his last illness very anxious for confession and absolution. When reminded that this was inconsistent with his expressed views he answered: "I don't care about that. I can make nothing of doctrines, but I want a confessor to give me absolution for my sins. I believe in a future life. What I want now is forgiveness for my sins, that's all." But he did not carry out his intention of sending for a confessor. About the finest service rendered by this volume is its interpretative explanation of Rossetti's poems one by one, making them easily intelligible and exhibiting their beauties like jewels. The discussion of his writingspoems, prose, translations and letters-fills about a hundred pages. In Fræterita, Ruskin wrote, "Rossetti was really not an Englishman, but a great Italian tormented in the Inferno of London." A marked trait in his character was a sort of kingliness, which without any air of assumption gave him personal dominance in every circle and scene. His magnetism made him master even over most original and independent personalities. It dominated William Morris absolutely for a time, it determined the art of Burne-Jones, it upset Ruskin, it profoundly affected Swinburne's poetry. This influence was not intentionally or consciously exerted; it seemed hypnotic. He did not seek to tyrannize. He was intensely affectionate, enthusiastically loyal to his friends, an irresistible comrade. There was entire absence of æsthetic pretentiousness and of the prophetic manner which was worn by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Carlyle. Mr. Benson tells us that Rossetti's nature was entirely penetrated and dominated by the beauty of the world. But it was one special form of beauty that most overpowered his spirit. Just as in the case of Morris it was the love of the kindly and gracious earth, as to Browning it was the complicity and grandeur of human motive, as to Holman Hunt it was a stern sense of the Divine, so to Rossetti it was the beauty of the human face as the sublimest form of loveliness that nature furnished or art could conceive. Earth and the things of earth he regarded only as the framing for this central beauty, the human face, the purest, fairest and divinest thing that the earth holds. This is the beauty that excites awe and reverence and honor and a sense of kinship with immortal and everlasting things. A feeling something like this is what exalted moralists have toward virtue. It is not a calculation of the practical value of virtue, but rather an instinctive sense of the beauty of virtue, such as Wordsworth expresses in his Ode to Duty:

"Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face."

"A noble deed, a splendid piece of self-sacrifice, a triumph of justice over tyranny-these have the same constraining attractiveness for the highest souls that beauty has for the artist; they are all messages from some distant fortress of old, from some invisible city of the Spirit built on foundations of amethyst and with gates of pearl. We give thanks for all clear-sighted souls who live not for the pleasure of the moment but under

the dominion of some high and eternal idea. The passion for what is beautiful in conduct is the highest range of the human spirit; but anything is praiseworthy which is a protest against materialism, against gross and animal views of life, against the seductions of comfort." Such Mr. Benson thinks Rossetti's poetry and painting to be, and he says that those wondrously beautiful faces that look so seriously out of his pictures will speak to all sensitive spirits more appealingly than the sight of some dewy wood-end seen from an opened casement in the silent freshness of dawn, or the thickening tide of twilight when the wood stands black against the green depth of sky; or the sight of the secret glade, muffled in leaves and carpeted with the drooping sweetness of spring hyacinths. In the literature of the century Rossetti stands by himself, lonely. "With the casuistical melancholy of Clough and his broken cadences he had no affinity at all; and hardly more with the Greek purity, the austere restraint of Arnold. With Browning he had more in common, yet the kinship is but superficial. With Tennyson there is a nearer bond, and certain of the Laureate's poems have a decided affinity to the work of Rossetti. But Tennyson had more philosophical curiosity, showing an intense desire to solve the riddle of the 'painful earth,' while Rossetti showed an overpowering desire to escape from it into the region of immediate sensation." His literary enthusiasms and antipathies were intense. Keats and Shelley were his delight. Of two American versifiers he wrote, "How I loathe Wishi-Washi (Hiawatha). I have not been so happy in loathing anything, except Leaves of Grass, by that Orson of yours. The Leaves are about as suggestive as the advertisement columns of a newspaper; and poetry without form is-what shall I say? Proportion is the most inalienable quality of a poem. From the chaos of incident and reflection arise the rounded worlds of poetry and go singing on their way." He means that Whitman gives chaos. This biography regards Rossetti as having a strong belief in God and the spirit world, though without definite conceptions of what lies behind the veil and impatient of attempts at precise definition. One of his poems speaks of some lovely character as "an angel-watered lily that near God grows and is quiet."

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METHODIST REVIEW

MAY, 1906

ART. I.-A FATA MORGANA

(SECOND PART)

III. BIOT and Matthieu, two French naturalists, who were sent to Duinkerken in the interest of the renowned measurement of the meridian, have devoted several weeks, upon the fairylike coasts of the Channel, to the investigation of the Morgana phenomena. Among other experiments they sent out men with signals in the direction where the light-image showed itself, with the result that these men disappeared, enveloped in the Morgana, while they were utterly unable to discover its whereabouts. Thus it appeared that the Morgana merely presents pseudo-images, and what Angelucci wrote many years before was confirmed. "At first I saw magnificent air-castles, but it all suddenly disappeared the moment the slighest breath of wind played upon the face of the waters." Hence if modernism shall stand exposed as a real Morgana it is not enough that the beauty of both is admired, and the necessity of each is explained, but the likeness of the two to each other must also be shown in this particular: that the images they show us are devoid of reality.

Modernism is without reality. The rapid course it ran in but a few years seems to sanction this judgment. What man saw modernism hurry on its course and leap the bends of its river-bed without being reminded of the lines from Bürger's Lenore: "Hurrah! die Todten reiten schnell, Graut Liebchen auch für Todten"?

for by "the dead" Bürger's Lenore means merely the false

ideal which in his inward combat is consumed by the reality. "Hurrah! the dead ride fast," is the keynote of the awe-inspiring song with which in every age the inane and the unreal hastens after its solution. The swiftness of the shadows, over against the slowness of what has actual existence, is even proverbial among the nations. In all parts of the earth the frailty of life is symbolized by the words, "As a shadow it flieth away," while slowness and scarcely perceptible progress are fixed and never self-contradictory characteristics of the Divine eternal which has real existence and abides. Has not Schiller sung most truly of all that is divine that "for the construction of eternities it scarcely adds so much as one grain of sand after another, the whiles from time it strikes life's debt-the minutes and years"? But what has anyone ever seen of that "addition of one grain of sand after another" in the methods which modernism employs? Leaving the architect of the Crystal Palace and an Erwin von Steinbach far in the rear, the modernists have erected as in a moment of time a beautiful temple, the fundamental material for which had still to be prepared, and which, covering every domain of life with its arches, would offer room to all the nations of the earth. It is but a few years comparatively since it abandoned its anonymous character and behold, we are informed from every side-not that the final touches are ready to be put upon the gable, but that the completed and since antiquated sanctuary already needs rebuilding and renovating. A few years only have passed and it has entered already upon its fourth phase. Now modernism is becoming again ecclesiastical-conservative. Truly, this is not suggestive of the growth of an oak, it rather reminds one of a wild grapevine. The course of life moves not so fast as long as one keeps his feet on life's ground. Nor does it carry the impression of an inner substance when, in these comparatively early periods of its career, we see those abandon its ranks who once carried the banner. At the cradle of a deep conviction of life, possessed of moral power, such desertion is inconceivable. Judas did not carry the banner, but the purse. Apostasy from Christianity only came with the later persecution.