tion. Nine years later, when he began to see his career open before him, he complains of failings of soul, of lassitude, of vague longings, and of uneasiness caused by religious doubts. SainteBeuve, by the way, had been brought up as a strict Catholic; and it was, as we shall see, not until after years of internal struggles and continual hesitations, that he finally threw off his allegiance to that religion. In January 1829 he writes to the Abbé :

"As for religion, the more I think of it, the more I see that it is a thing of the soul between the individual man and God. Let it have its pomps, its external worship, its public protection. That is all that it can claim. It ad

dresses itself to souls, the only conquest in

which it is interested; and souls are not sincerely gained by the things of the world, which are not of the soul, but of matter."

In July of the same year he tells the Abbé that his ideas, which had been inclined toward the philosophism of the eighteenth century, had returned to a better path, and that though he and the Abbé would still disagree, especially on points of orthodoxy, still they would understand each other on the most es'sential questions of life better than ever. This change Sainte-Beuve attributes not to any theological or philosophical process, but to the influence of art and poetry. In the spring of that year Sainte-Beuve had published his first volume of poems, "Joseph Delorme. In May of the following year Sainte-Beuve reports further progress in piety in a letter which we have already quoted. In 1836 he suffers

"religiously and spiritually from the absence of faith, of a fixed rule, of a pole. I have the sentiment of these things but I have not the things themselves, and there are many reasons why I should not have them. I explain to my. self why I do not have them; .I analyze all that; and after the analysis is finished I am further than ever from having them. . . . A well-founded faith would be a cure for everything. But the more I think of it, the more (unless a divine change or a ray from heaven intervenes) I think that I am capable only of an eclectic Christianity, if I may so speak, choosing in Catholicism, pietism, Jansenism, Martinism."

At this time Sainte-Beuve was engaged on his famous history of Port-Royal. In 1844 Sainte-Beuve was elected a member of the French Academy. He announces the fact to the Abbé Barbe with satisfaction mingled with ennui. It changes

things only on the outside, he says, and true happiness is not there: even to take only the literary side, it is in the satisfaction of producing works such as one has conceived them. Then, passing to the subject of religion, or rather to conduct, he laments that his spiritual life is going on very much at haphazard, and all his good resolutions very soon come to grief. "I feel the evil, since I write to you in this way, and yet I continue, deteriora sequor; because the tide drifts and my bark has no anchor."

Finally in 1865, he tells the good Abbé Barbe, who had sent him a copy of his treatise on the immortality of the soul, that he has given up the combat.

He says:

"I understand, I listen, I reply feebly rather by doubts than by firm arguments; but, after all, I have never been able to form on this

grave subject a faith, a belief, a conviction which abides and does not waver and totter a moment after I have formed it."

When he died like a Stoic, four years later, Sainte-Beuve was according to his express wish buried without any religious ceremony.

The impression of bitterness, lassitude and ennui, which one received from almost every letter in the first two volumes of Sainte-Beuve's correspondence is confirmed by the new collection of letters.

Ennui begins to show itself in his very earliest letters, and becomes deeper and deeper as his years passed by and his life became more and more isolated.

"There comes," he says in one of his letters, "a sad inoment in life when we feel that we have attained all that we can reasonably hope to attain; that we have acquired everything to which we may reasonably aspire. I am in that position. I have obtained much more than my destiny at first offered, and I feel at the same time that this much is very little. The future promises me nothing; I expect nothing from ambition, nothing from happiness."

Elsewhere he says:

"In youth a world dwells within us; but as we advance in life it comes about that our own thoughts and sentiments can no longer fill our solitude or at least can no longer charm it . . at a certain age in life if your house is not peopled with children it becomes the abode of crazes and vices."

What were the crazes and vices which filled Sainte-Beuve's house may be seen in M. Pons's unsavory volume, SainteBeuve et ses inconnues."

