Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/494

482 —Madonna, elected of the Lord to be the mother of the Saviour, and yet, blessed above women, to taste little maternal joy, to feel that He would never be a boy, and, with such sorrow as no painter has painted, and no poet sung, to know that even already He most be about His Father's business. He is serious on the sanctity of Jerusalem—in whose precincts the image of its Great King in the mind perpetually rebukes whatever is not lofty and sincere in your thoughts, and sternly requires reality of all feeling exhibited there; for, though in Rome you can tolerate tinsel, because &e history of the Faith there, and its ritual, are a kind of romance, it is intolerable in Jerusalem, where, in the presence of the same landscape, and within the same walls, you have a profound personal feeling and reverence for the Man of Sorrows.

And closely in keeping with his tone of thought is the finale—the Nunc Dimittis he calls it—of his Wanderings, when he pictures himself homeward bound, receding over the summer sea, and watching the majesty of Lebanon robing itself in purple darkness, and lapsing into memory, until Night and the Past have gently withdrawn Syria from his view—then sighing that the East can be no longer a dream, but a memory—feeling that the rarest romance of travel is now ended—grieving that no wealth of experience equals the dower of hope, becauseand, as a snow-peak of Lebanon glances through the moonlight like a star, fearing lest the poet sang more truly than he knew, and in another sense,And so the Howadji leaves us. Is not his leave-taking sorrowfully significant? Continually—whether truly or not—he reasons thus with life.

Who would not have predicated an Eastern fantasy—Eastern in subject and in tone—of his "Lotos-eating: a Summer Book?" All his known antecedents warranted the expectation of something far removed from that great New World that "spins for ever down the ringing grooves of change," and of which all true Lotos-eaters would testify, saying,in our go-ahead career, and thereforeBut this "Summer Book" is, in fact, a record of Mr. Curtis's summer tour among the hills and lakes of his native land. The Lotos-eater is a shrewd and satirical, as well as poetical observer, who steams it up the Hudson, and ridicules the outer womanhood of the chambermaid at Catskill, and reveals how the Catskill Fall is turned on to accommodate parties of pleasure, and criticises dress and manner and dinner at Saratoga, and is sceptical where others are enthusiastic at Lake George, and impatiently notes the polka-dancing and daylong dawdling of Newport,