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For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

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Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

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"THE THINGS THAT ARE MORE
EXCELLENT."

As we wax older on this earth,

Till many a toy that charmed us seems Emptied of beauty, stripped of worth,

And mean as dust and vain as dreams

For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
Some recompense the Fates have sent :
Thrice lovelier shine the things that last,
The things that are more excellent.
Tired of the Senate's barren brawl,
An hour with silence we prefer,
Where statelier rise the woods than all
Yon towers of talk at Westminster.
Let this man prate and that man plot,
On fame or place or title bent:
The votes of veering crowds are not
The things that are more excellent.
Shall we perturb and vex our soul
For "
wrongs " which no true freedom

mar,

Which no man's upright walk control,
And from no guiltless deed debar?
What odds, though tonguesters heal, or
leave

Unhealed, the grievance they invent?
To things, not phantoms, let us cleave-
The things that are more excellent.

Nought nobler is than to be free:

The stars of heaven are free because

In amplitude of liberty

Their joy is to obey the laws.
From servitude to freedom's name
Free thou thy mind in bondage pent;
Depose the fetish, and proclaim

The things that are more excellent.
And in appropriate dust be hurled
That dull, punctilious god whom they
That call their tiny clan the World
Serve and obsequiously obey:
Who con their ritual of Routine,

With minds to one dead likeness blent,
And never ev'n in dreams have seen
The things that are more excellent.

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And still doth life with starry towers

Lure to the bright, divine ascent !Be yours the things ye would be ours The things that are more excellent. The grace of friendship-mind and heart Linked with their fellow heart and mind;

The gains of science, gifts of art;

The sense of oneness with our kind;
The thirst to know and understand-
A large and liberal discontent :
These are the goods in life's rich hand,
The things that are more excellent.
In faultless rhythm the ocean rolls,

A rapturous silence thrills the skies;
And on this earth are lovely souls,
That softly look with aidful eyes.
Though dark, O God, thy course and track,
I think thou must at least have meant
That nought which lives should wholly
lack

The things that are more excellent.
Spectator.
WILLIAM WATSON.

A DYING NORSEMAN.
A.D. 1037.

WHAT can these new gods give me?
I have Odin and Thor,

Odin, the wise all father;

Great Thor, the mighty in war. There are gods enough in Valhalla, And to me they ever gave ear, Speak no more of your white Christ, We want no strange gods here. This new god, he cannot give me

Once more the arm of the strong, Strong arm that hath failed me never,

Though the fight were stubborn and long. Can he give me again the glory of youth? Go down with me to the sea, And harry the shore of Britain; Ah! never more shall I see The white sails spreading their wings, Each spring, as we left our home, And day by day drew southward,

I can almost feel the foam.

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From The Fortnightly Review.

RAPHAEL.1

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from the first its influence must have overflowed so small a place. In the By his immense productiveness, by case of the lucky Raphael, for once, the the even perfection of what he pro- actual conditions of early life had been duced, its fitness to its own day, its hold suitable, propitious, accordant to what on posterity, in the suavity of his life, one's imagination would have required some would add in the opportunity for the childhood of the man. He was of his early death, Raphael may seem a born amid the art he was, not to transsignal instance of the luckiness, of the form, but to perfect, by a thousand good fortune, of genius. Yet if we reverential retouchings. In no palace, follow the actual growth of his powers, however, but in a modest abode, still within their proper framework, the age shown, containing the workshop of his of the Renaissance, an age of which, father, Giovanni Santi. But here, too, we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed though in frugal form, art, the arts, itself, and found perhaps its chief en- were present. A store of artistic objoyment in the attitude of the scholar, jects was, or had recently been, made in the enthusiastic acquisition of knowl- there, and now especially, for fitting edge for its own sake, -if we thus view patrons, religious pictures in the old Raphael and his works in their environ-Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of ment we shall find even his seemingly the Apennines Giovanni's works remechanical good fortune hardly distin- main; and there is one of them, worth guishable from his own patient disposal study, in spite of what critics say of its of the means at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeed he is, he is also one of the world's typical scholars, with Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius-triumphant power of genius.

crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again, and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be the cause what it may, among all the many causes of sorrow inherent in the ideal of materUrbino, where this prince of the nity, human or divine. But if you keep Renaissance was born in 1483, year also in mind when looking at it the facts of of the birth of Luther, leader of the Raphael's childhood, you will recognize other great movement of that age, the in his father's picture, not the anticiReformation — Urbino, under its dukes pated sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" of the house of Montefeltro, had where- over the dead son, but the grief of a withal just then to make a boy of simple household over the mother hernative artistic faculty from the first a self taken early from it. That may willing learner. The gloomy old for- have been the first picture the eyes of tress of the feudal masters of the town the world's great painter of Madonnas had been replaced, in those later years rested on; and if he stood diligently of the Quattro-cento, by a consum- before it to copy, and so copying, quite mate monument of Quattro-cento taste, unconsciously, and with no disloyalty a museum of ancient and modern art, to his original, refined, improved, subthe owners of which lived there, gal-stituted-substituted himself, in fact, lantly at home, amid the choicer flow- his finer self, he had already struck the ers of living humanity. The ducal persistent note of his career. As with palace was, in fact, become nothing his age, it is his vocation, ardent worker less than a school of ambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of war and peace. Raphael's connection with it seems to have become intimate, and 1 A lecture delivered to the University Extension

Students: Oxford, August 2nd, 1892.

as he is, to enjoy himself-to enjoy himself amiably, and to find his chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. And one by one, one after another, his masters, the very greatest of them, go

to school to him.

It was so especially with the artist of | might seem, for its own sake, a whole whom Raphael first became certainly a octave of fantastic crime—not merely learner - Perugino. Giovanni Santi had under brilliant fashions and comely died in Raphael's childhood, too early persons, but under fashions and perto have been in any direct sense his sons, an outward presentment of life teacher. The lad, however, from one and of themselves, which had a kind of and another, had learned much, when, immaculate grace and discretion about with his share of the patrimony in them, as if Raphael himself had already hand, enough to keep him, but not brought his unerring gift of selection to tempt him from scholarly ways, he bear upon it all for motives of art. came to Perugia, hoping still further to With life in those streets of Perugia, as improve himself. He was in his eigh- with nature, with the work of his masteenth year, and how he looked just ters, the mere exercises of his fellowthen you may see in a drawing of his students, his hand rearranges, refines, own in the University galleries, of renews, as if by simple contact; but somewhat stronger mould than less gen- was met here half-way in its renewing uine likenesses might lead you to ex-office by some special aptitude for such pect. There is something of a fighter grace in the subject itself. Seemingly in the way in which the nose springs innocent, full of natural gaiety, eterfrom the brow between the wide-set, nally youthful, those seven and more meditative eyes. A strenuous lad! ca- deadly sins, embodied and attired in pable of plodding, if you dare apply that just the jaunty dress then worn, enter word to labor so impassioned as his now and afterwards as spectators, or to any labor whatever done at Perugia, assistants, into many a sacred forecentre of the dreamiest Apennine scen- ground and background among the ery. Its various elements (one hardly friends and kinsmen of the Holy Famknows whether one is thinking of Italian | ily, among the very angels, gazing, connature or of Raphael's art in recounting versing, standing firmly and unashamed. them), the richly planted lowlands, the During his apprenticeship at Perugia sensitive mountain lines in flight one Raphael visited and left his work in beyond the other into clear distance, the more modest places round about, along cool yet glowing atmosphere, the ro- those seductive mountain or lowland mantic morsels of architecture, which roads, and copied for one of them Perulends to the entire scene I know not gino's "Marriage of the Virgin sigwhat expression of reposeful antiquity, nificantly, did it by many degrees better, arrange themselves here as for set pur- with a very novel effect of motion pose of pictorial effect, and have gone everywhere, and that grace which natuwith little change into his painted back-ral motion evokes, and for a temple grounds. In the midst of it, on titanic in the background a lovely bit of old Roman and Etruscan foundations, his friend Bramante's sort of architecthe later Gothic town had piled itself ture, the true Renaissance or perfected along the lines of a gigantic land of Quattro-cento architecture. He goes rock, stretched out from the last slope on building a whole lordly new city of of the Apennines into the plain. Be- the like as he paints to the end of his tween its fingers steep, dark lanes wind life. That subject, we may note, as we down into the olive-gardens; on the leave Perugia in Raphael's company, finger-tips military and monastic build- had been suggested by the famous ers had perched their towns. A place mystic treasure of its cathedral church, as fantastic in its attractiveness as the the marriage ring of the Blessed Virgin human life which then surged up and herself. down in it in contrast to the peaceful Raphael's copy had been made for scene around. The Baglioni who ruled the little old Apennine town of Citta di there had brought certain tendencies of Castello; and another place he visits at that age to a typical completeness of this time is still more effective in the expression, veiling crime-crime, it development of his genius. About his