In spite of his bitterness and moral

crookedness, Sainte-Beuve must not be judged too severely. His moral crookedness was due to exceptional physical causes, and it was rather external than due to actual ugliness of soul. To our mind, Sainte-Beuve, as we see him both in his letters and in his political and critical writings, is a singular example of the power which a man of strong will has to divide his existence, and to keep each phase of it distinct. To say that Sainte-Beuve's head was always more active than his heart is true in this sense his intellect was never unconscious of the impulses of his heart, whether they were bad or good. His one pas sion in life was literature, and his one ambition was to play an important literary rôle. His efforts were successful, but at the price of what persevering and uninterrupted labor! At the age of sixty he writes to a literary friend :

"I confess to you, between ourselves, that I am a little angry, not with the public, of whose treatment of me in general I have nothing to complain, but with society, such as it exists at present; and to think that a man who has been working and printing for forty years (that is the exact figure) should see himself condemned to continue indefinitely without any body being aware that each week he accomplishes a tour de force, and that while he is often the first to be amused at it, he nevertheless runs the risk of breaking a muscle one fine day or another. Physique is everything, even in the matter of intellect, and every week my physique is horribly strained. Every Tuesday morning I go down into a well, and I do not come up again until Friday evening, at I know not what o'clock. . . . I never set foot in the Academy, for want of time. When invited to dinner by a distinguished Englishman, a member of Parliament, I replied to him that it was impossible, vu que je n'étais pas un monsieur, ni un gentleman, mais un ouvrier à la pièce et à l'heure."

This letter seems to us to explain the whole character of his life. By constant and enthusiastic literary labor his intellect was developed to a marvellous degree of lucidity and activity; various circumstances, and not least among them his physical ugliness, led, as he says, to his stifling his passion; nature had given him very strong animal passions, and he indulged them knowingly and philosophically as he has related in an apologue concerning la Jeune Clady, in the first volume of his "Correspondance." Sainte-Beuve could not, like Sophocles in his old age, congratulate himself on

having got rid of a raging and furious master" (AVTTOVтa Kaì уplov SεσпóτηV); but his mind was no more affected by his passions than was the mind of Sophocles. As for his heart, we have seen that it had capacities of tenderness. May we not say that the higher the intellect, the higher the sentimental emotions?

Nothing could have been more tender and exquisite than his affection for men like Ernest Renan, Taine, Paul de Saint-Victor, Scherer, and for the younger school of novelists and poets, such as Flaubert, the brothers de Goncourt, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. His was a friendship of the highest and noblest kind. It is no reproach that he did not lavish it right and left.

When Jules Janin succeeded SainteBeuve at the Academy he rendered full justice to Sainte-Beuve the critic in his brilliant reception-speech. He spoke of his marvellous sagacity, his profound intuition, his subtle finesse, his patience in investigation, and of that gift of understanding everything, of penetrating everything, of feeling everything, of entering into the most opposite natures, of living their life, of thinking their thoughts, of descending to the bottom of the very innermost folds of their being, with a golden lamp in his hand, and of passing like the Hindoo gods through a perpetual series of incarnations and avatars. He admired that ever-wakeful curiosity, never satisfied as long as the very slightest detail escaped it. Sainte-Beuve, if he could have heard his own loge, would perhaps have found that while exalting the critic, Janin had glided too rapidly over the poet.

But

Sainte Beuve was a many-sided man, and many who have recently spoken of him have been unjust to his memory for the simple reason that they have examined only one or two sides of his life. In his correspondence for instance, and in the volumes of scandal and gossip, the melancholy and sensual aspects of the critic were most prominent. No one dares to contest his literary glory, it is true; but very few ever speak of his poems, into which he has thrown so much of his better self; and yet, as Théophile Gautier tells us, Sainte-Beuve almost regretted that his critical reputation had eclipsed his reputation as a poet.

"Le poëte mort jeune à qui l'homme survit," existed in him young and living up to the last, and it was with visible pleasure, says Gautier, that he used to recite to his intimate friends a fragment of some mysterious elegy, some sonnet of languor and of love which had found no place in his three collections of poems. A word about "Joseph Delorme," and above all about the "Pensées d'Août," caused him more joy than a long panegyric of

his last causerie de Lundi. Indeed, as a poet, Sainte-Beuve had been an inventor. He had struck a new and thoroughly modern note, and in his humble poetry, which by the sincerity of the sentiment and by its minute observation of nature reminds us of the verses of Wordsworth or of Cowper, he had traced out for himself modest and flowery paths where no one in France had ever trodden before him.-Temple Bar.

