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The third division recounts them, and, whilst it approves the five "predicables" of Aristotle (genus, species, difference, property, and accident), it does not exclude other attempts at reckoning them differently. In fact, Maurus himself adverts to the reduction, which, if we follow the tradition of the School, becomes necessary, for instance, of Being to genus. But he upholds very confidently the opinion of S. Thomas that, in the pure intelligences, there must be as many species as there are individuals. (Our readers will think this a needless inquiry, we fear.) The view is very grand in its admission of intellectual distinctness, "the idiosyncrasy of genius," but we do not altogether go with the reasoning. Another time it may be possible to illustrate the question and its bearings, which are

numerous.

Then we have the categories or classes of real being. All is explained that a beginner could desire on this subject, and questions arise which immediately concern the present day. We can mention only three; the analogy of being; the application of this doctrine to the being of God; and the far-reaching question whether all categories and realities are, of necessity, relative. Without pretending that Maurus foresaw all the consequences of mistake on these points, we may claim for him the sagacity, almost instinctive, of a wise mind. He drew out a theory which, as to spirit and letter, is the antagonist of Oriental and modern Pantheism. The being of God is known to us analogically, but analogy is true and real knowledge. Every creature has its relations to God and to other creatures, even to those which are merely possible, but it is first and before all something absolute. He will not concede on the one hand that there is only one absolute. On the other hand, he has already denied the flux of Heraclitus. All that he could add, if he were revising his book now, would be a set of corollaries to deal with the contemporaneous errors in Germany and England. He need not retract nor erase a syllable.

So far he has dwelt upon the thoughts in the mind. Logic takes account also of their expression. This is handled in a sort of commentary upon Aristotle's introduction to the use of language, the slight treatise "De Interpretatione." The last division returns to the Logic proper, but has many things to say which before could not have been understood. It is a searching analysis into the syllogism, the relation between premises and conclusion, and the possibility (which Plato denied) of acquiring really new science.

So much for the matter. The style is fluent, easy, and correct. The questions are stated and arranged so as to remove obscurity and prevent any loss of time. Everywhere the doctrines of the Church are made to contribute illustrations, and to suggest amendments, especially in the pages on unity and distinction. These we would recommend to Germans of the school of Fichte, if any still survive. They might learn more in a few days on the nature of the Ego, than their master came upon in a lifetime of searching.

WE

Preludes. By A. C. THOMPSON.

E are bound to confess that, when a volume of poems by a new writer is put into our hands, we usually take it listlessly, and with the secret wish that the poet's dreams, hopes, joys, griefs, and loves (all of which we feel pretty certain to be by no means new or original experiences), had remained for ever locked in the sanctuary of his own breast. It was not, therefore, with any pleasureable sense of expectation that we began to turn the leaves of Miss Thompson's "Preludes"; but our attention was soon arrested, and by the time we closed the book, we felt certain that much at any rate of the contents of this volume are a gain to the world. They are a gain, insomuch as they are real poems, not mere prettinesses of idea strung together with a certain facility of expression and musical rhythm, such as frequently do duty for poetry, but the actual creation of of a mind which, naturally imaginative and introspective, has evidently been strengthened and matured by much labour and cultivation, and by that reverent and patient study of great poets, the need of which is so grievously felt among our young song-writers, and which accounts for so much of their thinness of thought and general want of finish and completeness. Not that we mean to accuse Miss Thompson of plagiarism or imitation; on the contrary, we have rarely come across a volume by any one of the minor poets now living so free from this defect; and we see in her what should be always the effect of high cultivation and of a wide and sympathetic knowledge of other writers, her originality is not crushed or overlaid, but strengthened and invigorated thereby. Miss Thompson has done wisely in choosing, as she frequently does, the sonnet form as her medium of poetical expression, for in some of these compositions she may take rank amongst the finest sonnet-writers of the century-with Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning and Charles Turner. We will quote as an example the sonnet which has for its motto Petrarch's words, "Senza te son nulla" ("Nought am I, of thee bereft ").

"I touched the heart that loved me as a player
Touches a lyre; content with my poor skill.
No touch save mine knew my beloved; (and still
I thought at times: Is there no sweet lost air
Old love could wake in him, I cannot share)?
Oh, he alone, alone could so fulfil

My thoughts in sound to the measure of my will.
He is dead, and silence takes me unaware.

"The songs I knew not he resumes, set free
From my constraining love, alas for me!
His part in our tune goes from him; my part
Is locked in me for ever; I stand as mute

As one with full strong music in his heart,
Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute."

This appears to us to be a very perfect little poem. It is what a sonnet emphatically ought to be—a crystallization of one, or at most two, ideas,

completely and perfectly thought out, but separated from all the adjuncts -the preludes and sequences-which render thoughts so difficult to gather up one by one, and represent each one in its entirety. It is this separation of thoughts, be it said by the way, which makes the composition of sonnets so valuable a means of mental training, as it forces the mind to concentrate itself upon one idea and not to let it go until it has completely mastered it, and to free itself from the overcrowding of thought and of words (both in consequence apt to be crude and semi-articulate), which is the great bane of some inexperienced writers. The two ideas embodied in the sonnet we have given, though the comparison of the heart to a musical instrument is not perhaps a very original one, are both very striking, and, so far as we know, have not been worked before. It forms a sort of pendant to another sonnet equally beautiful, and with a very delicate aroma of the graceful Italian and mediæval conceits, very quaint and fresh in its modern English garb. Lorenzo de' Medici's line, “Questo ne' patti nostri, Amor, non era (This was not in our pact, O Love"), is the motto of this sonnet.