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twentieth year he comes to Siena - traced back from him to Pinturicchio, as that other rocky Titan's hand, just lifted that painter worked on those vast, wellout of the surface of the plain. It is lighted walls of the cathedral library at the most grandiose place he has yet Siena, at the great series of frescoes seen; has not forgotten that it was once illustrative of the life of Pope Pius the the rival of Florence; and here the Second. It had been a brilliant perpatient scholar passes under an influ- sonal history, in contact now and again ence of somewhat larger scope than with certain remarkable public events Perugino's. Perugino's pictures are for a career religious yet mundane, you the most part religious contemplations, scarcely know which, so natural is the painted and made visible, to accompany blending of lights, of interest in it. the action of divine service - a visible How unlike that Peruginesque conceppattern to priests, attendants, worship- tion of life in its almost perverse otherpers, of what the course of their invisi- worldliness, which Raphael now leaves ble thoughts should be at those holy behind him, but, like a true scholar, will functions. Learning in the workshop not forget. Pinturicchio then had inof Perugino to produce the like such vited his remarkable young friend works as the Ansidei Madonna- to hither, "to assist him by his counsels,' produce them very much better than who, however, pupil-wise, after his his master, Raphael was already be- habit also learns much as he thus ascome a freeman of the most strictly sists. He stands depicted there in perreligious school of Italian art, the so devout Umbrian soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled by the naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astir in the artistic soul everywhere else in Italy. The lovely work of Perugino, very lovely, at its best. of the early Raphael also, is in fact "conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day, though not unpleasantly. In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of the "Cambio," the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic rule of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their places indeed side by side with the figures of the New Testament, but are no Romans or Greeks, nor the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them, warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, but still contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in his church-work; or, say, dreams - monastic dreams thin, do-nothing creatures, conjured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never broke through the meditative circle of the Middle Age.

Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits a wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that power-the power of developing a story in a picture, or series of pictures - may be

son in the scene of the canonization of Saint Catherine; and though his actual share in the work is not to be defined, connoisseurs have felt his intellectual presence, not at one place only, in touches at once finer and more forcible than were usual in the steadygoing, somewhat Teutonic, Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty years. The meek scholar you see again, with his tentative sketches and suggestions, had more than learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually to its store. Henceforward Raphael will be able to tell a story in a picture, better, with a truer economy, with surer judgment, more naturally and easily than any one else.

And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps most deeply impressed with medieval character- -an impress it still retains-grotesque, parti-colored -parti-colored, so to speak, in its genius-Satanic, yet devout of humor, as depicted in its old chronicles, and beautiful withal, dignified. It is here that Raphael becomes for the first time aware of that old pagan world, which had already come to be so much for the art schools of Italy. There were points, as we saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its day. Amid those intensely Gothic surroundings in the cathe

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