SILVANUS THOMPSON.

From The Spectator.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF RELIGIOUS POETRY. The purpose of all poetry is to illu. minate our experience of the world by means of passion and imaginative thought. Passion is necessary, because it is only when the mind is at white heat under the influence of some powerful emotion that its contents become so thoroughly fused as to flow readily into a new mould. By calling this new mould of thought imaginative, it is meant that the elements of experience which move the poet, and about which he desires to move us, are brought into sudden vividness through association with some other experience whose value is clearly known. Thus when the Psalmist says, "My days are gone by like a shadow, and I am withered like grass," there rises before the mind the picture of some hot Eastern landscape; and as we look at the grass all dry in the sun's glare, there passes over it the shadow of a bird's wing. And by means of that picture, in which the poet saw an image of the transitoriness of human life, his emotion becomes ours. Now this fine verse from the 102nd Psalm, though it occurs in a religious poem, is not itself religious poetry; it is a poetical illumination of a fact of human life, its shortness, which every one must recognize to be a fact,

most keenly if he has none. Poetry is not religious unless it recognizes the religious interpretation of the world, and this constitutes its chief difficulty. For there is an alternative risk, either that the religious poet will go straight to the facts that have roused his emotion, and represent them apart from their Christian interpretation, or that the work of reflection involved in attending to this will cool his imagination. There is a danger that his Christianity will get the better of his poetry, or his poetry of his Christianity.

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The most successful religious poetry, because the least troubled by this difficulty, is lyrical expression of the soul's delight in God, and in the world of nature regarded as His handiwork. the first case, the feelings of admiration, love, hope, and worship that the poet must express will be so simple and direct that there is small chance of collision between his instinctive religious emotions, which are to a certain extent Christianized, and his Christian creed; we find it possible to use to-day, with not so very much mental reservation and correction, the religious lyrics of the Jews, and with more reservation, those of other peoples. And in regard to nature the Christian creed is so broad that provided the beauty of nature be ascribed to God, the Christian can sympathize both with Cowper, who lays the greater stress on God's transcendence, and with Wordsworth, who lays the greater stress on his immanence. When religious lyrics fail, it is usually because emotion has been considered a sufficient equipment for the sacred poet without thought and imagination. This is the common fault of hymns. The experience they represent has been fresh felt in passion, but not fresh dipped in thought. A man of genius differs from the rest of us chiefly in this, that the simplest thing he studies, by the branches it puts out, the ties it reveals to so many things else, is a perpetual fount of interest, and so the tritest facts of nature and grace never cease to be a revelation.

But the "new song" which the Chris

tian poet has to sing must be sung not only before "the Throne" and "the Living Creatures," but also before "the Elders;" that is to say, it must interpret anew to the Church the Christian interpretation of man's life; and it is here that the chief difficulty of religious poetry shows itself. The cause of the difficulty lies in the fact that "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual;" and this is true in more ways than one. The spiritual interpretation of the world does not lie on the surface, and there is a natural explanation which is always ready to present itself. Take for an example the phenomenon of death. When the poet is deeply stirred by this fact of death, when his passion is liberated and the world shaken to and fro in his imagination, it is almost necessarily the first natural view of death that possesses him. If he is considering the thought of death abstractly, or looking forward to it as Browning does in "Prospice," or reflecting upon it long afterwards as Tennyson in the "In Memoriam," then he will remember he is a Christian; but at the moment when the shock comes it is not the reflective mind that is at work, it is the imagination stirred by passion; the phenomenon of death lies once more in its naked awfulness before the poet as freshly as the world lay before Adam, compelling him to utter the dread name, and shudderingly he names it. It is pure loss; the flower is shattered, the wine is spilt; "the silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern." Look at this verse wrung from the greatest poet of our own day by the death of his friend:

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

has heard and understood; and his song, a song of natural and inevitable fate, a song that might have come from Mimnermus, will echo in the hearts of Englishmen when the "In Memoriam" lies as dusty on the booksellers' shelves as the "Essay on Man" does to-day. Or take an even more pointed instance from the same poet; read the exquisite first four stanzas of "The Deserted House:"

Life and thought have gone away

Side by side

Leaving doors and windows wide;

and then read the intolerable appendix, added to Christianize it,-lines that have neither passion, nor thought, nor melody, nor rhythm. There is a second sense, too, in which religious poetry is hampered by the precedence of the natural over the spiritual. The heyday of the blood in which the passion is strongest and the imagination most active is often a day of revolt against tradition, and especially against that traditional interpretation of the deepest facts of life which we call Christianity. We need only point to Shelley. That Shelley ranked himself as a servant of the truth, and thought he lived at least as resolutely as most people by the highest ideal he knew, but few perhaps would dispute. But the fact remains that he is not a Christian poet, but, on the contrary, that he branded as "impious," and stamped in the dust with all the passion of his poet's ture, "the name that is above every name." And even when there is no actual revolt against Christianity, it would seem true that, while the main effort of Christianity is to discover "a soul of goodness" in the world's evil, it is the sombre aspects of life which appeal most keenly to the poetical sensibility. When Shakespeare tells us that young gentlemen in his day "would be

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is passing a criticism upon the minor poetry of all time; but even greater poets have sometimes felt themselves called to be a nerve over which should creep "the else unfelt oppressions of

one of you medical students may have to cut a man's throat to save his life. The father who chastises his son for the sake of the good of his morals is a most humane man; a father who should beat his son for the mere sake of inflicting pain upon him would be an inhuman monster. And so it is with the necessary experiments upon lower animals. If they were made, as some people seem to assume, for the mere sport of the thing, they would be indeed to be deprecated and decried; but if they are made with the wholly noble object of not only increasing human knowledge, but also diminishing human suffering, then I hold that such investigations are deserving of all praise. Those little know who lightly speak on these matters how much self-denial is required in the prosecution of such researches when they are conducted, as indeed they always are, so far as I am aware, with the object of establishing new truth.