"My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,
Into thy garden; thine be happy hours

Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,
From root to crowning petal, thine alone.

"Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown,
Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers;
But, ah, the birds, the birds! who shall build bowers
To keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.

"For as these come and go, and quit our pine

To follow the sweet season; or, new comers,

Sing one song only from our alder trees,

"My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
Flit to the silent world and other summers,

With wings that dip beyond the silver seas."

Almost as successful as her sonnets are some of Miss Thompson's songs and shorter poems. The following very graceful and touching verses commemorate an incident in the life of San Lorenzo Giustiniani, one of those heroic acts of renunciation of self and of earthly ties which make the natural man within us shrink and shiver; for we cannot doubt that the mendicant friar whose features the poor mother could not certainly discern through her "mists of tears was really her long-missed son :

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"I had not seen my son's dear face
(He chose the cloister by God's grace)
Since it had come to full-flower time.
I hardly guessed at its perfect prime,
That folded flower of his dear face.

"Mine eyes were veiled by mists of tears
When on a day in many years
One of his order came. I thrilled
Facing, I thought, that face fulfilled.
I doubted, for my mists of tears.

"His blessing be with me for ever!
My hope and doubt were hard to sever.
That altered face, those holy weeds.
I filled his wallet, and kissed his beads,
And lost his echoing feet for ever.
"If to my son my alms were given
I know not, and I wait for heaven.
He did not plead for child of mine,
But for another Child divine,
And unto Him it was surely given.
"There is one alone who cannot change,
Dreams are we, shadows, visions strange,
And all I give is given to one.

I might mistake my dearest son,
But never the Son who cannot change."

In this poem the extreme simplicity of the thought is a great contrast to the subtle and complex tone of mind which is generally a characteristic of Miss Thompson, and which we would recommend her to keep carefully within bounds, as in some cases it is apt to lead her into obscurity and uncertainty of idea, in other cases into a rather strained and morbid manner of forcing all natural objects to become as it were consecrated to the poet's state of feeling and need of expression, and thus to lose their own individuality, and the healthy and natural message which they ought to convey to all thoughtful minds. We remember that Miss Proctor says somewhere

"Why turn each cool grey shadow

Into a world of tears?

Why say the winds are wailing?

Why call the dewdrops tears."

And this verse was often in our mind whilst reading the "Preludes." The lines "In Autumn are very characteristic of this weakness of the authoress. From time immemorial the fading leaves, the grey skies, and general decay of autumn have suggested images of death and disappointment and weariness of heart, but it is an over-strain of the feeling of autumnal sadness, which tells us that

"The low winds moan for dead sweet years,

The birds sing all for pain."

--And which addresses the yellow leaves as the " dying blisses of the year," with a passionate invocation to them to "kiss me again as I kiss you,” whilst a few lines further on these "dying blisses" become "broken hearts," and elsewhere" dead delights," till after the confusion and variety of epithet, we feel quite relieved in the last verse of the poem at being told in plain words

"There is an autumn yet to wane,
There are leaves yet to fall."

Though the succeeding lines.

"Which when I kiss may kiss again,

And pitied, pity me for all,
And love me in mist and rain,"

leave us strangely bewildered, and with a sense that if Miss Thompson's view of our relations with autumn and its leaves be the true one, the conditions of being become even more unmanageable and perplexing than we had previously imagined them to be! However, our recognition of the overstrained sentiment degenerating into mannerism or into silliness, which is occasionally to be met with in the course of this volume, does not detract from the full and free meed of praise which we give to Miss Thompson's work. As we have before said, it is work of a very real and noble kind, and which bears the promise of greater things than she has yet accomplished. Her lays are chiefly "short swallowflights of song," and judging from this volume, we think it probable that she is one of those who will find their best work their shortest; at the same time the only poem of considerable length, "A Study," though wanting somewhat in the dramatic movement and interest which the subject demands, is very, well conceived and abounds in passages of great beauty. Take the following very tender and delicate bit of wordpainting

"Then in the ripe rays of the later day,

All, the small blades of thin grass one by one,

Looked through with sun, will make each a long shade,
And daisies' heads will bend with butterflies."

-or such lines as "I was not worthy to be comfortless," which bear a deep meaning and convey a very subtle lesson of spiritual training.

The illustrations which are scattered through the book appear to us poor, and unworthy of the hand that executed them. The prettiest of them is one belonging to a poem, so true in description, so fresh in sentiment, and pathetic in feeling, that we cannot do better than close with it our notice of what we hope may prove to be really but preludes :

"A TRYST THAT FAILED."

"It was a time of wind and sun,
Morning day, and the Winter done,
Morning life, and the Spring begun.
"It was a place so dreamy and brown,
Pensive with sheep-bells under the down,
Scent-dreamy, wild, with a windy crown.

"You were coming, out of the spring,
Out of the sun-dream wandering,
Out of the wind-joy hastening.

"I did not see you, sweet; a flight

Of sea-birds only, pearly and white,

With a sudden shadow fled into the light.

"I never heard you call, my Fair;
O music up in the flickering air!
O voice my ears so ill could spare!
"And the wild, wild call my soul begot,
The long wild call, I know not what,-
We met not then, for it reached you not,

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