one for the few favored by nature or circumstance; it is rather the allembracing expression of a fine trust in the whole of human nature. This democratic outlook, which is somewhat obscured by the symbolism demanded for the dramatic work we have just had under discussion, is given a more definite expression in the volume of the "Poems," to which we now turn. We find it in "Gloucester Moors," with which the book opens, a striking poem which likens the earth

I wonder what the fishers do

To keep them toiling still!

I wonder how the heart of man

Has patience to live out its span,

Or wait until its dreams come true."

But this mood is not lasting, nor does it insistently prevail in the writer's consciousness. Whatever the defeats life may bring, the strong spirit will not be cowed, nor will it seek a refuge in quietism. Some stanzas written “At Assisi" give us a clear statement of the poet's philosophy.

"I turn away from the gray church pile;

I dare not enter, thus undone :

Here in the roadside grass awhile

I will lie and watch for the sun.

Too purged of earth's good glee and strife,
Too drained of the honied lusts of life,
Was the peace these old saints won!

"St. Francis sleeps upon his hill,
And a poppy flower laughs down his creed ;
Triumphant light her petals spill,
His shrines are dim indeed.

Men build and build, but the soul of man,
Coming with haughty eyes to scan,
Feels richer, wilder need.

"How long, old builder Time, wilt bide

Till at thy thrilling word

Life's crimson pride shall have to bride

The spirit's white accord,

Within that gate of good estate

Which thou must build us soon or late,
Hoar workman of the Lord?"

There is not a poem among the score or more contained in Mr. Moody's volume that is commonplace or devoid of some arresting quality of imagery or emotion. Regretfully passing by the greater number of them we reserve our remaining space for the two pieces inspired by the dark page of recent American history. Our broken national faith, our lust of dominion, the subordination of morality to greed in our international dealings, and our

desertion of the principles upon which our greatness as a people has hitherto been based,

these are things that have made the last two years a period of inexpressible sadness to Americans who have been taught to cherish the teachings of Washington and Jefferson, of Sumner and Lincoln. How we have longed for the indignant words of protest that our Whittier or our Emerson or our Lowell would have voiced had their lives reached down to this unhappy time! But in reading Mr. Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and his lines "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines we are almost consoled for the silence of the prophet-voices that appealed so powerfully to the moral consciousness of the generation before our own. We seem to catch the very accent of Lowell's patriotic fervor in these lines suggested by the Shaw Memorial:

"Crouched in the sea-fog on the moaning sand
All night he lay, speaking some simple word
From hour to hour to the slow minds that heard,
Holding each poor life gently in his hand

And breathing on the base rejected clay
Till each dark face shone mystical and grand
Against the breaking day;

And lo, the shard the potter cast away
Was grown a fiery chalice crystal-fine
Fulfilled of the divine

Great wine of battle wrath by God's ring-finger stirred.
Then upward, where the shadowy bastion loomed
Huge on the mountain in the wet sea light,
Whence now, and now, infernal flowerage bloomed,
Bloomed, burst, and scattered down its deadly seed,
They swept, and died like freemen on the height,
Like freemen, and like men of noble breed."

Contrast this bright picture of heroic devotion to a great cause with the dark picture presented by the successors of these men now engaged in the bloody subjugation of an alien people who have done naught to offend us, and whose crime is that they love their country well enough to die by thousands for its sake.

"I will not and I dare not yet believe!
Though furtively the sunlight seems to grieve,
And the spring-laden breeze

Out of the gladdening west is sinister

With sounds of nameless battle over seas;
Though when we turn and question in suspense
If these things be indeed after these ways,
And what things are to follow after these,
Our fluent men of place and consequence
Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase,
Or for the end-all of deep arguments
Intone their dull commercial liturgies --

I dare not yet believe! My ears are shut!

I will not hear the thin satiric praise
And muffled laughter of our enemies,
Bidding us never sheathe our valiant sword
Till we have changed our birthright for a gourd
Of wild pulse stolen from a barbarian's hut
Showing how wise it is to cast away
The symbols of our spiritual sway,
That so our hands with better ease

May wield the driver's whip and grasp the jailer's keys."

By the memory of the fine altruistic impulse that stirred our national heart when the suffering Cubans besought us for aid, let it not be said of us that a mean motive underlay that frank outburst of active sympathy, that our protestations of unselfishness were the merest hypocrisy, and that our soldiers have given up their lives that their country might be dishonored.

"We charge you, ye who lead us,

Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain !
Turn not their new-world victories to gain!
One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays
Of their dear praise,

One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,

The implacable republic will require.

For save we let the island men go free,
Those baffled and dislaurelled ghosts
Will curse us from the lamentable coasts
Where walk the frustrate dead.
The cup of trembling shall be drainèd quite,
Eaten the sour bread of astonishment,

With ashes of the hearth shall be made white
Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent."

This impressive adjuration is supplemented by the lines suggested by the death of General Lawton.

"A flag for the soldier's bier

Who dies that his land may live; O, banners, banners here,

That we doubt not nor misgive! That he heed not from the tomb

The evil days draw near

When the nation, robed in gloom,
With its faithless past shall strive.

Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark,

Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark."

al

When our nation shall have won back its sanity, and once more learned to heed though at what cost we tremble to think the lessons of righteousness taught us by the Fathers of the Republic, these poems will seem as stars seen through the angry cloud-rifts of a tempestuous night, bearing shining witness to the fact that in our hour of darkness there were some souls that held the faith undaunted by all the powers of evil leagued against them. We are somehow reminded of an eloquent similitude employed by the late Frederic Myers. Speaking of the judgment of the men to come upon still another poet who, like Mr. Moody, would not despair of a seemingly hopeless cause, he said: "They will look back on him as Romans looked back on that unshaken Roman who purchased at its full price the field of Cannæ, on which at that hour victorious Hannibal lay encamped with his Carthaginian host."

