creation of the world; ineffable in its mysteries, adorable in its sacraments, interesting in its history, celestial in its morality, rich and attractive in its ceremonial,- it is fraught with every species of beauty. Would you follow it in poetry? Tasso, Milton, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, will depict to you its miraculous effects. In belles-lettres, in oratory, history, and philosophy, what have not Bossuet, Fénélon, Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bacon, Pascal, Euler, Newton, Leibnitz, produced by its inspiration! In the arts, what masterpieces! If you examine it in its worship, what ideas are suggested by its antique Gothic churches, its admirable prayers, its impressive ceremonies! Among its clergy, behold all those scholars who have handed down to you the languages and the works of Greece and Rome; all those anchorets of Thebais; all those asylums for the unfortunate; all those missionaries to China, to Canada, to Paraguay; not forgetting the military orders whence chivalry derived its origin. Everything has been engaged in our cause- -the manners of our ancestors, the pictures of days of yore, poetry, even romances themselves. We have called smiles from the cradle, and tears from the tomb. Sometimes, with the Maronite monk, we dwell on the summits of Carmel and Lebanon; at others we watch with the Daughter of Charity at the bedside of the sick. Here two American lovers summon us into the recesses of their deserts; there we listen to the sighs of the virgin in the solitude of the cloister. Homer takes his place by Milton, and Virgil beside Tasso; the ruins of Athens and of Memphis form contrasts with the ruins of Christian monuments, and the tombs of Ossian with our rural churchyards. At St. Denis we visit the ashes of kings; and when our subject requires us to treat of the existence of God, we seek our proofs in the wonders of Nature alone. In short, we endeavor to strike the heart of the infidel in every possible way; but we dare not flatter ourselves that we possess the miraculous rod of religion which caused living streams to burst from the flinty rock.

IT

DESCRIPTION OF A THUNDER-STORM IN THE FOREST

From Atala

WAS the twenty-seventh sun since our departure from the Cabins: the lune de fer (month of July) had commenced its course, and all signs indicated the approach of a violent storm. Toward the hour when the Indian matrons hang up the plowshares on the branches of the junipers, and when the paroquets retire into the hollows of the cypress trees, the sky grew overcast. The vague sounds of solitude gradually ceased, the forests were wrapped in universal calm. Suddenly the pealing of distant thunder, re-echoing through these vast woods as old as the world itself, startled the ear with a diapason of noises sublime. Fearing to be overwhelmed in the flood, we hastily disembarked on the river's bank and sought safety in the seclusion of one of the forest glades.

The ground was swampy. We pressed forward with difficulty beneath a roof of smilax, among grape-vines and climbing plants of all kinds, in which our feet were continually entangled. The spongy soil trembled all around us, and every instant we were on the verge of being engulfed in the quagmires. Swarms of insects and enormous bats nearly blinded us; rattlesnakes were heard on all sides; and the wolves, bears, panthers, and badgers which had sought a refuge in this retreat filled the air with their roarings.

Meanwhile the obscurity increased; the lowering clouds entered beneath the shadows of the trees. The heavens were rent, and the lightning traced a flashing zigzag of fire. A furious gale from the west piled up the angry clouds in heavy masses; the mighty trees bowed their heads to the blast. Again and again the sky was rent, and through the yawning crevices one beheld new heavens and vales of fire. What an awful, what a magnificent spectacle! The trees were struck by lightning and ignited; the conflagration spread like a flaming garland; the showers of sparks and the columns of smoke ascended to the very heavens, which vomited their thunders into the sea of fire.

Then the Great Spirit enveloped the mountains in utter darkness; from the midst of this vast chaos came a confused roaring made by the tumult of many winds, the moaning of the trees, the howlings of ferocious beasts, the crackling of the flames,

and the descent of balls of fire which hissed as they were extinguished in the water.

The Great Spirit knows the truth of what I now say! At this moment I saw only Atala, I had no thought but for her. Beneath the bent trunk of a birch-tree, I succeeded in protecting her from the torrents of rain. Seated myself under the tree, supporting my well-beloved on my knees, and chafing her bare feet between my hands, I was even happier than the young wife who feels for the first time the consciousness of her motherhood.

