"Seek

soul for the sake of God. Hence our Lord says, first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things sensible goods after which the heathen seekshall be added unto you." So it falls out that by neglecting or denying the primitive revelation, and living not according to the law of the soul, but according to the instincts of the body, we retrograde instead of making progress in that order where we freely admit a large margin for human progress was left, namely, in providing for the animal life of man. You do the Church foul wrong when you blame her for opposing the doctrine of progress asserted by the rationalistic philosophy of the day, because that progress is divorced from moral and intellectual truth, because it is no real progress even as to the actual enjoyments of animal life, and because its tendency is to destroy the animal life of the body as well as the moral life of the soul. It is not progress in earthly well-being the Church opposes, as you foolishly imagine, but the attempt to effect that progress in disregard of the only conditions on which it can be a progress and not a regress. The multiplication of sensible goods, or the increase and accumulation of material riches, do not of themselves constitute a progress even in earthly well-being, unless preceded and accompanied by the higher life of the soul, by conformity, after the inner man, to the truth and law of God made known to us in the primitive revelation. The mere man of the world, the epicurean, the sensualist, is, as all experience proves, whatever his material wealth, the most wretched of mortals. We know well that no Catholic denies this; but those Catholics who accept the modern doctrine of progress, and seek to incorporate it with the doctrine of the Church, should know that this modern doctrine has for its basis the vegetable or animal origin of man, or the mere animal and savage state of the primitive man asserted by Horace and Cicero, or the ancient rationalistic philosophy, and cannot be accepted without denying the nobler part of man, without neglecting the moral life of the soul, and therefore not without losing that very earthly well-being that is sought. This well understood, no Catholic can for a moment countenance the modern rationalistic philosophy, fatal alike to soul and body, or feel that his Church does not well in rejecting it. Let any man, Catholic, or non-Catholic, study

these volumes, and he will understand this, and understand it well.

We have neither the space nor the ability to give a complete analysis of these volumes, for they are themselves only an analysis of the subject they treat. We have indicated a few of their more salient points, and that chiefly for the purpose of stimulating the curiosity of our readers to master their contents. What chiefly arrests our attention is the necessity demonstrated by the author of reuniting reason and faith, religion and philosophy, society and the Church. The divorce proclaimed by philosophy in modern as in ancient times has led, and could not but lead, to the most fatal results. Religion divorced from reason becomes superstition or fanaticism, philosophy divorced from revelation becomes immoral, licentious, and falls into scepticism and nullity. But we must not misunderstand the nature of the union demanded. Science must take its data from faith, not on the authority of faith. The primitive revelation, preserved in its chief elements by universal tradition and language, in its purity and integrity with the patriarchs, in the Synagogue, and in the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, solves all the problems which require solution in our present state; but it does so in the intelligible order, not by force of authority, imposing dogmas, and enjoining obedience, as is too often imagined, but by unfolding, so to speak, the grand scheme of Providence in both the intelligible and the superintelligible orders, which orders, though distinguishable, are never separable in that scheme. What pertains to the superintelligible, being above but not against the intelligible, is received by faith, and on the authority of the revealer. That which is thus received, shows us the real character and relations of the intelligible, and puts us in the position to apprehend it as it is; but it is affirmed by us, not on the authority of faith, but on its affirmation of itself in noetic intuition or rational demonstration to our understanding, in its principles as in its conclusion, as must always be the case with scibile as distinguished from the credibile. The doctrine requires us to reason, to philosophize in the intelligible by the light of revelation, by the light which faith sheds on the natural order, but requires us to accept nothing in that order on extrinsic authority, and leaves us free to accept or reject in the region of the intelligible according to the presence or absence of intrinsic evidence.

ART. V. The Poetical Works of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. Boston Little, Brown, & Co. 1854. 7 vols. 16mo.

THE admirers of Wordsworth, late Poet Laureate of her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, must have been pleased with Messrs. Little, Brown, & Co.'s beautiful and complete edition of his Poetical Works. These admirers are much more numerous than they were; but Wordsworth, we confess, has never been a favorite of ours, and we have been, and even are, barbarian enough to relish these cruel but witty lines of Byron :

"Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,

The mild apostate from poetic rule,

The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay

As soft as evening in his favorite May,

Who warns his friend to shake off toil and trouble
And quit his books for fear of growing double;
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane,
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of an idiot boy,'-

A moonstruck, silly lad, who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day, -
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,

And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the idiot in his glory

Conceive the bard the hero of his story."