The exercise of a little charity might lead those who speak of us as inhuman to reflect that possibly we may be as humane as themselves. The profession to which I have the great honor to belong is, I firmly believe, on the average, the most humane of all professions. The medical student may be sometimes a rough diamond; but when he comes to have personal charge of patients, and to have the life and health of a fellow-creature depending upon his individual care, he becomes a changed man, and from that day forth his life becomes a constant exercise of beneficence. With that beneficence there is associated benevolence; and, in that practical way, our profession becomes the most benevolent of all. If our detractors knew this, common sense would enable them to see that our profession would not be unanimously in favor of these researches if they were the iniquitous things which they are sometimes represented to be. I was reading the other day a very interesting account of Pasteur's work on rabies, written by one who was associated with him from an early period (M. Duclaux). It had been established that the introduction

of a portion of the brain of a mad dog under the skin of a healthy animal was liable to cause rabies, and Pasteur had reason to believe that it was principally in the nervous centres that the poison accumulated. He felt a very strong desire to introduce some of the poison into the brain of an animal; but he was a peculiarly humane man. He never could shoot an animal for sport. He was more humane than the great majority of human beings; and for a long time he could not bring himself to make the experiment of trephining an animal's skull, and introducing some of the poison of rabies into the brain. He was exceedingly desirous of doing it to establish the pathology of the disease, but he shrank from it. On one occasion, when he was absent from home, one of his assistants did the experiment, and when Pasteur came back ne told him that he had done so. "Oh!" said Pasteur, "the poor creature! His brain has been touched. I am afraid he will be affected with paralysis." The assistant went into a neighboring room and brought in the animal which was a dog. It came in frisking about and investigating everything in a perfectly natural manner; and Pasteur was exceedingly pleased, and though he did not like dogs, yet he lavished his affection upon that particular animal and petted it; and from that time forth he felt his scruples need no longer exist. The truth is that the pain inflicted by this process of trephining is exceedingly slight, and yet the operation is sometimes described as being a hideously painful one. That is a mistake. In point of fact the operation is always done now under anæsthetics, so that the animal does not feel it at all; but even without that the operation is not seriously painful. I look forward to the time when there will be an institute in connection with this college, where investigations of the kind to which I have referred can be carried on, and where pathological knowledge of the first importance may be promoted. Think also of the practical advantages of an institution where the materials can be provided for the treatment of

diseases on the principles which have been recently established. It appears to be now placed beyond doubt that that dreadful disease diphtheria may by the antitoxic treatment be reduced in mortality from about thirty per cent, to about five per cent. if the proper material is promptly used. It is exceedingly important that in a city like Belfast the supply of such material should be within easy reach of the practitionerthat he should not be compelled to send to London for the requisite serum, and thus lose much valuable time. Every hour that is lost in the treatment of a case of this nature is a very serious loss indeed. But it is by no means only in diphtheria that such an institute is likely to confer benefits of this kind. In the case of the streptococcus, which is the cause of erysipelas and kindred disorders, including that very terrible disease, puerperal fever, there are very promising indications that the use of antitoxic serum will rescue patients from otherwise hopeless conditions. Let any one picture to himself the case

of a young wife after her first confinement afflicted with this dreadful puerperal fever, and doomed under ordinary treatment to certain death. The practitioner makes an injection of this serum under the skin, with the result that the lady rapidly recovers, and in a few days is perfectly well. Let any man conceive such a case as this, and all objections to the investigations necessary to bring about such a state of things must vanish into thin air. So soon as our poor selves are directly concerned our objections disappear. If a tiger threatened to attack a camp, who would care much about what kind of a trap was set for it, or what suffering the trap caused the animal, so long as it was caught? When the matter affects only the welfare of others, including generations yet unborn, the good done does not appeal to the individual, and the objector sees only the horrors of modern scientific investigation; of which horrors, however, he quickly loses the sense as soon as he becomes personally concerned.

Rome as a Health Resort.-Dr. J. J. Eyre, one of the foremost living authorities on the climate of Rome, has contributed to the Queen a paper entitled "Rome as a Health Resort." which will be a surprise to some people who have remained under the traditional impression of the unhealthiness of the city and district. Doctor Eyre points out that it was recognized some thirty or forty years ago, by eminent authorities on climate, including Sir James Clarke, that the Roman climate was particularly beneficial in the case of persons suffering from consumption or chronic bronchitis. But at that time malarial fever was still prevalent, and the sanitary state of the city left much

to be desired; so that nervous invalids and their friends had some excuse for fighting shy of the Eternal City as a place of abode for their transitory selves. But the "Roman Fever" is now a thing of the past, owing to the great sanitary improvements which have taken place during the last fifteen years or so, and Rome is now, not only the healthiest city in Italy, but compares very favorably as to hygienic conditions with the large towns of Europe and America. The sewers are well constructed and thoroughly flushed, the water supply is one of the purest and most abundant in the world, and the cleanliness of the streets is almost invariably commented on by visitors.