fount whence all truth flows down. "It rolls like a river that falls from rock to rock and shows by the fullness of its tone, the abundance of its mountain spring." It has a "melody that to every merit would be a just reward." Beside it the sweetest melody "that ever drew soul on earth would sound like the tearing of a thunder cloud!" "All the tongues that Polyhymnia and her sisters made most lubrical with their delicious milk, could not sing a thousandth of its truth." "The full harmony and sweetness of its chant could not be known save in that place where joy is everlasting." "It is itself the lyre whose holy strings the right hand of Heaven loosens and winds up." It is like "a lark singing, then silent as if satiated with the sweetness of its final note." Its word, or logos, or logic, the utterance of its ideas into life, becomes the hymnody of Paradise. Thus white with the purity of life, abloom with love, odorous with song-notes - what other earth-form could the emparadised spirit take for its completest symbol than the Rose of May? May was the month in which Dante first saw Beatrice, the Virgin's month and flower, the feast-month and flower-emblem of his nation's most popular and poetic devotion. Was not the white rose worn on every breast whether rich or poor? Did it not adorn all tables and altars? Had the spirit of prayer any better emblem - calling supplications a rosary as if their rose-breaths were most sweet to God? And the dome of Florence, the city of the poet's nightly dream in exile was it not a prayer of stone, a marble rose dedicate to the Rose of Heaven, Maria del Fiore, Heaven's White Rose, because the virgin that had enwombed the Son of Man, who in his one life lived all lives, was both individual and race, creature and creator, finite and infinite, man and God. "Here is the rose wherein the Word of God was made flesh." "Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, humble and exalted more than any creature, and determined of the Eternal Council, thou art she who didst so ennoble human nature that he who made it disdained not to be of its making. In thy womb was rekindled the love through whose warmth in the eternal peace this flower has sprung." Type of the pure, reasonable soul, which likewise is maid and Madonna! God's offpsring, it yet conceives God. The truth which is its own, it knows to be more, the truth of all souls, their worshipful Redeemer and Sanctifier. And since that truth is the truth of all souls, all are needed to make its perfect stature meeting in common thought, common will and common love to attain its full symmetry, its God-man height. Wherefore thoughts and wills and loves must be embodied in institutions in Family and State and Church - to keep what they get of wisdom and increase it from generation to generation, as the heritage of every soul which laws, public opinions, manners, companionships, enclose like homesteads. And when the soul comes to know the gift, the racial life, the world-mind, that is within it by this mighty overshadowing, a knowledge it has by philosophy or even by that faith which is the substance of things not yet philosophically known but hoped for; when this knowledge comes to the soul, then indeed it beholds the Angel of Annunciation, and while he speaks, God's handmaiden - for such it now is hears all generations call her blessed. Thenceforth it shall be unto her as God wills. The racial life, the worldpurpose shall leap anew within her as the life of her life. She will bring it to distinct birth; she will keep its sayings in her heart; she will devote herself to its nurture; she will follow after its goings about to do good; she will stand by the cross where it dies to ascend, and when the ascension reaches the throne of Godhood, its enthronement will be her Assumption. Rose of earth, Rose of Heaven, planted in sense, burgeoning with experience, abloom in thought, to open where thought fills itself with Divine truth and feels that truth as the light which warms its root while whitening its crown; one soul yet all souls, all needed to open the one to the full width of its humanity; their efforts, though failures, their famous successes, their imperfect loves, their sciences, their cross-like heroisms, their eagle-winged triumphs, their contemplations, all together weaving the common tissue of its glory, as their distinct characters form its many and diverse petals, here at last the lower heavens that were a rush, a gleam, a fable of degrees, a voice without features, display their complete spiritual reality— here at last is Paradise, the Paradisal Church, whose rose, wide open as it is, and full of God, may open still wider and, with greater expan sion have diviner fullness. Its petals are not all blown. More enterprises and virtues and transcendent thoughts are to appear; other minds noble as the noblest of its 'present sages and saints are to shine in its corolla. For it grows and shall grow forever. Breezes of angelic flight are about it and the light that vivifies it is eternal. The eternal light lives in the flower even as the flower lives in the light eternal. When humanity dies, God too will die. "O Light eternal, that sole in thyself residest, sole comprehendest thyself, and by thyself understood and comprehended, lovest and smilest in thyself, that circle which appeared in thee as a reflected light, when somewhat contemplated by my eyes, within itself, of its own varied hue, seemed to me pictured with our image." St. Louis. ROBERT AFTON HOLLAND. SHOULD IDEALISM PERISH IN THE INDUSTRIAL SOUTH? "Humanity, that tireless traveller, advances unceasingly over vale and hill, to-day on the heights in the light of day, to-morrow in the valley in darkness and danger, but always advancing, and attaining by slow degrees and weary efforts some broad plateau, where he pauses a moment to rest and take breath. "These pauses, during which society assumes a form which suits it for the moment, are organic periods. The intervals which separate them may be called "inorganic periods, or times of transformation." How the summits, of which Duruy thus speaks, are attained is surely to this traveller often a matter of doubt and wonder. It has frequently been his experience, his disappointment to find that his ideas of whence he has come and whither he is going are mistaken ideas. Much he forgets, much he cannot see for the darkness, much he must leave uncertain until some higher peak, perhaps at greater distance, permits a clearer view. In no case, however, will his philosophy be more liable to error than when, having climbed rapidly some new, sharp ascent, he stands panting for further attainment, absorbed in the anticipations of the struggle for the next steps forward. Compared with the course of evolution of the other states of the world, the rapidity with which the American nation has grown to its present position has been the wonder of all observers, and the cause of pride or jealousy to friend or foe. In our own land, our rapid progress has been the source of a rather bumptious national egotism which still persists; so much so that many fail to realize that now certain very deep and significant changes may indicate a pause in the "dynamic" rush of the last century. The occupation of nearly all the public lands fit for agricultural purposes, the emigration from the Northwest across the frontier into Canada, the return of Western farmers to intensive agriculture in Eastern and Southern states, the diminishing native birth rate in a large part of the country, the fact that foreign immigration is tending towards congested and unas similated islands in our large cities rather than as of old to the great open West: are not all these and a hundred other phenomena indications that we are approaching a static condition of society, in which the great advantages that have hitherto been ours will be levelled down by the struggle for existence and in which we shall have to meet many of the problems which our grandfathers rejoiced to have left behind? In one part of our country, however, the rush upward and onward is still in its youth. Hampered in the earlier part of its history by its physical geography and by its institutions, thrown back violently by the War and a destructive Reconstruction, the South seems just now to have begun a belated dynamic change, and to be at the beginning of a progress towards industrialism. similar to that which characterizes other parts of the country. This is set before us by the sober statistics of the census and of State Reports, by the ardent propagandism of journals, by the somewhat militant agitation of newspapers, railroad folders, and city advertisements. The vox populi in the South surely recognizes, proclaims, and preaches a desire to reap to the full the benefits with which Nature has endowed us, and to catch up with those sections which hitherto have led in material advance. Material progress, wherever and whenever it takes place, seems to excite the interest and enthusiasm of the many. It must be remembered, however, that there are always those who take the opposite point of view. We recall Wordsworth's lament of a century ago: When I have borne in memory what has tamed Now, a hundred years later, England still lies under indictment for her materialism and her commercialism. The poet laureate laments the growing distaste for the higher forms of poetry, and other writers fill the reviews with lamentations over the "materialism of English life" in its journalism, its sports, its drama, and its Church. Even more frequently is the worship of the Almighty Dollar |