Yet we are willing to concede that Byron is too severe, and that Wordsworth never deserved all the ridicule of which he was at one period the butt. We are personally, no doubt, still under the influence of our early prejudices against him and his school, but we are disposed to be just, and we should like to be among the warmest of his admirers if we could. Most of our literary friends are Wordsworthians, and make, at least in fancy, annual pilgrimages to Rydal Mount. We should like to sympathize with them, and not be looked upon by them as an untutored savage, or a literary heretic; but with all our endeavors, we can succeed only in part, only so far as not

to think it worth our while to quarrel with them on his account, or so far as to admit that Wordsworth tried hard to be a poet, and, if he has left us no considerable poem worthy of admiration throughout, he has manifested much true poetic sensibility, and written short passages and single lines not surpassed in their kind in our language.

But all this expresses only our individual taste and judgment, and is worthy of no respect from others. There is or should be some recognized standard by which to judge in matters of poetry as well as in other matters. But unhappily for us, we have in English no such standard, and consequently no scientific criticism. Alison has given us a work of some merit On Taste, Campbell says some good things in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, and much just criticism may be found scattered through the English and American quarterly reviews and other periodical literature; but all is unscientific, empirical, founded on habit, prejudice, or fashion, varying every hour. We have no science or philosophy of art. Till we have such a science or philosophy, we can have no good literary or artistic critics, and as long as we are mere sensists or psychologists, we can never have it. Burke was a great man, but his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful is not worth naming, far less worth reading; for the author had a false system of metaphysics, and wrote his work on the supposition that the sublime and beautiful are mere subjective affections, or exist only in the order of conceptions and emotions, not in the order of reality, and are therefore psychological, not ontological. The Germans, indeed, have what they call Esthetic, or Esthetics, but, as the word implies, they make the sublime and beautiful either sensations and emotions, or simply objects of the sensibility. Or if they rise higher, they base their science of art on a defective and false conception of being, and give us nothing but scientific ignorance, hardly superior, if indeed equal, to the practical good sense of English and American critics.

Art, according to the ancients, is imitative, and its aim is to give expression to the sublime and beautiful, or as we say now-a-days, all simply, to the beautiful. Being imitative, we have first to settle what it is that it does or should imitate? The answer usually is, that Art should imitate nature. This is correct, if we understand by the

nature to be imitated, the natura naturans, not the natura naturata of the Schoolmen. Its province is to imitate nature in her creative energy, and to realize, or to clothe with its own forms, the beautiful, which the soul of the artist beholds. The beautiful itself has an objective reality, and has been happily termed by an Italian, reviewing, in a French periodical, the works of Silvio Pellico, "the splendor of the true." The splendor of the true is not substantially distinguishable from the true itself. The true in itself is identically Being, according to the definition of St. Augustine, not rejected by St. Thomas, and according to the older philosophers, who teach us that the summum verum and the summum ens are identical, as are the summum ens and the summum bonum. The verum, the ens, the bonum, taken simply and ontologically, are God, who is in himself the true, the beautiful, and the good. The beautiful regarded in itself as that, to use the language of Plato, by which all beautiful things are beautiful, is therefore indistinguishable from supreme being, supreme truth, supreme good, or God himself, save as the splendor is distinguishable from the resplendent, that is, formally but not really. Hence, as Art seeks to realize the beautiful, to embody or express it in its productions, a true science of Art must have an ontological basis, and is not possible without a true and adequate ontology.

We do not say there can be no Art without a true and adequate ontological philosophy. What we say is, that without such philosophy there can be no true and adequate science of Art, and therefore no really scientific criticism. The artist may produce without fully comprehending his process; genius is not always, perhaps seldom, able to explain itself. There is a truth in these lines of Emerson:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.

Himself from God he could not free:
He builded better than he knew,

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The true ontology is expressed in the first verse of Genesis: "In principio creavit Deus cælum et terram," "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."