OVER THE SEA. I AM looking back through the days and weeks Speaks with a murmur of mournful sighs, In a voice that carries the sound of tears, And lighting the lamp of its passionate eyes, It opens the shroud of the buried years. The wind is blowing up from the wold, The stars are shining down on the sea, But the wind is bleak, and the light is cold, And 'tis only of pain they speak to me. For the wind once toyed with a silken tress, And the stars once shone on a saintly face; And how can a faithful love grow less? Or a new love take the old love's place? The sea is swirling up to my feet, Singing its monody, soft and low; But the song of the sea is deadly sweet, For I mind how it slew me years ago. We had been parted, I and she, With many a hundred miles between, And now she was coming across the sea, (Oh, the sky was blue and the waves were green !) Coming- and yet she never came ! Meeting and yet we met no more! She heard me not when I called her name, Though the dead might have heard me on that shore. Oh, love, though my eyes but dimly see, In the day when the sea gives up her dead. PASSING MORVEN. July 31, 1883. Down Mull's dark sound, from port to port, And silent, 'mid a motley throng O land of Morven dearer far To me than fairest spot of earth: O land on which my eyes first looked, The land that gave my fathers birth. Scanning to-day thy winding shores, Although as through a haze of tears, I feel anew thy wondrous spell, Rich heirloom of a hundred years. I see the kirk-crowned sward of Kiel, I seem to see in visions fair, I hear the old, familiar sounds That broke, but did not mar the calm: By craggy Dhucraig - Achnahaw- To where, the midmost channel reached, And ev'ry spot on which I gaze, From sandy beach to cairn-topped ben, Of that bright past forever fled, Lo, the Grey Isles ! our paddles forge From The British Quarterly Review. world, the MS. was entrusted to a committee, who conceived themselves at liberty to retrench, to prune, and to modify, to shape what was formless so giving of necessity a different result to the first idea and to weaken what was strong. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of the wholly different minds of the men affected dorcet as an editor, and Voltaire as a by the "Pensées," they have had Conwork on Port Royal, brought to bear on commentator; Sainte-Beuve, in his great AMONG the books which have moved, and continue to move the world, is one which considered in itself and in its history is unique. For, properly speaking, it is not a book at all, but rather an undi. gested heap of detached thoughts and fragments for a book which was only partially written, if even fully planned. Pascal took in hand his great work against atheists and unbelievers in the thirty-fifth them and on the character of Pascal the year of his age, after finishing the "Prowhole power vincial Letters" in the spring of 1657. A of his searching and luminous criticism, while no less than three modern certain languor had succeeded to that vast intellectual effort, carried to so triumphant and Molinier, have gone back to the orig editors in France, MM. Faugère, Havet, a conclusion, and, always in feeble health, inal MSS., have discussed each line and he was able during that year only to word and marginal mark, have arranged sketch in part the course his work would and rearranged each fragment to see take, to write fully, and with great elabo where best it would fit, and, in a word, ration, certain paragraphs and portions of have treated this book, which is no book, definite chapters, and to make notes, afterwards to be expanded viva voce for lec- as one of the sacred scriptures of the world. These men have labored, and entures at Port Royal. But in the following tering into their labors we may study the spring he was attacked by neuralgia in the face, which proved to be the begin-pleasure and profit, and find order arise thoughts, the man, and the time with ning of other nervous affections, taking from him all power of sustained labor, racking his body with pain, and obliging him either to depend not a little on the aid of an illiterate servant as amanuensis, or to jot down his own thoughts on separate slips of paper, which he was never able to work out nor to fit into their place. These have lain strewn, so to speak, on the world like the feathers scattered by out of the disorder. monachism and asceticism, a modern As justifying and explaining mediæval writer has well said: "The very ferocity and foulness of the time, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the medieval saints. The world was so bad that to be saints at all they were compelled to go out of the world." In the same manner the terri the fairy Disorder; it has been the task of many editors to try and restore them ac-ble laxity of what is called society in cording to the plan in Pascal's mind, not fully known to them, and only in part described by him to his most intimate friends. Then, when the pen fell from the dead hand, and his family determined that the thoughts so left should be given to the France a laxity which had invaded the sanctity of cloistered life, and poisoned the pure wells of religion - called out the austere holiness of Port Royal, and of the lives associated with it during, roughly speaking, the last century of its existence. Among these lives that of Pascal is the one which most naturally, even more than that of Le grand Arnauld, or La mère Angélique, rises to our mind when we hear the name of the great abbey. The Cistercian Convent of Port Royal des Champs is, or rather was, for scarce one stone is left upon another, about eigh * C. Kingsley, preface to The Saint's Tragedy. Founded in the first decade of the thirteenth century, and presumably fulfilling its functions as a place of pious retreat and prayer for many years, it had become lax and irregular at the opening of the sixteenth