where welcomed and fêted. Cambridge conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, and when he appeared in the red robes to address the University he was the very realization of the glory of old age, with his noble eyes deep sunken under massive brows, and with long white silken hair and beard of patriarchal whiteness. In London there was one round of hospitable welcome and friendly homage, from a breakfast with Mr. Gladstone to midnight calls from Bulwer and Aubrey de Vere. The Queen sent for him, and received him at Windsor "cordially and without ceremony;" and, by request, he visited the Prince of Wales. There was a Sunday at Gadshill, and two days with the Laureate -"King Alfred," as he used to call him-in the Isle of Wight. The fountain, like a pile of stones, near the Crab Inn at Shanklin was given an inscription by him; it had been asked for, and was perfect of its kind, beginning like Scott, but in the end touched by his own spirit : O traveller, stay thy weary feet, Drink of this fountain pure and sweet; It flows for rich and poor the same. The cup of water in His name. Writing to a friend long before this last visit, he had said, "You are not wrong in supposing that England is to me a beloved mother country, for which I have a strong affection." With a winter on the Continent these his last travels ended; henceforth he had only "Travels by the Fireside"-hearing again, from his books, the Alpine torrent, the mule-bells on the hills of Spain, and seeing afar off the castles of the Rhine and the Italian convents. If he had not been at once a lover of travel and of culture, Longfellow's poetry would have lacked half its riches. In 1870 he brought out the second series of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn." In November, 1871, the subject of the "Christus" -so long planned-took possession of his whole mind. It was finished at the end of the next January, 1872; never had he so many doubts about any book, but, as we have seen, it contained passages worthy of his most vigorous years. He himself had once said no poet could write much after fifty; but, considering his advanced age, the close of his life was wonderfully prolific; nor had his bounty relaxed, and the sale of his works made a noble charity fund. To increase it, a friend, unknown to him, sold "The Hanging of the Crane" for three thousand dollars. Then came Kéramos," bought for a thousand, to appear, with illustrations, in Harper's Magazine. It was the last and greatest of his dissolving-view poems; one flies over the earth from Delft to France and Italy, old Africa, far China and Japan. His memory recalled the old pottery still standing in Portland, near Deering's Woods, where it had been a delight of his boyhood to stop and watch the bowl or pitcher of clay rise up under the workman's hand, as he stood at his wheel under the shadow of a thorntree. There within doors, amid the shelves of pots and pans, he may have read the inscription upon a glazed tile : "No handicraftsman's art can with our art compare, We potters make our pots of what we potters are." He hears the wheel murmur between the visions-that some clay must follow, some command-" so spins the world away ;" and the furnace flame is to try the vessels of clay and stamp them with honour or dishonour. Turn, turn thy wheel! All life is brief; The wind blows east, the wind blows west, Will soon have wings and beak and breast, Turn, turn thy wheel! This earthen jar What makest thou? Thou hast no hand? A world by their Creator planned, Who wiser is than they. The end was approaching for the poet also. On his seventysecond birthday the children of Cambridge (U.S.) gave their famous present of the carved chair made from the "spreading chestnut-tree" that had overhung the village smithy of his early verses. In 1880 came the thin volume, "Ultima Thule," the last published under his own eyes. "Never was your hand firmer," Mr. Lowell wrote to him. And certainly up to that time he could make a witty speech as well as a brilliant poem. Proposing the health of Agassiz at the Saturday Club, he began with a hit worthy of Dickens up for a speech :-" Wordsworth once said that he could have written Shakespeare's Plays if he had a mind to;'* and I suppose I could make a speech if I had * Charles Lamb said, " So all he wanted was the mind." a mind to. But I shall do nothing of the sort." Neither time nor disaster had robbed him of his cheerfulness, his generous reception of strangers, and his delicate humour; they all remained to the last. His affection for the young remained also undimmed. One of his last pastimes was to play at playing backgammon with a little grandson; one of his last acts to receive and show round his study some schoolboy visitors who had asked permission to come. His "long, busy, blameless life" ended peacefully on March 24, 1882: and, as his brother well says, "the world was better and happier for his having lived." Wherever our language reaches, his poems have gone, with their teaching of faith in God, their tendency to a pure happiness for man. He does not rank among poets of the first magnitude; but there are few, even of the highest, who deserve so much praise. While modern poetry throws a halo over doubt, have we not reason to prize him whose verses worship God, whose simple lucid poems persuade human hearts to trust in His providence, to look to immortal life, to make a brave struggle upward and rise on the ruins of failure? And while other poets illuminate unreal pictures, impossible earthly hopes, have we not reason to be thankful to him who threw light about home affections and the common experiences of life? Again, it is the style of the time to suppose sorrow and bitterness of heart poetical and beautiful; ought we not to hold as a good gift these works of a long life, all tending in the main most distinctly to contentment, to hope and happiness? His grandest achievement was this to have made popular the poetry of faith and of joy, for, if there is sorrow in his voice, it is only enough to soften the heart, not to depress the soul. Speaking in public on "The Education of the Poor," Cardinal Wiseman long ago pointed out that England has no poet who is to its labouring classes what Goethe is to the German peasantry, unless it be the one who has "gained such a hold on our hearts that it is almost unnecessary to mention his name. Our hemisphere cannot claim the honour of having brought him forth, but he still belongs to us, for his works have become as household words wherever the English language is spoken." There is doubt enough in the world, and sorrow enough and weariness; it is a true blessing that this poet of the household came laden with faith and hope, and with refreshment, courage, and joy. HELEN ATTERIDGE. ART. III. FACILITIES OF MODERN PILGRIMAGE. THERE THERE have been periods in the history of Christendom so marked by danger and disaster that hostile observers have fancied the crisis would prove fatal, if not to the Church's existence, at least to her vitality. Such was doubtless the case when the Reformation shook the fabric of religious and social order, and overthrew the traditions of ages; such also was the case at the time of the French Revolution; such again in our own days when the Civil princedom of the Pope was overthrown; and other instances might be easily gathered from the records of the past. There is, however, one calamitous event that has almost been forgotten, because it is separated from our own times, not only by the interval of six or seven centuries that have since elapsed, but by the still greater interval that divides the ideas, the manners, and usages of modern Europe from those of the Middle Ages. After the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, the Latin kingdom was established with the Holy City for its capital, and the Catholic Church reigned in triumph in the land which had been its cradle a thousand years previously. Yet so bright an episode was not permitted to last long; in October 1187, Salah-ed-Dîne, or Saladin, as he is commonly called, captured the city, and reduced it under Mussulman rule. The third crusade, undertaken in the hope of regaining Jerusalem, failed, owing in great measure to the dissensions among the Catholic princes; and eventually, though twice given up by treaty to the Christians, and remaining in their possession at first for ten, and a second time for five years, the Holy City fell into Mahometan hands in the year 1244, and so has continued-not, however, without several changes of masters-down to the present day. The Latin kingdom survived the seizure of Jerusalem by Saladin for more than a hundred years. The town of Acre, or Akka, as it is now called, having been retaken by the Crusaders in 1191, became the head-quarters of the Franks, receiving the name of St. Jean d'Acre; but just a century later, in 1291, the Egyptian Klalife, Ibn-Kalaoun, laid siege to it and took it by assault, thereby extinguishing the last remnant of Latin domination. Thus it was that the shock felt by all Europe when Jerusalem was lost in the twelfth century, was followed by another, though at an interval so great that the memory of no man then living could bridge it over, when at the close of the thirteenth century the kingdom that the Crusaders had founded fell to rise no more. The first of the two events was probably the one most keenly felt. The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had been the centre of the hopes and aspirations of Christian chivalry; it had been wrested from the hands of the Mussulman and had been under Catholic guardianship for three generations (as we commonly reckon them), so that the pang caused by its loss was a bitter one indeed. And yet the second blow must have been very severe, for with the fall of Acre the hope of rescuing the Holy Land from Mahometan sovereignty was finally extinguished. It is curious that this town of Acre was the scene of the last warlike operations that took place in Palestine. Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, had obtained possession of it, and also of a part of Syria, but in the year 1840 some of the European Powers, including England, intervened on behalf of Turkey, an English fleet bombarded Acre, which was almost destroyed, and the whole country was restored to the Porte. We need not discuss the merits or demerits of Mehemet Ali, whose government is said to have caused discontent among the inhabitants, but it is probable that, so far as material civilization is concerned, it would have been better for Syria and Palestine to be under Egypt than under Turkey; and if we may imagine events to have run the same course in other ways that they have since done, those countries would have come indirectly under English influence and tutelage. Things, however, might be much worse than they now are: the Turkish Government undoubtedly operates in a manner unfavourable to agriculture, commerce, the making of good harbours and roads, and the establishment of safe and rapid means of communication; but so far as religion is concerned, the Catholic Church is in as good a position, and probably a much better one, than she would be under certain European Governments. The modern Turks, though they can be fanatical and even cruel when excited by religious or political passions, are not, generally speaking, tyrants or persecutors, and they are amenable to the Powers of Europe for the treatment of Christians living under their sway. We turn, however, from these questions of high politics to the humbler but more practical inquiry how it is that Catholics of the present day, especially among ourselves, have ceased to take in the Holy Land and its sacred shrines that vivid interest which animated the Crusaders and the medieval pilgrims? After the loss of Jerusalem, permission was obtained, by agreement with the Mahometan authorities, for Catholic priests to officiate at the Holy Sepulchre; and the Franciscans eventually came, under the personal guidance of their great founder, to take charge of the sanctuaries; a charge which, notwithstanding occasional persecutions, they have ever since retained. But the custom of making pilgrimages to the Holy |