THOMAS CHATTERTON

(1752-1770)

TO THE third quarter of the eighteenth century belongs the tragedy of the life of Thomas Chatterton, who, misunderstood and neglected during his brief seventeen years of poetic revery, has by the force of his genius and by his actual achievement compelled the nineteenth century, through one of its best critics, to acknowledge him as the father of the New Romantic school, and to accord him thereby a place unique among his contemporaries. His family and early surroundings serve in a way to explain his development. He was born at Bristol, a town rich in the traditions and monuments of bygone times. For nearly two hundred years the office of sexton to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe had been handed down in the family. At the time of the poet's birth it was held by a maternal uncle; for his father, a "musical genius, somewhat of a poet, an antiquary and dabbler in occult arts," was the first to aspire to a position above the hereditary one, and had taken charge of the Pyle free schools in Bristol. He died before his son's birth, and left his widow to support her two children by keeping a little school and by needlework. The boy, reserved and given to revery from his earliest years, was at first considered dull, but finally learned to spell by means of the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio and a blackletter Bible. He spent much of his time with his uncle, in and about the church. St. Mary Redcliffe, one of the finest specimens of mediæval church architecture in England, is especially rich in altar tombs with recumbent carved figures of knights, and ecclesiastic and civic dignitaries of bygone days. These became the boy's familiar associates, and he amused himself on his lonely visits by spelling out the old inscriptions on their monuments. There he got hold of some quaint oaken chests in the muniment room over the porch, filled with parchments old as the Wars of the Roses, and these deeds and charters of the Henrys and Edwards became his primers. In 1760 he entered Colston's "Blue-Coat" charity school, located in a fine old

THOMAS CHATTERTON

building of the Tudor times. The rules of the institution provided for the training of its inmates "in the principles of the Christian religion as laid down in the Church catechism," and in fitting them to be apprenticed in due course to some trade. During the six years of his stay, Chatterton received only the rudiments of a commonschool education, and found little to nourish his genius. But being a voracious reader, he went on his small allowance through three circulating libraries, and became acquainted with the older English poets, and also read history and antiquities. He very early entertained dreams of ambition, without however finding any sympathy; so he lived in a world of his own, conceiving before the age of twelve the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary cierk of the fifteenth century, and his patron Master William Canynge, a former mayor of Bristol whose effigy was familiar to him from the tomb in the church. This fiction, which after his death gave rise to the celebrated controversy of the 'Rowley Poems,' matured at this early age as a boy's life-dream, he fashioned into a consistent romance, and wove into it among the prose fragments the ballads and lyrics on which his fame as poet now rests. His earliest literary forgery was a practical joke played on a credulous pewterer at Bristol, for whom he fabricated a pedigree dating back to the time of the Norman Conquest, which he professed to have collected from ancient manuscripts. It is remarkable as the work of a boy not yet fourteen. He was rewarded with a crown piece, and the success of this hoax encouraged him further to play upon the credulity of his townspeople, and to continue writing prose and verse in pseudoantique style.

In 1767 he was bound apprentice to John Lambert, attorney. The office duties were light. He spent his spare time in poetizing, and sent anonymously transcripts from professedly old poems to the local papers. Their authorship being traced to him, he now claimed that his father had found numerous old poems and other manuscripts in a coffer of the muniment room at Redcliffe, and that he had transcribed them. Under guise of this fiction he produced, within the two years of his apprenticeship, a mass of pseudo-antique dramatic, lyric, and descriptive poems, and fragments of local and general history, connected all with his romance of the clerk of Bristol. A scholarly knowledge of Middle English was rare one hundred and thirty years ago, and the self-taught boy easily gulled the local antiquaries. He even deceived Horace Walpole, who, dabbling in mediævalism, had opened the way for prose romances with his 'Castle of Otranto,' a spurious antique of the same time in which Chatterton had placed his fiction. Walpole at first treated him courteously, even offering to print some of the poems. But when Gray and Mason