century. The abbot of Citeaux, visitor of the convent, made his formal visitation in 1504, and found, first, that the divine offices were ill sung, and celebrated with extreme irregularity. Before all things, he says, they must get an abbey clock as one means to punctuality. Second — which would seem much more important in these days the dormitories were ill arranged; in fact, there was a common dormitory, the rule of strict se clusion was not at all observed. Thirdly, the nuns wore fashionable dresses with wide sleeves and trains, the price of which, said a preacher of those days, would have maintained a whole poor family; and when the fashion changed they thought that they did much for God in making these dresses, used and soiled though they were, into altar coverings. They even wore jewels, forgetting that a nun was dead, and that trinkets were ill suited to a corpse. In 1572 and 1574 further visitations showed a still worse state of things, under a careless abbess who was threatened with excommunication, and who ended by deserting her convent on the pretext that she was troubled by the wars of the League. She betook herself to an abbey in Normandy, where, presumably, she was less looked after. These visitations discovered irreverent services, sacraments disregarded, confessions neglected, and these made, when made, to any priest' and not to him appointed by authority, sick sisters uncared for, the food of the community stinted, together with grave personal imputations against the abbess. The lady who succeeded her when she ran away reformed the kitchen at any rate, and does not appear to have been open to blame. But - and nothing shows the whole state of feeling outside and inside the convent more than this-she took as assistant superior, with, as it would seem, the vested right of succession, a little girl aged seven years, Jaqueline Marie Arnauld, whose parents had caused her to enter into religion for that end. The whole circumstances were amaz ingly discreditable, and go far to justify the cynical remark of a distinguished judge of our own days, who has said that "it is always the very best persons who do the very worst things." M. Antoine Arnauld, the father of the infant nun, caine of a good family in what would now be called the upper-middle class; an advocate in great practice, a man esteemed by all as honorable and religious, selected by the University of Paris as their counsel against the Jesuits, the confidential adviser of half the great world of Paris. He had ten children, and not unnaturally in those days looked to the convent as the destiny of some of his daughters; since to a man in his position to ask for them the post of abbess, or at least of assistant superior, was to gain it. The appointments were in the patronage of the crown, and it was easily arranged that the abbess of Port Royal should nominate Jaqueline Arnauld as her assistant, and that a similar post at St. Cyr should be filled by Jeanne, a still younger sister; the office of abbess then vacant being given to a lady who was bound to resign when Jeanne reached the age of twenty. The future abbess of Port Royal was placed for her religious education at yet another Cistercian abbey, that of Manbuisson, the superior of which was a pluralist, being also abbess of Bertaucourt near Amiens. These high positions Madame Angélique d'Estrées owed not to any exalted spirituality — such is scarcely to be expected when ecclesiastical offices are crown appointments - but to the fact that she was the sister of La belle Gabri- | his part in the masquerades, which were a elle, the mistress of Henry IV. The easy favorite diversion of the community. The manners of the time placed no barrier nuns also wore masks on occasions, and, between the intercourse of the cloistered which seems to have been considered allady and her of the court, who often re- most as worldly, gloves. Much of this, tired for a while to her sister's convent however, was at once set to rights. Mafor country air; and Madame Angélique dame Arnauld, having turned out the disd'Estrées obtained the second abbey as solute nun of thirty-three, found a prioress, being within an easy distance from Paris, a Madame du Pont, to take management not too far for a visit from the king when of the house, which she did fairly well, hunting. Under this singular instructress and being herself a busy, practical woman, Jaqueline Arnauld passed her novitiate, she and other members of the family were and at the age of nine made her profes- constantly driving over from Paris withsion, changing her name to Angélique in out notice to visit the young superior. compliment to Madame d'Estrées. It was While manifesting no remarkable sanctity and is common that a nun on quitting the – how was it possible? — La mère Angé. world should take a new name, but there|lique said her offices regularly, and read a was a special reason in the case under good deal - romances and Roman history consideration. For when the original ar- being her chief study. M. Arnauld, when rangement that Jaqueline should after the law courts were not sitting, came to wards succeed to Port Royal was proposed stay occasionally at the nunnery, and the at Rome, the ratification of the royal ap great patron of the family, King Henry pointment was absolutely refused by the IV., knowing that the father of the abbess pope, and the whole affair was for some was there, himself arrived, during one of time in abeyance. But now the abbess his hunting excursions. The little abbess, was dead, and without sanction from preceded by her cross-bearer and followed Rome the assistant superior could not by her train of nuns, went to meet his take her place. In applying to the pope Majesty, and had prudently put on pat all mention of Jaqueline Arnauld was tens, so that the king thought her very. dropped, and Angélique was named to his tall