The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1893-04-01
him and the warm desire to shield his

VI MOuoIA auoI1C6u pOclls. OuT pO0lS
have of late preferred to cast CHEEKY
stones rather than to blow trumpete; if
he takes the Tyre, it becomes more like
David's harp than the mandolin of the
minor lyrist. He has touch of Horace
in his poetic moods, but more of the
mind of Hesiod. " ith the fervor of Hes
iud he cries:
Not when in Greece fair freeddm's form
First blessed the earth
With god-like mirth,
And men, glad as the yellow swarm
OF bees, in fragrant bowers
Despoiled the tender flowers.
And filed with song the hours.
Fled she the heavenly strength and grace
Which here uplights her holy face;
Nor yet in Rome, when, with d sterner mien,
She stood and looked, and was acknowledged
queen.
Not in the middle age,
And fierce with tyrant's rage.
Loud with titanic struggles for the right
Waged with the soulless power of lawless
might,
Was she so fair
When here and there,
She cleaned amid the thunderstorm,
Shedding the radiance of her form
On earth, as when at night,
Yhe flying clouds between.
aH The moons soft light
BY grateful eyes is seen.
All through Spalding's ''America' there
is one dominant note-pride of country.
After this comes the love of nature. The
optimism of his poetry is as strong as
the psssimism of his prose. For it is
not hard to detect in his essays touch
of that pessimism which Horace's shows
occasionally, and of that fine intellectual
scorn which causes the most republican
OF bishops to be sometimes mistaken for
an aristocrat. There is one phase of
scorn and hatred which is unmistakab!e,
both in "America' and "The Poets
Praise" It is the scorn of evil tongues
and the hatred of everything sordid, He
does not talk against materialism gently
and with supertine phras as Emerson
does; he does not sing against it, as Ten
nyson does; he calls loudly on the world
TO battle against it. In "Ihe Poets
Praise" he exalts the seer and the
prophet; he even calls on the children of
earth to admire the slender reed by the
river whi,h merely lends itself to the
music made by the winds of God. He
reiterates that doctrine which made
Rome in her early days all powerful, and
which has caused New England to stamp
her special characteristics in American
civilizations:
Let not then poverty be held curse.
The body needs but little, and the soul
Would hunger though it owned a nations
Like one who dies of thirst where oceans
roll,
The needs are greater than the universe,
And God. not gold, is its magnetic pole.
His philosophy is the highest and pur-
est. He demands purity, high aims, self
sacrifice from each American. These, he
tells us, make patriotism. To make his
country great a man must begin with
himself. He is more transcendental than
Emerson in his demands. An American
must be good, that his country may be
creator, because his country is great
an American must be good, in order to
preserve her greatness.
Above all the philosophy, the deep
thought, the constant lntrospection into
the very depths of life rises through all
Henry Hamilton's "America" the strophe
of God and the antistrophe OF country.
The dove with olive bough
Flies DER the sinking flood;
We are one people now,
Yhe bond is writ in blood.
Where'er our banners wave,
Of man no man is slave;
And the immortal truth outspolken,
That all men brothers are and free,
When we the old worlds chains had broken,
And knelt before fair Liberty,
Is now in very deed
Americas fixed creed.
Bishop Spalding enjoys the distinction
OF being the only poet in the Catholic
hierarchy, or, at least the only poet who
has given utterance to his Thoughts in
the form of verse. His prose, however,
is so poetical that the majority of his
readers prefer him under the form in
which they have learned to love him as
Al. ,,&ko-o, @f +rr,fbo +ho+ ovo n,