sea, or by the babbling rivulets, that deep memories are stirred in the heart of the dying man.

To Geoffrey, who had attached so much importance to mere secular knowledge, the sea is likewise a place of reflection. Disappointed and weary he turns, one Christmas Eve, to Sandy Cove. The blue-black waters heaved and tossed wearily in the starlight." So is the soul tossed by doubt. He tried to conjure up his hopes and his fears for the future; yes, and the illusion of his dreams. How many doubting and despairing souls have done the same! Again, Helen Bellamy, during a conversation with Geoffrey by the sea, states this solemn truth in speaking of the young society woman who leaves the world to enter some far-off convent: "It is not weariness, or disgust, or disappointment; but in the whirl of the waltz she sees a crucified figure, and in the whisper of love she hears some far-off voice that touches and thrills her; and she stands out at once from the crowd without reluctance, without doubt. She has seen the nod of the Bridegroom's head, the beck of the Bridegroom's hand." It was by the quays of the Liffey that he passed on that eventful night when his soul found again the God of his youth. "A dark cloud came up from the sea; a smart shower pattered out of the gloom," and he sought shelter in a little church on the quays, where the two luminous eyes of the Man-God pierced his pall of doubt and sweetest accents whispered again and again to his tortured soul, "Quare?" "Quousque?" and there, by the murmurs of the far-sounding sea,

he was converted to the God of true knowledge.

At their old favorite place, Sandy Cove, Geoffrey told his friend, Messing, of his determination to give his life to God in religion. "It was upon one of those delicious afternoons in the end of August when the sun is veiled in clouds, as if ashamed of his too great heat, and memory that is so shy of sunshine comes up and throws back the doors of the past." Under the spell wrought by nature in sea and sky he told his old preceptor of the new life about to open for him.

Thus does the does the sea influence the thought, the diction, the imagery and the characters of Fr. Sheehan. We may say of him that for his brighter hours it had the smile and splendor of beauty, and it stole into his darker musings with a mild and healing sympathy. It exercised an influence which permeates all the solemn. lessons which these characters afford, and gives to his style a buoyancy, depth and solemnity which make him one of the great writers of the present day. In the temple of fame let us accord a niche to this new scion of Old Erin, for Fr. Sheehan is destined to live in the hearts and intellects of men who love solemn and important truths, expressed in beautiful language, until the ocean he pictured so vividly shall have been lulled to rest forevermore.

GEOFFREY.

ON FINISHING A LITTLE VOLUME OF TENNYSON.

"Dicit mihi mea pagina, fur es."

(COMPETITIVE.)

Accuse me not, my little friend,

Of theft if from your store I bear
Away the wealth found hidden there
And use it for a lawful end.

For we first met one wintry noon,

When all the boisterous skies hung low,

When brightly burned the hearth's red glow,

And with you night came all too soon,

And sought in vain to hide your face,
Where first I felt the poet's joys
To play with fancy as with toys,
And in your words the magic grace

Which it were wrong to hoard as gold,
That cheers the lonely miser's eye;
This morning's rose shall bloom to die
And kindred buds succeed the old,—

Shall they refuse, while yet they bloom,
The toiling bee his well-earned due?
No, no! they shall not, nor shall you
Deny the gleam that lights my gloom.

MEL.

THE RELIGION OF TENNYSON AS SHOWN IN THE "IN MEMORIAM.”

(COMPETITIVE).

Certain writers have for a long time past condemned "In Memoriam" as irreligious. They discover in it grave doubts and contradictions, from which they conclude that the author was either an atheist or a panthiest or an agnostic.

It is an easy matter for these writers to quote a few verses which the poet himself refers to afterwards as having been uttered in an excited and despondent hour, and which he corrects and refutes by other lines, glowing with the warmth of Christian feeling.

Hence, from the "In Memoriam," where the poet is not always declaring just what he believes, but proposing doubts and allowing his grief to range unbridled, it would be unjust to assert that he was an atheist, pantheist or agnostic, only on the authority of a few verses, which can be offset by others proving him, on the contrary, a believer in the divinity of Christ, the resurrection of the body, the immortality of the soul, and future happiness.

In the very beginning of the invocation the poet shows his belief in the divinity of Christ: "Strong Son of God, immortal love, etc."

His belief in the resurrection of the body is clearly seen in the third stanza of the invocation:

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust."

And in the same stanza he shows that he believed in the immortality of the soul when he says, in speaking of man's desire for everlasting life,

He thinks he was not made to die,

And Thou hast made him, Thou art just."

Here the word "thinks" is not to be construed in a doubtful sense, but is equivalent to "feels"; that is, man feels within himself that he was not made to die; and since God, who made man and put that feeling in him, is just, the feeling or yearning must be satisfied; otherwise, God is fooling us.

To these three quotations from the invocation we shall add others from the poem itself to prove our assertions and refute the arguments of our adversaries.

But before we enter upon the main body of the poem it may be well to state that it is divided into four parts, each beginning with Yuletide.

In the first grand division of the poem, from the first canto up to the twenty-eighth, the author mentions no religious belief; he seems inconsolable for the loss of his friend. But as we take up the second division, from the twenty-eighth to the seventy-seventh canto, we shall see that he was reconcilable; and that, though his mind went deeper and deeper into the great and unfathomable depths of truth veiled from man, still it grew more and more in the knowledge of man's insignificance and the vastness of God and His works.