for her age. He had never even afHoliness, accompanied by the false state- fected to believe the fiction which had ment that her age was seventeen. This been presented to the pope. age seemed scarce sufficient, and it needed all the diplomacy of Cardinal Ossat to carry the point and gain consent at last to the king's nomination. It is difficult to see why, if a direct falsehood were to be told at all, the Arnaulds and their supporters drew the line at seventeen, and shrank from declaring Jaqueline to be of any age which might have satisfied the pope without further trouble. The condition of the community over which this infant was called to preside was scandalous beyond measure. There were thirteen nuns, of whom the eldest was thirty-three, and as she was the eldest, so she was the worst of the whole, and Madame Arnauld, mother of the abbess, had to exert her influence to have her removed. Religious ceremonies had been reduced to their lowest possible measure, the official confessor could barely read, but he was able more intelligently to take It is not strange that this life of routine undignified by devotion, yet undiversified by the distractions which had made the life of worse nuns endurable to them, became intolerable to Angélique; she saw a way of escape in the fact that her profes. sion had been made before the lawful age. She determined to leave the religious life; and, as a preliminary, good Catholic though she was, determined to run away and take shelter with her Huguenot aunts.. She was only prevented doing so by an illness, during which she was removed to her mother's care and tenderly nursed. Her father, becoming at any rate partly aware of what was passing in his daughter's mind, insisted on her signing a paper in which she renewed her vows; and she returned to her post, still weak, but more resigned, touched by the pleasure with which the nuns saw her return, and disposed to find comfort and rest in reading religious books, rather than romances, as heretofore. tain day they were wrought up to a great renunciation, and renewing their vows of poverty, cast all their little private possessions into the common stock. It were long and needless to relate all that happened thereafter in the conventual reform the new and unaccustomed sanctity of the cloister, even against M. Arnauld himself, the rigid enforcement of poverty, the seclusion even within the seclusion of the convent in which the abbess and the stricter nuns shut themselves, and with. all this, as the inner motive of the whole, the passionate fervor of religion which steeped the souls of La mère Angélique and of those who fell under her influence. But the great awakening of her own religious life, and as a consequence that of others, was at hand. A certain Père Basile passing by one evening, came to the convent, and offered to preach. The abbess, then just coming in from the garden, refused, as the hour was late, but she afterwards consented. His subject was the humility of the Son of God in his birth and in his cradle. But how he treated the subject, or what were his words, the Mère Angélique could never tell. She only knew that her heart was touched by divine grace, and that the hour was as the dawn, the light whereof increased unto the perfect day. The instrument of this conversion was strangely ill adapted to carry on the work begun by his means. He was dissolute in his life, he had already proved the cause of scandal in more than one religious house, so that any help from such a man to a girl of sixteen wishing to reform herself and her convent was out of the question. Nor did much assistance come from other advisers to whom she turned. One was too sterp and another too little able to understand what this new crisis in a spiritual life meant; so that, thrown on her own resources, La mère Angélique plunged into excesses of unchecked austerity. Neither from within nor without could she gain aid or sympa-tance in our rapid sketch of the reform at thy, for her father disapproved of the attempted reform, as well as of its exaggerated asceticism. But on All Saints Day, 1608, after she had returned from a visit to her home more sad and discouraged than she had ever been, and as it would seem six months after the visit of the itinerant Capuchin, there came another outpouring of grace, which made all clear, and was the true beginning of what concerns us in the history of Port Royal. This time the moving cause was the preaching of a Bernardine monk, for M. Arnauld had found means to keep away the too exciting Capuchin. He spoke on the beatitude," Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake," and the shaft from his bow aimed at a venture was driven home where it struck by one of the nuns, who said to the abbess, "You, madam, if you choose, may be one of the blessed who suffer for righteous ness." Hence came struggles of spirit and of conscience which once more seriously undermined her health, also entreaties and discussions with the sisters, till on a cer From Port Royal the reform spread. The most relaxed convents, even Manbuisson, still under the profligate rule of Madame d'Estrées, felt the influence of, or were directly set in order by La mère Angélique; and, refuting the proverb that a prophet has no honor in his own country, the whole Arnauld family one after another succumbed to the holy zeal of this first convert. Six sisters became nuns of Port Royal, two brothers, and four neph ews were specially connected with it. La mère Angélique was fortunate in the confessors and directors whom she chose in this time of change, her spiritual advis ers for many years; but neither their names nor they themselves are of impor It Port Royal. Nor is it necessary to dis- It was a part of the peculiarity of this religious revival, extending over many years, of which the above is a hurried sketch, that it necessarily affected the |