A nurse's song

Of lullaby, to bring her babe asleep. INFANCY is a great mystery. We know that we each have gone over that stage in human life, though even this much is not always quite easy to realize. But what else do we know about it? Something by observation, something by intuition; by experience hardly anything at all. We have as much personal acquaintance with a lake-dwelling or stone age infant as with our proper selves at the time when we were passing through the "avatar" of babyhood. The recollections of our earliest years are at most only as the confused remembrance of a morning dream, which at one end fades into the unconsciousness of sleep, while at the other it mingles with the realities of awaking. And yet, as a fact, we did not sleep through all the dawn of our life, nor were we unconscious; only we were different to what we now are: the term "thinking animal" did not then fit us so well. We were less reasonable and less material. Babies have a way of looking at you that makes you half suspect that they belong to a separate order of beings. You speculate as to whether they have not invisible wings, which drop off afterward as do the birth wings of the young ant. There is one thing, however, in which the baby is very human, very manlike. Of all new-born creatures he is the least happy. You may sometimes see a little child crying softly to himself with a look of world woe on his face that is positively appalling. Perhaps human existence, like a new pair of shoes, is very uncomfortable till one gets accustomed to it. Anyhow the child,

being for some reason or reasons exceedingly disposed to vex its heart, needs much soothing. In this highly civilized country a good many mothers are in the habit of going to the nearest druggist for the means to tranquillize their offspring, with the result that these latter are not unfrequently rescued from the sea of sorrows in the most final and expeditious. In less advanced states of society another expedient has been resorted to from time immemorial—to wit, the cradle song.

way.

Babies show an early appreciation of rhythm. They rejoice in measured noise, whether it takes the form of words, music, or the jingle of a bunch of keys. In the way of poetry we are afraid they must be admitted to have a perverse preference for what goes by the name of sing-song. It will be a long time before the infantine public are brought round. to Walt Whitman's views on versification. For the rest, they are not very critics. The small ancient Roman asked for nothing better than the song of his nurse

severe

we should go if we want to know what style of speech was in use among the humbler subjects of the Cæsars. The lettered language of the cultivated classes changes; the spoken tongue of the uneducated remains the same; or, if it too undergoes a process of change the rate at which it moves is to the other what the pace of a tortoise is to the speed of an express train. About eight hundred years ago a handful of Lombards went to Sicily, where they still preserve the Lombard idiom. The Ober-Engadiner could hold converse with his remote ancestors who took refuge in the Alps three or four centuries before Christ; the Aragonese colony at Alghero, in Sardinia, yet discourses in Catalan; the Roumanian language still contains terms and expressions which, though dissimilar to both Latin and standard Italian, find their analogues in the dialects of those eastward-facing "Latin plains" whence, in all probability, the people of Roumania sprang. But we must return to our lullabies.

There exists another Latin cradle song, not indeed dating from classical times, but which, like the laconic effusion of the Roman nurse, forms a sort of landmark in the history of poetry. It is composed in the person of the Virgin Mary, and was in bygone days believed to have been actually sung by her. Good authorities pronounce it to be one of the earliest poems extant of the Christian era:

Dormi fili, dormi! mater

Cantat unigenito :
Dormi, puer, dormi! pater
Nato clamat parvulo:
Millies tibi laudes canimus
Mille, mille, millies.

Dormi, cor, et meus thronus;
Dormi matris jubilum ;
Aurium cælestis sonus,

Et suave sibilum !
Millies tibi, etc., etc.

Ne quid desit, sternam rosis, Sternam fœnum violis, Pavimentum hyacinthis

Et præsepe liliis,

Millies tibi, etc., etc.

Si vis musicam, pastores Convocabo protinus ;

Illis nulli sunt priores;

Nemo canit castius.

Millies tibi laudes canimus

Mille, mille, millies.

