man whom he had most vilely wronged! — and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed! - he did not err! there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment!"

*

"Peace, Hester, peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy sternness. "It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all that we suffer. By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man."

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of gathering herbs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

"As Wordsworth's poetry is, in my judgment, the most important work done in verse in our language during the century, so Emerson's essays are the most important work done in prose." - Matthew Arnold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston of an old Puritan family. He was educated at Harvard and became a Unitarian minister in his native city. After three years, finding that he could not hold the same belief as his congregation, he abandoned the ministry, courageously sacrificing his position to his change of convictions. Emerson was, on his own admission, a transcendentalist, or extreme realist, and pantheist. The peculiar quality of his mind has been likened to German mysticism and the visions of the Neo-Platonists, while the Hon. Anson Burlingame declared that "there are twenty thousand Ralph Waldo Emersons in China."

His principal works are "Essays,' Representative Men," "English Traits," "Lectures and Addresses" and "Poems." His representative men are Plato, the Philosopher; Swedenborg, the Mystic; Montaigne, the Skeptic; Shakespeare, the Poet; Napoleon, the Man of the World, and Goethe, the Writer. It is not as an essayist, poet or philosopher that Emerson will be best remembered; there was something in himself that compelled admiration. He appears to have been a powerful personality, for he certainly influenced many of the finer minds of New England, and no doubt he led a noble and intellectual life. His exquisite æstheticism took away the grossness of the results to which his materialistic philosophy leads. Despite his bad philosophy and want of revealed religion, we discover in his verse and prose an exquisite sense of beauty, which renders his works most enticing and most dangerous.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook;
The purple petals fallen in the pool

Made the black waters with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for being.

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew;

But in my simple ignorance suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876). — Orestes A. Brownson was born at Stockbridge, Vermont, in 1803. He was adopted by an aged Puritan couple, who trained him according to their rigid ideas of propriety. He says of himself that, "debarred from all the sports, plays and amusements of children, he had the manners, the tone and tastes of an old man before he was a boy." At an early age he had learned to read, and from his fourteenth year he was obliged to support himself by hard labor. For a short time he studied at an academy in Ballston, N. Y., but it was principally by his own efforts and his constant. application to reading, reflecting and writing that he developed his latent genius.

His interesting story, "The Convert," relates his religious wanderings. A Congregationalist, a Presbyterian, a Universalist, a Rationalist and a Socialist, he was everything in turn and satisfied with nothing until he found in the Catholic Church the solution of all his doubts — the solace of all his troubles. Henceforward all the efforts of his pen were devoted to the defense of Catholic principles. Brownson's Quarterly Review was founded nearly one year before his conversion; this Review he supported almost single-handed during twenty years. The want of a regular course of studies in his youth, the lack of a thorough Catholic training and the necessity of hurrying his articles through the press, made him liable to hasty and crude statements, to inaccuracies and errors, to changes and modifications in his views and opinions. His faith, however, never faltered, and his conduct in regard to the sacraments and practices of the Church was always that of a fervent Catholic.

His principal works are "The American Republic,"

"The Convert," "Charles Elwood," "The Spirit Rapper" and his "Essays."

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890). — John Boyle O'Reilly was born at Dowth Castle, County Meath, Ireland, June 28, 1844. His father, William David O'Reilly, was the master of the Netterville Institution and was a fine scholar. His mother, Eliza Boyle, was nearly related to Colonel John Allen, famous among the Irish rebels of '98. Young O'Reilly had from his father a thorough scholastic training, while from his mother he inherited poetic genius and a strong passion of patriotism. The circumstances and surroundings of his boyhood were well calculated to inspire in him those yearnings for liberty and devotion to country which seven centuries have shown to be ineradicable in the Irish people.

He is a representative of much that is peculiarly characteristic of our own age and time. His life is a romance stranger than the wildest dreams of fiction. At the age` of thirteen he was a student in school at Drogheda, Ireland; at seventeen a stenographer in England; at nineteen a private soldier in the Irish Hussars; at twenty-two lying in a dungeon in Dublin, condemned to death for treason against Great Britain; at twenty-four a nameless convict in a criminal colony in West Australia.

On November 3, 1869, John Boyle O'Reilly landed in the United States penniless. He was only twenty-five years of age, of splendid physique, brilliant and courageous. After spending a short time in Philadelphia and New York he went to Boston and obtained employment on the Pilot. In 1873 he published his first volume of poems, "Songs of the Southern Seas." This was followed by "Songs, Legends and Ballads;" "Moondyne," his famous novel; "Statues in the Block and Other