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE.

GENERAL Cox's WAR REMINISCENCES.* The two handsome volumes of "Military " of the late Major-General Reminiscences Jacob Dolson Cox form a very valuable contribution to the literature of the Civil War. The author was a scholar to begin with, and was always a student. During many years. preceding his death he had wide experience as a critic, often reviewing books on the Civil War period, noting what was omitted by others, what was said in extravagant statement, what took the form of positive misconception of facts. Uniting in himself the education requisite to just judgment, the experience of a general in actual campaign work, and the special training afforded by his later life, he was fitted as few could be to produce, a generation after the war, a story regarding it of the greatest interest and importance.

The worth of his production is enhanced because, as General Cox was not one of the greatest officers developed by the war, attention to the personality of the man does not obscure the details of his story, and consequently the two volumes are a very valuable source of information on questions relating to that trying time, and not alone a showing of the achievements of a single individual, as, unfortunately, has been the case with many volumes of memoirs published during the last decade.

The military career of General Cox was largely devoted to the campaigns in West Virginia, in East Tennessee, and with Sherman on his famous "March to the Sea." There was, indeed, a digression for awhile to Antietam, with a resulting account of the battle there which might possibly lead to criticism, but the early return to West Virginia from the army in the East would seem to make this rather an episode in the man's military life than an organic part of it.

Without noting particularly the details which are presented in connection with the occupation of East Tennessee and the march through, Georgia, the campaign in West Virginia may be taken to furnish abundant material for an appreciation of the General's conception of warfare. Nowhere else is there such a clear account of the operations in the new mountain State, which, turning to freedom, broke away from the Old Dominion and entered the Union

MILITARY REMINISCENCES OF THE CIVIL WAR. By Jacob Dolson Cox. In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

as a separate commonwealth. Occupying a place on the border line between the tide-water regions south of the Potomac and the great Central West, the possession of West Virginia had a two-fold importance. As a political measure it was essential that there should be an early massing of the army of the Union to sustain the people in their determination to stand by the country as against the champions of slavery, and when so many Americans were turning away from their allegiance, justice required that if support were needed it should be given heartily to the friends of freedom. From a military standpoint the State was even more important. It was the gateway from Ohio to Virginia, and therefore absolutely essential to the successful operations of the Union forces. Because of the rough and rugged nature of the soil there were only a few routes by which an army could march across the State. These routes might easily have been defended with comparatively small expense, but as a matter of fact much outlay was required to secure them.

The early movements in West Virginia had a great deal to do with shaping the general conduct of the war, because it was owing to the brilliancy of achievements there that General McClellan was called to be head of the armies. Those chapters which discuss McClellan have much interest, and the estimate made by Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Schouler in their histories of the period are fully sustained by the statements from General Cox.

But, after all, the lessons learned from a study of the campaign in West Virginia involving a great many problems of warfare, such as, for example, the handling of raw recruits, the dealing with newspaper men, some of them not particularly scrupulous in their methods or careful of the interests of their country, the peculiar conditions of life due to the isolation of the people, the irregular guerilla fighting on both sides, do not impress one as so important as the general information in the volumes on topics such as the "Vallandigham Case," Morgan's Raid," "The Knights of the Golden Circle," the plot to liberate prisoners at Johnson's Island, etc.

66

A striking feature of General Cox's Memoirs is the comparison in quality of the volunteers and the regulars, or of the volunteer officers and those who had the benefit of West Point training. One gets a pretty definite notion that the members of the regular army rather suffered by comparison with the volunteers,

who came from every walk in life because of devotion to the cause of the Union, and fought for flag and country from sentiment rather than from the necessity of military discipline. As Mr. Cox puts it, "A bold heart and a cool head and practical common-sense were of much more importance than anything taught at school," and these characteristics were often displayed in most striking manner by the volunteers right at the start, a brief experience in warfare making them notably prominent.

In discussions such as these, the volumes are strong, General Cox's special training and his student instincts lending much weight to his carefully worded opinions. There is a vein of quiet humor throughout, many of the anecdotes and incidents of army life being related in a very interesting way. Even the apparently trivial may be of value, if correctly interpreted, as, for example, the shrill cry "Glory to God" from a woman spectator of the scenes in the Ohio Senate when it was announced that Fort Sumter was being attacked. "It was the voice of a radical friend of the slave, who after a lifetime of public agitation believed that only through blood could freedom be won." The last few chapters are given up to the movements against Johnston by Sherman's army, and the history of the end of the war in the Carolinas and Georgia is presented in detail and in so satisfactory a way that these pages will be often consulted for this particular part of the story of the Civil War.

FRANCIS W. SHEPARDSON.

HAZLITT'S VENETIAN REPUBLIC.*

Throughout a long lifetime, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt has been a devoted lover of Venice and

things Venetian. At the age of twenty-three he formed the idea of writing a history of the island state, and his first sketch appeared in 1858. This was revised and expanded two years later into a "History of the Venetian Republic" in four volumes, which, their author now tells us, " undoubtedly left their precursors far behind in merit and completeness, but were still excessively far, looking at them to-day, from realizing what such a work ought to have been." In the forty years that have since elapsed, the author's writings have dealt with other themes, but he has still read and accumu

THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC: its Rise, its Growth, and its Fall, 421-1797. By W. Carew Hazlitt. In two volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co.