bing at the form in which any good man chooses to clothe his faith. Deeper than the outer Reformation-form, or moral, of the ballad, lies the romantic sentiment that love is all-levelling, all-sanctifying; that its intense earnestness is absolute, and may reconcile and blend a ray of light shot from hell with the gleam of a saint's glory. The occult theological sense of the ballad is that of redemption through love, human love of heart for heart being strangely blended with the sentiment of divine love as we so often find it, not merely in the wild lays of the Eastern Sufis, or of Hafiz, but even in rapt monkish hymns to the Virgin. "A remarkable peculiarity of Oriental poetry," says Alger, "is the most unrestricted use of erotic phraseology to describe the religious life.” * 66 "THERE's never a spot in this wildered world Where His glory shines so dim, But shapes are strung, and hearts are warm, "GOD is the infinite bodiless beauty and love, whose attributes darken and shimmer through the veils and illusions of nature, and whose embrace, uniting the soul to Himself, is speechless bliss and endless rest." This persuasion of the wonderful force and truth and beauty of love in every form; this Oriental identification of earthly and divine love, is the true and only key to the marvellous "Shirhashirim," the song of Solomon, whose claim to be a divinely-inspired, or even religious poem, has * "The Poetry of the East." By WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. been so fiercely disputed from the days of Theodore of Mopsuestiæ down to those of Eichhorn and De Wette. Foolish theologians, not to remember that at the court of Solomon itself there was much coquetting not only with gazelle-eyed dames of the Moabites, Ammonites, and Sidonians, but also with those other belles, Ashtoreth and Milcom; those lorette goddesses, not exactly of the demimonde, but very truly of the mezzo-luna. But there is a third and deepest meaning of this Tannhauser song; the one I have endeavored to follow not only in this work, but in my deepest and most earnest view of life, and which I trust, dear reader, may be as pleasant and as serious to you, be you of the present day, or of future days far distant, when that which I now grasp at dimly and yearningly will be fully and clearly cried to all the world. It is the stern protest by some great heart, who passed away forgotten in the dark, cruel age which knew him not, against that devilish blindness which would not recognize that the beautiful and joyous, and all which is most truly gratifying to a purely natural and honest mind, is not and cannot be wicked. He who wrote it felt in his heart of hearts that there is in Beauty, in every form, as in integrity or love, a soundness and purity which identifies itself with absolute truth. And this Beauty, which combines everything true or attractive, is something great, highly important, a matter to rank with duty. From the second century down to the present day, man has always protested directly or indirectly in a thousand ways that the beautiful and pleasant is the chosen garb and form of all that is devilish, sinful, and vicious! Nay, never deny it, man; for, prevaricate as you will, that much rises above all quibbling to the knowledge of the impartial mind, and all denial will not prevent a future age from writing it down in history in more burning and glowing letters than are these poor words of mine. I have read Pharisaical cant on the "immorality" of art, I have heard it time and again that Satan makes all his attacks under the seductive wiles of grace and tenderness and beauty, I have seen it set down that all loveliness is "vanity." But I have, in spite of all this, almost invariably found Vice ugly and loathsome, and her efforts to be beautiful only resulting in a tattered, be-rouged, pitiful parody, fascinating only those whom no true beauty would ever allure. And if I have sometimes seen Selfishness, Slavishness, Innate Falsehood, Thievishness, and Vulgarity shrewdly cloak themselves under the beautiful, I have found on reflection that that beauty is generally artificial, and that the great majority of those fascinated are either ignorant, or themselves sympathetically inclined to falsehood. And, after all, what is it but a tribute to Beauty that Vice strives to use it? Certain it is, that Vice is not nearly so successful in such hypocrisy as when it puts on the dark robes of Religion. Could any one man combine in his own experience the knowledge of human rascality and guile possessed by an old detective, an Austrian diplomatist, a Parisian fatherconfessor, a Russian tschinovnik, or a Pennsylvania or Washington member of the Third House (and we must strike below earth's surface to find one more familiar with low corruption than that), he would confess that all knaves have a natural and instinctive repugnance for the truly beautiful. They may parade pictures, vaunt their taste; it is all but a cracked varnish, a shallow lie. Reader, have you in your experience found that knaves, hypocrites, cruel wretches, and liars are deeply penetrated by a love of the beautiful or of the healthy enjoyment of the best blessings of life? Have you found that sordidly avaricious, selfishly ambitious men are often inspired by that genial sense of loveliness and love, without which no true joyousness exists? And finally, do you not understand that while such bad men could never have lived in the rosy Fairy land of our sovereign and noble Queen of all Beauty and Art and Song; of dear Dame Venus; they might have flourished ripely at the court of Urban, among the intrigues and poisonings and gloomy horrors of Rome in the dark ages ? Every man who lives in the cultivation of his higher nature, be it as artist, poet, scholar, reformer, inventor, philanthropist, lover, friend, teacher, or well-doer of any kind, so that he do all from deeply-seated interest in what he does, is opening little by little the way to that golden Venusberg and to an eternal life of LOVE! CHAPTER THIRD. Ir may seem strange when I say that I know of no writer who has ever preached the gospel of Joyousness in all its health and purity. But the world has never been as yet fit to receive it Even now, years must pass ere it can be unfolded. I who write, you who read, live in an age when we only, from time to time, in calmer hours, hear from afar a few merry notes of the deep-ringing, fairy horn which glads the soul. Only now and then can a gleam of the sunlight pierce the dark clouds; and where it falls it must rest as yet, like such gleams in Ruysdael's pictures, on withered grass or damp rocks. The world is still in its earliest March spring. Winds blow freshly but wildly and chill; the nights are long and dreary, and during those nights the old grandmother crone, cowering in the sheltering antique chimney corner, still repeats to believing ears horrible legends, dreadful ballads. The elder or wiser ones, indeed, only half believe them—many laugh at them. But all, and most of all the children, still shiver at their grotesque, moving poetry; and when they make and sing new songs for themselves, the |