57. ST. FRANCES OF ROME.

LADY FULLERTON.

LADY G. FULLERTON-Born in England, in 1812. She is a convert to the Catholic faith, and a writer of considerable merit. Her "Ellen Mid lle ton" and "Grantly Manor" were written previous to her conversion. Her "Lady Bird," and her beautiful "Life of St. Frances of Rome," are the works of a later period, and bear the unmistakable stamp of faith-inspired genius.

1. THERE have been saints whose histories strike us as par ticularly beautiful, not only as possessing the beauty which always belongs to sanctity, whether exhibited in an aged servant of God, who for threescore years and more has borne the heat and burden of the day, or in the youth who has offered up the morning of his life to his Maker, and yielded it into His hands before twenty summers have passed over his head; whether in a warrior king like St. Louis, or a beggar like Benedict Labré, or a royal lady like St. Elizabeth, of Hungary; but also as uniting in the circumstances of their lives, in the places they inhabited, and the epochs when they appeared in the world, much that is in itself poetical and interesting, and calculated to attract the attention of the historian and the man of letters, as well as of the theologian and the devout.

2. In this class of saints may well be included Francesca Romana, the foundress of the religious order of the Oblates of Tor di Specchi. She was the model of young girls, the example of a devout matron, and finally a widow, according to the very pattern drawn by St. Paul. She was beautiful, courageous, and full of wisdom, nobly born, and delicately brought up. Rome was the place of her birth, and the scene of her labors; her home was in the centre of the great city, in the heart of the Trastevere; her life was full of trials and hair-breadth 'scapes, and strange reverses.

3. Her hidden life was marvellous in the extreme. Visions of terror and of beauty followed her all her days; favors such as were never granted to any other saint were vouchsafed to her; the world of spirits was continually thrown open to her sight; and yet, in her daily conduct, her character, and her

ways, minute details of which have reached us, there is a simplicity as well as a deep humility, awful in one so highly gifted, touching in one so highly favored.

4. Troubled and wild were the times she lived in. Perhaps, if one had to point out a period in which a Catholic Christian would rather not have had his lot cast,-one in which there was most to try his faith and wound his feelings,—he would nam the end of the fourteenth century, and the beginning of th fifteenth. War was raging all over Europe; Italy was torn by inward dissensions, by the rival factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

5. So savage was the spirit with which their conflicts were carried on, that barbarism seemed once more about to overspread that fair land; and the Church itself was afflicted not only by the outward persecutions which strengthen its vitality, though for a while they may appear to cripple its action, but by trials of a far deeper and more painful nature. Heresy had torn from her arms a great number of her children, and repeated schisms were dividing those who, in appearance and even in intention, remained faithful to the Holy See.

6. The successors of St. Peter had removed the seat of their residence to Avignon, and the Eternal City presented the aspect of one vast battle-field, on which daily and hourly conflicts were occurring. The Colonnas, the Orsinis, the Savellis, were every instant engaged in struggles which deluged the streets with blood, and cut off many of her citizens in the flower of their age. Strangers were also continually invading the heritage of the Church, and desecrated Rome with massacres and outrages scarcely less deplorable than those of th Huns and the Vandals.

7. In the capital of the Christian world, ruins of recent dat lay side by side with the relics of past ages; the churche were sacked, burned, and destroyed; the solitary and in destructible basilicas stood almost alone, mournfully erect amidst these scenes of carnage and gloom; and the eyes of the people of Rome were wistfully directed towards that tutelary power which has ever been to them a pledge of prosperity ad peace, and whose removal the signal of war and of misery

58. SPRING.

LONGFELLOW.

MR. LONGFELLOW is al: accomplished American poet and scholar; born in 1807. "Evangeline," "The Golden Legend," and "The Song of Hiawa tha are his longest and most finished poems. He is also popular as a prose writer.

1. It was a sweet carol, which the Rhodian children sang of old in Spring, bearing in their hands, from door to door, a swallow, as herald of the season:

"The swallow is come!

The swallow is come!

Oh, fair are the seasons, and light

Are the days that she brings

With her dusky wings,

And her bosom snowy white !"

2. A pretty carol, too, is that, which the Hungarian boys, on the islands of the Danube, sing to the returning stork in Spring:

"Stork! stork! poor stork!
Why is thy foot so bloody?
A Turkish boy hath torn it:
Hungarian boy will heal it

With fiddle, fife, and drum."

