She had accomplished her work. She died victorious, not victorious against any particular person, against Gregory IX, or Innocent IV or against authority; but victorious through them and through it.

And in this case also, you will find there two elements which make the Catholicism of Francis so original. Submission and liberty, liberty and submission. We are here very far removed certainly from the notion that the best way we can show reverence to authority is to turn our intelligence into a vacuum, to make our hearts empty so that what authority likes to pour in can be received.

Again I say it would be absurd to make St. Francis of Assisi a rebel or an unconscious Protestant. But it would be just as absurd to present him as a mere passive echo of authority, or as a man who had surrendered his own conscience. Often there comes out in his writings the idea that authority can make mistakes and that it ought to be withstood. But at the same time he adds, that even when obedience is refused, authority must not be forgotten nor cast aside.

People will say these are contradictions. Perhaps they are logical contradictions; but they are not serious and real contradictions, not contradictions in history, which, as it has been called, is God's logic. There are just the same contradictions which are found in family life, in national life, when quite naturally without thinking we allow authority to influence us, without however, giving up the practice of advising, correcting and transforming it.

This was the spirit in which the great contemporary Catholic, Newman, wrote in 1874.- Please note the date: "Conscience is in us," he says, "the aboriginal vicar of Christ, prophetical in its information, a monarch in its decrees, a priest in its benedictions and its anathemas. And if the eternal priesthood were ever to cease in the whole church, there would remain in conscience a sacerdotal principle and it will preserve its sway.'

It is often said that legend is truer than history. And this statement is exact, provided we recognize that legend gives us bad information on subjects which it claims to tell. But it gives good information about the people who make the state

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ments.

One of the most popular legends of the Middle Ages was that St. Francis was standing in his tomb, alive and ready to come out and take up his preaching and teaching. On the 12th of December, the pickaxe - not of criticism but the mason'sdestroyed the old tradition. The Poverello was found there reduced to a skeleton; and yet the graceful legend is true. Francis of Assisi is not dead, for his work is not yet over. Somewhere or other he is concealed, perhaps very near us, and he is waiting to come out of his tomb and to commence his preaching again, that the times may be fulfilled. Gentlemen, they will be fulfilled of themselves, but perhaps it will be better to help in the task of fulfillment. The sturdy laborer who gets up before sunrise knows very well that he does not cause the sun to rise a moment sooner, but at least by doing so he will be ready to plow his furrow the moment the first rays are visible in the horizon.

If the sunrise finds us at work we shall understand the real secret of Francis of Assisi's genius, which will return, perhaps, quicker than we think, and reconcile submission and liberty, science and fate, and man, not only with his God, but with all creation. To him we owe that mysterious phrase which I hesitate to translate to you. For the translation would probably be feeble and perhaps altogether bad:

Sancta obedientia facit hominem subditum omnibus hominibus hujus mundi et non tantum hominibus, sed etiam bestiis et feris ut possint facere de eo quidquid voluerunt; quantum fuerit eis datum desuper a Domino.

Translated by W. LLOYD BEVAN.

New York.

son.

THE POETRY OF MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS

Mr. Stephen Phillips is a poet as typically English as TennyYou will not find, of course, the English countryside in his poems as you find it in Tennyson's, nor much of his country's myth or history; but you will find, though expressed in terms of a nature more vehement, a moral and intellectual outlook that represents the Puritan townsman as certainly as Tennyson's represents the Anglican country clergyman in whom the Puritan is still uppermost.

Puritanism, in one phase or another, is in all the line from which Mr. Phillips descends. Spenser, whom "the perilous rich world" lured as it lures Mr. Phillips, destroyed the "bowers of bliss" with a savagery as holy as was General Monk's in ruining the rich beauty of abbeys. Milton is to all the world the typical Puritan poet. Gray, too, had the Puritan restraint; and Wordsworth, passionate though he was, smothered the fire that was in him as though it was of Hell, and became the surest bringer of peace to a restless age. Tennyson, in youth falling into waking trance, like that of certain Roundhead clergy, and life-through brooding and moody as so many of them were, was recognized by Carlyle as a fellow Puritan as much for his personal qualities as by the Puritan spirit in his poetry; and Arnold and Mr. William Watson, though our day of doubt brought them to question the Puritan faith, remain faithful to the Puritan point of view to which they were born.