Everybody who is in Rome at Christmas-tide makes a point of visiting Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, the church which stands to the right of the Capitol, where once the temple of Jupiter Feretrius is supposed to have stood. What is at that season to be seen in the Ara Coeli is well enough known-to one side a presepio, or manger, with the ass, the ox, St. Joseph, the Virgin, and the Child on her knee; to the other side a throng of little Roman children rehearsing in their infantine voices the story that is pictured opposite. The scene may be taken as typical of the cult of the Infant Saviour, which, under one form or another, has existed distinct and separable from the main stem of Christian worship ever since a Voice in Judæa bade man seek after the Divine in the stable of Bethlehem. It is almost a commonplace to say that Christianity brought fresh and peculiar glory alike to infancy and to motherhood. A new sense came into the words of the oracle

Thee in all children, the eternal Child

And the mother, sublimely though she appears against the horizon of antiquity, yet rose to a higher rank-because the highest-at the founding of the new faith.

Especially in art she left the second place that she might take the first. The sentiment of maternal love, as illustrated, as transfigured, in the love. of the Virgin for her Divine Child, furnished the great Italian painters with their master motif, while in his humble fashion the obscure folk poet exemplifies the selfsame thought. We are not sure that the rude rhymes of which the following is a rendering do not, convey, as well as can be conveyed in articulate speech, the glory and the grief of the Dresden Madonna :

My Lord Thou art :

Sleep, as I press Thee to my heart.
Poor the place where Thou dost lie,

Earth's loveliest !

-Yet take Thy rest;

Sleep, my Child, and lullaby.

It would be interesting to know if Mrs. Browning ever heard any one of the many variants of this lullaby before writing her poem "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus." The version given above was communicated to us by a resident at Vallauria, in the heart of the Ligurian Alps. In that district it is sung in the churches on Christmas Eve, when out abroad the mountains sleep soundly in their snows and a stray wolf is not an impossible apparition, nothing reminding you that you are within a day's journey of the citron groves of Mentone. An Old English carol, current in the time of Henry IV., has much affinity with the Italian sacred cradle songs:

Lullay lullay! lytel child, myn owyn dere fode;

How xalte thou sufferin be naylid on the

rode ...

In Sicily there are a great number of pious lullabies of a lighter and less serious sort. The Sicilian poet relates how once, when the Madunazza was mending St. Joseph's clothes, the Bambineddu cried in His cradle because no one was attending to Him; so the archangel Raphael came down and rocked Him, and said three sweet little words to Him, "Lullaby, Jesus, Son of Mary!" Another time, when the Child was older

and the mother was going to visit St. Anne, He wept because He wished to go too. The mother let Him accompany her on condition that He would not break St. Anne's bobbins. Yet another time the Virgin went to the fair to buy flax, and the Child said that He too would like to have a fairing. The Virgin buys Him a tambourine, and angels descend to listen to His playing. Such

stories are endless; some, no doubt, are invented on the spur of the moment, but the larger portion are scraps of old legendary lore. Not a few of the popular beliefs relating to the Infant Jesus may be traced to the apocryphal Gospels, which were extensively circulated during the earlier Christian centuries.

Professor Angelo de Gubernatis, in his Usi Natalizj," quotes a charming Spanish lullaby addressed to any ordinary child, but having reference to the Holy Babe:

The Baby Child of Mary,

Now cradle He has none;
His father is a carpenter,

And he shall make Him one.
The lady good St. Anna,

The lord St. Joachim,
They rock the Baby's cradle,

That sleep may come to Him.
Then sleep thou too, my baby,
My little heart so dear;
The Virgin is beside thee,

The Son of God is near.

When they are old enough to understand the meaning of words children are sure to be interested up to a certain. point by these saintly fables, but, taken as a whole, the songs of the South give us the impression that the coming of Christmas kindles the imagination of the Southern mother rather than that of the Southern child. On the north side of the Alps it is otherwise; there is scarcely need to say that in the Vaterland Christmas is before all the children's feast. We, who have borrowed many of the German yule-tide customs, have left out the Christkind;" and it is well that we have done so. Transplanted to foreign soil, that poetic piece of extrabelief would have become a mockery. As soon try to naturalize Kolyada, the Sclavonic white-robed New-year girl. The Christkind in His mythical attributes is nearer to Kolyada than to the Italian Bambinello. He belongs to the