But what child has a heart to sing in this capricious clime of ours, where Spring comes sailing in from the sea, with wet and heavy cloud-sails, and the misty pennon of the East wind nailed to the mast?

3. Yes, even here, and in the stormy month of March even, there are bright warm mornings, when we open our windows to inhale the balmy air. The pigeons fly to and fro, and w Lear the whirring sound of wings. Old flies crawl out of th cracks, to sun themselves, and think it is Summer. They die in their conceit; and so do our hearts within us, when the cold sea-breath comes from the eastern sea, and again,

"The driving hail

Upon the window boats with icy flail."

4. The red-flowering maple is first in blossom: its beautiful purple flowers unfolding a fortnight before the leaves. The moosewood follows, with rose-colored buds and leaves; and the dogwood, robed in the white of its own pure blossoms. Then comes the sudden rain-storm; and the birds fly to and fro, and shriek. Where do they hide themselves in such storms? at what firesides dry their feathery cloaks? At the fireside of the great, hospitable sun; to-morrow, not before: they must sit in wet garments until then.

5. In all climates, Spring is beautiful: in the South it is intoxicating, and sets a poet beside himself. The birds begir to sing they utter a few rapturous notes, and then wait for an answer from the silent woods. Those green-coated musicians, the frogs, make holiday in the neighboring marshes. They, too, belong to the orchestra of nature, whose vast theatre is again opened, though the doors have been so long bolted with icicles, and the scenery hung with snow and frost like cobwebs.

6. This is the prelude which announces the opening of the scene. Already the grass shoots forth. The waters leap with thrilling pulse through the veins of the earth, the sap through the veins of the plants and trees, and the blood through the veins of man. What a thrill of delight in Spring-time! what a joy in being and moving!

7. Men are at work in gardens, and in the air there is an odor of the fresh earth. The leaf buds begin to swell and blush; the white blossoms of the cherry hang upon the boughs, like snow-flakes; and ere long our next door neighbors will be completely hidden from us by the dense green foliage. The May flowers open their soft blue eyes. Children are let loose in the fields and gardens; they hold buttercups under each thers' chin, to see if they love butter; and the little girls dorn themselves with chains and curls of dandelions, pull out the yellow leaves, and blow the down from the leafless stalk.

8. And at night so cloudless and so still! Not a voice of iving thing, not a whisper of leaf or waving bough, not a breath of wind, not a sound upon the earth nor in the air! And overhead bends the blue sky, dewy and soft and radiant

with innumerable stars, like the inverted hell of some blue flower, sprinkled with golden dust, and breathing fragrance; or if the heavens are overcast, it is no wild storm of wind and rain; but clouds that melt and fall in showers. One does not wish to sleep, but lies awake to hear the pleasant sound of the dropping rain. It was thus the Spring began in Heidleberg

95. WHAT IS A CHURCH?

HECKER.

REV. ISAAO THOMAS HECKER-was born in New York, in 1819. In 1845, he became a convert to Catholicity, in 1847 joined the Redemptorists, and in 1849, was ordained priest by His Eminence Cardinal Wiseman. Having spent some years with the Redemptorists, he with the consent of the su preme pontiff, and in conjunction with some other zealous fathers, established the new missionary order of St. Paul the Apostle.

His published works are Questions of the Soul, and Aspirations of Nature, both of which are addressed to the thinking portion of the American people, and are calculated to do much good.

1. RELIGION is a question between God and the Soul. No numan authority, therefore, has any right to enter its sacred sphere. The attempt is sacrilegious.

Every man was made by his Creator to do his own thinking. What right then has one man, or a body of men, to dictate their belief, or make their private convictions, or sentiments, binding upon others?

2. There is no degradation so abject, as the submission of the eternal interests of the soul to the private authority or dictation of any man, or body of men, whatever may be their titles. Every right sentiment in our breast rises up in abhor rence against it.

A Church which is not of divine origin, and claims assen its teachings, or obedience to its precepts, on its ow authority, is an insult to our understandings, and deserves the ridicule of all men, who have the capacity to put two ideas together.

3. A Church that claims a divine origin, in order to be consistent, must also claim to be unerring; for the idea of teaching error in the name of the Divinity, is blasphemous.