Mr. Phillips, to judge from his writings, still holds to the Puritan faith in a God who will permit His followers to "rise only through pain into His paradise." He is Puritan, too, in his preoccupation with the world to come, and Miltonic, if not Puritan, in his great concern with the pomps of this world; which, Puritan-like, he finds ephemeral things, almost unreal in their brevity, but all too dear to the hearts of men. It was perhaps from the Greek in him that Milton derived his intense interest in the shows of life. There was in him, we all accept, that blending of Hebraism and Hellenism that Matthew Arnold pointed out. That blending there has always been in differing

proportions of one and the other, in all Englishmen of the old University training. I have often wondered why it was that an English classical education seems always to aid and abet Puritanism. The English poets without University training are certainly less Puritan. There is in many such nothing Puritan at all-witness Keats and Browning and Henley and Mr. Yeats. I sometimes think that by bringing home to the student the sense of how vivid and bright and beloved was life to the Greeks, a knowledge of the Greek classics makes more terrible the contrast between happiness here and eternal damnation hereafter. And if it be objected that Mr. Phillips's short stay at Cambridge precludes his being much of a Grecian, I can only refer to how many of his poems are concerned with Greek myth and how many qualities of his style show classical influence.

It is the preoccupation of Mr. Phillips with the world beyond the grave that reveals most clearly his Puritanism. This is no new interest of his come to him, as it must come to all of us with advancing years, but one that has been with him since boyhood; two of his four poems in "Primavera" (Oxford 1890), published when he was twenty-two, are filled with wonder of the afterworld. "Christ in Hades," which in 1896 brought him his recognition, is a vision into the future from a Greek standpoint; and in "Faust," his last work, the curtain falls on a world halfway to heaven. "Herod' alone of the plays opens up no vistas into the hereafter. In "Paolo and Francesca," the lovers, forefeeling their doom, contemplate centuries of torture together in Hell; in "Ulysses" the hero descends into Hell; in "The Sin of David" and in "Nero," spirits of the slain return to wreak vengeance on their still living assassins; and even Iole, in her first bloom and wildly eager for life and love, finds sweetness in the call of death.

Of fifty poems of Mr. Phillips, the total body of his nondramatic verse, seventeen are either of the world of spirits or have to do with the return of the dead to this world, or are contemplations of death. Sometimes in these poems the reference to death seems, at first reading, vague, but once you realize that Mr. Phillips's attitude is somewhat that of the Swedenborgian, who feels that the dead are always present, his meaning will

become clear enough. And if you keep this belief of his in mind it clears up certain passages in other classes of his poems. When offhand, you think of his poems other than those inspired by death, you think first of those on Greek myth and then of those on modern city life, and then perhaps of those that reveal his faith-his religious poems, if you may so call them. This last-named group are essentially nearly allied to the poems that have to do with his dream of the world beyond death his spiritualistic poems, I would call them, if that word had not so technical a meaning in America; but you will as surely find his all-important topic in these other two groups. Death in life is the subject of "The Woman with the Dead Soul," the poem which, by its position at the forefront of the "Poems" of 1897, Mr. Phillips evidently then considered the most important of all in the volume. In one of his four long poems of classic story, "Marpessa," the girl beloved by Appollo rejects the immortality proffered by the god largely because of her curiosity as to life after death. It is no exaggeration to say that fully half of the poetry of Mr. Phillips is inspired by thoughts of death.

Some day or other we may have these poems on death arranged by Mr. Phillips each in its place in a sequence. In the now defunct Literature (February 26th, 1898), there appeared this apparently inspired statement: "Looking to the future, Mr. Phillips has in view a long poem intended to give a spiritual setting to his London or modern stories. The completion of this design is likely to take many years; the modern stories will be continued separately, and eventually woven with a spiritual setting into a complete poem. The main idea, uniting the whole work, is found in the return of a dead woman to the earth, where it is her punishment to follow and watch all kinds of suffering and heroism, and thus learn the lesson she never learnt when alive - of love and sympathy. The poem will close with a note of hope." A year later Mr. Phillips contributed to the Dome (London, February, 1899), under the title "A Field for Modern Verse," an article that induces one to accept as trustworthy the declaration of Literature, and that reveals what is his conception of futurity: "The general picture of a world beyond the